Yukon and Alaska Northern Lights Loop - CanaDream

Thirteen nights and 3,193 kilometres in a loop from Whitehorse in a motorhome, into Alaska and back, timed for the northern lights.

Dawson City comes first up the Klondike Highway, the centre of the 1898 gold rush, where the streets are unpaved, the boardwalks are original and the claims are still worked. Fairbanks follows over the Alaska border, which sits almost directly under the auroral oval and is about the best place on the continent to see the lights from a road.

Anchorage comes next on Cook Inlet, then Tok on the way back east, and Haines Junction beside Kluane National Park, which holds the largest non-polar icefield in the world and the highest mountain in Canada. Haines and Skagway follow on the Alaska panhandle, the second the start of the Chilkoot Trail that the stampeders climbed, then Carcross, where a small desert of glacial sand sits beside the road, before Whitehorse.

The motorhome and the day-by-day plan come from CanaDream, and the hire is priced live per vehicle rather than per person; campsites, fuel, ferries, park fees and activities are all extra, with insurance options priced at booking. Fourteen days with stay days at five stops gives the aurora several chances, which matters because it is a weather and solar business and no sighting can be promised. Late August into September is the usable window for a motorhome, when the nights are dark again but the roads and campsites are still open. Crossing into Alaska needs the hire terms checked for cross-border cover. Services on the northern highways are a long way apart.