A trip down the Klondike Highway

Working at a small-town newspaper comes with a few logistical inconveniences. For one, the newsroom is located above an Alaska-themed bookstore affiliated with the same company, making it confusing for some people trying to differentiate the two. (That the bookstore is called Skaguay News Depot doesn't help.)

A much larger-scale issue is the newsroom's lack of a newspaper printer. There would be no reason to expect a newspaper with a circulation of just less than 1,500 to have its own printer, and like many other small newspapers, The Skagway News gets printed in another town. In Skagway's case, the nearest land-accessible town with a printer is the Yukon capital of Whitehorse.

So for 30-something years, every two weeks, Skagway News editor Jeff Brady has made the 109-mile drive to the Whitehorse Star's newsroom, walks out with bundles of newspapers a few hours later and drives 109 miles back to Alaska. You can imagine what this is like in the winter.

Whitehorse has a population of about 26,000 and feels like downtown Manhattan compared to Skagway. It has movie theaters, Chinese food and a diversified economy, all things Skagway lacks. Everyone is excruciatingly nice. Drivers will let pedestrians cross at all costs. One time while waiting at a street corner, my coworker Katie pressed the traffic light button and the crossing signal instantly turned on. Coincidence, maybe, but I wouldn't be surprised if pedestrians had power over the traffic lights.

Yesterday I made the last of four trips to Whitehorse this summer, and as usual, the drive over was even more spectacular than the destination itself.

Highlights of the trip included:

• The "whiteout" we experienced as we left Skagway. For miles, when on a clear day we would have seen endless mountains and streams, we could only see an interminable white cloud that obscured everything but the 50 yards of road ahead of us. Have you ever looked out the window and not been able to see anything?

• Crossing the Canadian border into British Columbia. This is possibly the least-used and most isolated U.S. border, according to an episode of the show Homeland Security U.S.A. I secretly revel watching the guard open my passport, inspect my photo from when I was 17, and look back up at me, confused by what appears to be a young Matisyahu in the passenger's seat. We're allowed into Canada after confirming we don't have any prohibited types of bear spray in our possession.

• Bear-spotting. The first two times I made the trip to Whitehorse, we spotted a small cinnamon bear patrolling the same stretch of highway in British Columbia. In Alaska and northwestern Canada, if you see a car pulled over on the side of the road, your first assumption is they found a bear and stopped to take pictures. Sometimes they pull over for other reasons, but it's too late, because they already caused a chain reaction of slowing vehicles searching for a bear that doesn't exist.

• The serene Tutshi Lake, which, like everything else in the Tlingit dialect, sounds nothing like an English speaker would expect. And for the record, Tlingit is pronounced "clink it."

• Driving by the Carcross Desert. This makes absolutely no sense. I don't know what geological processes took place that led to one square mile of this tiny Yukon town turning into a desert, but it's there. The empty, sandy hills stretch for all of 40 seconds of driving time before the landscape abruptly reverts back to picturesque mountains and lakes. Carcross bills it as the smallest desert in the world. Although technically it's not a desert because there's too much moisture in the air, that doesn't make it any less mind-boggling. This is a tiny, tiny desert. It is very small.

And of course, Whitehorse itself. It's a little strange at first getting thrown into this bustling metropolis after spending weeks at a time in Skagway. I mean, they have a Wal-Mart. Purists like me shop at the Real Canadian Superstore, however. That's where Skagway residents flock to in order to stock up on everything, because the one grocery store in Skagway often is overpriced and has a mediocre selection. I only go there for necessities (read: Cheez-Its). The superstore also happens to carry perhaps the greatest generic-brand line of grocery items of all time.

On the drive back to the United States, it hit home that I'll be leaving Alaska in less than two weeks. It's certainly going to be strange returning to the North Carolina heat wave, and waking up and not seeing hundreds of tourists taking pictures of my house. I'll save the reflecting for another time. I know the only thing you care about is...

BeardWatch: Collected more compliments this week, the most enthusiastic of which from a young Whitehorse Star reporter with stubble. And this morning, none other than tourism director Buckwheat Donahue called my beard a "great specimen" and said we needed to have more beards in Skagway. I'm just glad to be doing my part. The beard is fluffier than ever and I glance at it every time I pass a reflective surface.  With just two more weeks to go before I leave, my beard is starting to feel a sense of urgency and has promised to pick up the pace down the home stretch.