Yukon's Klondike Kluane Loop

Seventeen nights in a motorhome round the Yukon, which has a population of about forty-five thousand in an area larger than Spain, so the emptiness is the first thing anyone notices.

Whitehorse opens it, with the waterfront trolley and the SS Klondike, a sternwheeler that worked the river up to Dawson City until the road replaced her. The Klondike Highway then runs north to Dawson itself, which is a National Historic Site and was the centre of the greatest gold rush in history: thirty thousand people arrived in 1898 and most of them left within three years. The boardwalk streets, the Commissioner’s Residence and the Palace Grand Theatre all survive.

Haines Junction follows, with an optional flight over Kluane National Park, and then Kathleen Lake sits between two peaks looking into it. Kluane holds the largest non-polar icefields in the world and Canada’s highest mountain, almost none of which is visible from the road, which is why the flight is worth the money. Rafting on the Tatshenshini is optional.

Carcross closes the loop on Bennett Lake, with the Carcross Desert nearby, a square mile of sand dunes left behind by a drained glacial lake and generally called the smallest desert in the world. The Bove Island viewpoint and the White Pass are on the way back to Whitehorse. Canadian Affair include the flights and the motorhome, with campground fees, fuel, insurance and meals separate. The price is per person. Services are genuinely sparse up here, so fuel planning matters in a way it does not further south, and the operator’s route notes are worth reading rather than skimming. The compensation is that for seventeen nights you will share these roads with almost nobody.