Beaver Creek

Beaver Creek sits so close to the Alaska border that its whole reason for existing is basically the highway and the crossing a few kilometers further on. It’s Canada’s westernmost community, population somewhere around a hundred, and after two long days driving the Alaska Highway from Whitehorse through nothing but spruce and mountains, rolling into it felt less like arriving somewhere and more like reaching the edge of something.

We stopped for the night at one of the lodges along the strip that makes up the whole town, and the woman running the front desk, who’d grown up there, told us Beaver Creek used to be even more isolated before the highway connected properly in the 1940s, built as part of the wartime rush to link Alaska to the rest of the continent. You can still feel that improvised, thrown-together-fast quality in how the town is laid out — everything strung along one road, nothing behind it but bush.

In the morning we walked out past the last buildings just to see how quickly the town disappeared behind us, and it took about four minutes. The land opens up into rolling tundra-edged hills with the Yukon-Alaska border cutting an arbitrary line through them, no fence, no marker most people would notice, just a slight clearing in the trees visible if you know to look for it from a rise.

Lia asked, half joking, whether people who live in Beaver Creek think of themselves as living at the edge of the country or the middle of their own world, and I think that’s the real question every tiny highway town like this raises. From Ottawa it’s about as far west as Canada gets. From where we stood drinking gas-station coffee at seven in the morning, it was just Tuesday.

When to go: Summer, June through August, when the highway is fully open and reliable; the border crossing and services can be limited or unpredictable outside that window.