Teslin

The Alaska Highway crosses Teslin Lake on a long bridge that, for me, is one of the great unadvertised views in the Yukon — water running for kilometers in both directions, mountains stacked up along the far shore, and almost nobody stopping to look at it. We did stop, twice, once on the way in and once leaving three days later, and both times it looked completely different depending on the light.

The village itself sits at the north end of that bridge, home to the Teslin Tlingit Council, and the George Johnston Museum tells a story I hadn’t heard anywhere else in the territory — a Tlingit trapper and photographer who documented his own community through the early twentieth century and, almost as a side note, once drove the first car in the region, shipped in piece by piece with no road yet to put it on.

We spent an afternoon at the Tlingit Heritage Centre down by the water, a striking building shaped like a traditional longhouse with five clan crests carved along its front, and a guide walked us through the regalia and canoe displays with the kind of patience that made it clear he’d rather we ask too many questions than too few. Lia bought a small piece of beadwork from a table set up by one of the artists, who told us exactly which family crest it referenced and why.

Teslin gets treated as a highway pit stop by a lot of people driving the Alaska Highway flat out for Whitehorse or Alaska, gas and coffee and back on the road, and I get why — it’s easy to blow through in twenty minutes. But give it half a day and it turns into one of the more layered stops on that whole drive, lake included.

When to go: Come between June and early September for the museum and Heritage Centre’s full hours and for the best light on the lake at both ends of the day.