From the November 2007 Issue of Car and Driver

In 1976, using mostly third gear, Brock Yates drove a Corvette 1138 miles along the Alaska Highway, nearly all of it gravel and mud. It wasn't easy. Back then, Corvettes were primitive and enjoyed all the build quality of Chinese gardening equipment. Before Yates set out, a GM engineer confessed to him, "Let's face it, the Corvette is three feet too long and 800 pounds too heavy....the seats are awful and the rear suspension does weird things. But within the next two years, you're going to see a serious effort to make the car better."

It took longer than two years, but somewhere along the fiberglass path of its evolution, the Corvette became not only one of the world's finest sports cars but also, well, a real car.

Thirty-one years after Yates's expedition, we likewise vowed to nose a Vette into the northernmost neck of Canada's woods. Thing is, the Alaska Highway is nowadays not only paved but also clogged with tourists eating Ritz crackers inside sparkling quarter-million-dollar Prevosts towing Hummer H3s. There exists, however, a little-known gravel detour off Yates's route that pokes due north. In '76, Yates called his story "Northwest Passage," and now we were proposing to drive almost to the real Northwest Passage (see map). The road is called the Dempster Highway, and it runs through Canada's Yukon and Northwest territories, never entering the U.S. It's as rough, lumpy, unpredictable, perverse, and unfinished as Yates's 1976 L48.

Brock called his car the Yukon Corvette. We would call ours the Dempster Corvette. Brock traveled with then art director Jim Williams. I would travel with current art director Jeff Dworin. Brock's car was plucked right out of the Corvette Group's engineering fleet in Milford, Michigan, and sported a plexiglass roof. So would ours. Brock's Corvette churned out a thundering 180 horsepower.

Screw that.

To their credit, the Corvette guys immediately grasped the alluringly goofy notion of a Yukon redux and selected a famous car for the undertaking—the 61st C6 to emerge from the Bowling Green factory, built in 2005 as a "manufacturing validation build." It was originally fitted with a four-speed automatic and a 400-horse LS2 and served a brutal existence as a suspension-development vehicle—known in the vernacular as a mule. Other drivelines came and went until 2006, when the car was fitted with a six-speed automatic and the current 430-horse LS3, in which guise it was used to calibrate the latest C6.5's traction- and stability-control systems.

Throughout its life, our Corvette turned untold laps at Virginia International Raceway, Homestead-Miami Speedway, Moroso Motorsports Park, and Roebling Road Raceway, and then endured a European swing, laying down Goodyear rubber at the Nürburgring, the Ring's Nordschleife, Spa-Francorchamps, and on the autobahn. Behind its wheel sat a slew of talented drivers, including pro racer Ron Fellows, the only name our Canadian onlookers recognized. No one knew the car's true mileage. With each new driveline, its odometer was zeroed.

Once this C6's jet-setting life concluded, it endured further abuse during cold-weather testing in Michigan's Upper Peninsula, then was parked for indecent periods within GM's climatic wind tunnel, where it was alternately frozen and baked. At which point, alas, the Precision Red C6—a prototype that, like all mules, could not be sold—had a date with the crusher.

That's when we came along, promising to give the old girl one last fling, an adventure sure to inflict the sort of pits and pockmarks that would alarm even Manuel Noriega. GM's engineers had grown fond of ol' Number 61, and if we managed to nurse it up and down the Dempster intact, they vowed to induct it into the National Corvette Museum in Bowling Green. Like a dog unexpectedly adopted from the pound, our C6 narrowly escaped euthanasia.

View Photos JEFFREY DWORIN

When the car arrived, we made a few modifications. We raised the ride height 0.75 inch; fabricated a roof rack to hold one spare front tire and two five-gallon jugs of premium unleaded; created plexiglass stone deflectors for the windshield; installed a brush guard that might or might not survive a tête-à-tête with a caribou; fitted a bra; mounted a pair of zillion-candlepower auxiliary lights that, by law, must be blazing full time on the Dempster, even during 23 hours of daily sunlight; and painted the wheels black to camouflage the hideous scars they were about to incur. But the stock Goodyear Eagle F1s—18 inches fore, 19 inches aft—stayed put. No pansy M+S-rated rubber for us, because, well, we like a challenge and no one would give us a free set. Via DHL, we did ship a spare rear tire to the Yukon, where we could collect it prior to our Dempster diving. We never saw that tire again. Ever.

Not knowing what we intended for this Corvette, civilian enthusiasts were outraged that we'd so casually defaced an American icon. The luggage rack, they told us, was particularly loathsome. We pointed to the Nürburgring sticker on the rear hatch, but they weren't appeased. A gas-station attendant in Watson Lake, Yukon Territory, snarled, "What's that supposed to be?"

I wasn't sure what he meant. "It's a Corvette," I said, thinking maybe he'd never seen one, which was true of a dozen or so Yukonners we'd already met.

"No," he said. "What I mean is, you think you're goin' off-road with that?" Then he spit on the floor behind the cash register.

"I live in Michigan," I said, trying to prove I wasn't a city slicker. "I've been off-roading a lot. We're going up the Dempster."

"Got news for you, pal," he replied. "First, you ain't in Michigan anymore, eh? Second, that whatchamacallit ain't goin' up no Dempster, 'less it's on the back of a flatbed."

In the Yukon, we were cheechakos, the Chilkoot word for greenhorns. Or it might mean cheesecake. Either way, that's what we were.

Like our Corvette, the Dempster proved to be an admirable feat of engineering. The C6's odometer logged 484 miles from Dawson City (one-time residence to writers Jack London, Robert Service, and Pierre Berton) to Inuvik, the highway's northern terminus in the Northwest Territories. That's 968 miles up and back, every inch an NVH engineer's worst nightmare. The Dempster perches atop permafrost, so the gravel surface had to be four to eight feet thick. Without that insulation, the permafrost would melt, and the road, as it sank, would turn into something closely resembling gray tapioca. Along the Dempster, the frost doesn't just heave. It pukes.

Construction began in 1959, when politicians called it the Road to Resources. Locals joked that it was more like the Road to Remorses, and isolated construction workers called it the Road to Divorces. The highway was opened to the public in 1979. It was Canada's first all-weather byway across the Arctic, intended to service limitless oil and mineral fields that turned out to be not so limitless. The road roughly follows a hunting trail devised eons ago by the local Gwitchin Indians and thus should have been called the Gwitchin Highway. Instead, it was named after Sgt. W.J.D. Dempster, who earned hero status for attempting to rescue four fellow RCMP officers, who, in 1911, had the bad luck to simultaneously freeze and starve to death about three-quarters of the way up the trail. In Inuvik, which cleverly means "place of people," the mercury has been known to dip to minus-70 degrees Fahrenheit. Our Corvette's winter-proofing didn't extend that far.

The Dempster spans two mountain ranges, the Arctic Circle, the Continental Divide (which it crosses three times), and the Peel and Mackenzie rivers, both of which must be forded via ferries cutting through five-foot waves whose temperature rarely surpasses 40 degrees. You think Minnesota is the land of "10,000 Lakes"? The Mackenzie Delta is exceeded in size in the Western Hemisphere only by the Mississippi and Amazon deltas, and it encompasses 25,000 lakes.

The vegetation is mostly taiga forest, comprising stunted subalpine firs and skinny black spruces, although in many sections the tallest and oldest "trees" are willow and berry bushes. Where the permafrost has gone to goo, the trees lean at comical angles. The locals call them "drunken forests." Beyond Inuvik, a town only 60 miles shy of the Arctic Ocean, there's just tundra—no trees at all, although there's still plenty of drunkenness.

The Dempster is also a highway for caribous, grizzly bears, Dall sheep, mountain goats, moose, wolves, wolverines, lynxes, several varieties of foxes, arctic hares, and 160 species of birds, among them willow ptarmigans, whose first response to the danger posed by an onrushing red Corvette was to sit down in a huff.

Ptarmigan: "Listen, no kidding, you get one foot closer, and I will sit. I'm warning you. Don't tempt me. I swear I'll do it, and then you'll be sorry." And then they'd sit.

The road is 24 feet wide, except where swirling creeks have eroded it to half that width, and it alternates between loose gravel, dense shale, clay, impacted flint, chert, granite, and slushlike mud offering all the grip of an Exxon oil spill on the 405 freeway. It's the immovable flint and chert, poking skyward like individual daggers, that slice tires as if they were ripe tomatoes. Those spooky portions of the road—which I began to call the "white sharks" because they were chalky white and murderously serrated—must be traversed at 20 mph. Or less. Doesn't matter whether you're in a Corvette or a Land Cruiser. You slow to a crawl. Dempster veterans warn that if you lose a tire and are down to no spares, you turn back. We were carrying one spare—a front—and were told it might send the traction control into an electronic snit if we had to mount it on the rear. We couldn't afford to annoy the traction control, which was assisting our forward progress about three times per minute, especially in the eight-inch gravel windrows that the graders kept leaving behind and that dislocated the Corvette's bra and bent its chin spoiler completely back on itself at least six times.



View Photos JEFFREY DWORIN

There's more to driving a Corvette on the Dempster than meets the eye. That's because your eyes aren't scanning the scenic wonders all around but instead are focused on erratics (lone boulders that have worked their way to the surface and, once launched into a fiberglass wheel well, sound like bazooka blasts); lateral drainage ruts capable of bending alloy wheels; blinding dust; fine pebbles that could easily double for precision ball bearings; half-ton Bullwinkles standing inert mid-road; and an infinite number of potholes filled with water. Some were an inch deep, some were deep enough to harbor a small school of barracuda. No way to tell, so we had to steer around every one of them. Like a sprint-car driver, I found myself seeking out the wettest and darkest patches of road, which were reliably the smoothest. On those sections, I could sometimes rocket up to 40 mph, thus making use of maybe 35 of the 430 horses on tap. It was the only time I've been in a Corvette and was positive I wasn't going to get a speeding ticket.

Oncoming traffic was sparse and reliably polite. Dempster protocol insists you slow to avoid flinging stones at cars traveling the opposite direction, a courtesy underscored by a sign that warns, "NO MEDICAL SERVICES NEXT 734 KM." Not far from that, however, was a sign that seemed to encourage recklessness. It said, "AVALANCHE AREA, DO NOT STOP." I put the hammer down, wantonly blasting up to 43 mph.

Along the Dempster, the landscape is exactly as it was 10,000 years ago, which is even before Yates's Corvette was built. No structures, nothing rearranged to suit developers, no signs of human molestation save the occasional shredded tire. Strangely, glaciers never touched this region. Its topography was shaped entirely by water, wind, frost, and gravity. In many places, it looks like northern Scotland.

Halfway along the Dempster's length are two buildings where—not by choice—every motorist must stop. It's an outpost called Eagle Plains, perched not on a plain but atop a narrow 2360-foot-high ridge. This establishment bills itself as "an oasis in the wilderness." The wilderness part is true. But Eagle Plains is otherwise a filthy gas station adjoining 32 dingy corrugated-metal motel rooms that smell like the two dogs that live in the cafeteria and the saloon at the end of the hall. Eagle Plains's lone nod to culture is a hand-carved bar with a plaque that boasts, "Constructed in Whitehorse in 1930 and in continuous use ever since." For good reason.

With nothing to do after eating Eagle Plains's "Arctic Burgers," Dworin and I sauntered outside to watch a helicopter take off into a pelting, 43-degree rainstorm. It achieved an altitude of 50 feet, yawed to the right, dipped dramatically at the nose, then veered directly at us before making a hard belly-flop of a landing a few feet from a tandem-tanker fuel truck.

"Why didn't you run?" Dworin asked.

"I was hoping you'd run first," I said.

Our hotel in Inuvik (population 3481) at the northern tip of the Dempster smelled far better and was surgically clean. It did, however, lack one amenity: electricity. In the morning, there was frost on the Corvette's glass—this in mid-August—so we ate more jerky and headed south.

At one point on the return leg, I was driving tentatively in the oncoming lane to avoid gravel so deep and loose that it threatened to swamp the Corvette. As I rounded a corner, I was alarmed to see an 18-wheeler charging toward us. Without hesitation and without slowing, the trucker deftly moved into the deep gravel, giving me a little wave as we passed, both of us humping along in the other's legal lane—a generous gesture you'd not likely enjoy on more southerly roads. As Yates put it 31 years ago, the truckers "operate with the kind of intelligent abandon that comes with the knowledge that they will pay for their own mistakes."

In the end, incredibly, the Corvette emerged from the Dempster a festival of filth but mechanically unfazed, rolling proudly into Dawson City in time for Jell-O wrestling at a local bar, in time for a gay-pride parade featuring "dykes on bikes," and in time for a sidewalk-performing border collie named Becca who held sticks on her nose, tossed them into the air, then caught them on the rebound.



View Photos JEFFREY DWORIN

Our fiberglass boulevardier performed an even slicker trick. It suffered no flat tires—either a divine miracle or a fortuitous side effect of its OE run-flats, whose sidewalls are stiff enough to be used in bridge construction. We did crack the windshield and broke the bulbs in the front turn signals. Along the doorsills, flying stones had blasted portions of the paint right down to bare 'glass. And the shocks felt a little rubbery, although they held their own during the 4000-mile trek back to Ann Arbor.

Our fiberglass boulevardier performed an even slicker trick. It suffered no flat tires—either a divine miracle or a fortuitous side effect of its OE run-flats, whose sidewalls are stiff enough to be used in bridge construction. We did crack the windshield and broke the bulbs in the front turn signals. Along the doorsills, flying stones had blasted portions of the paint right down to bare 'glass. And the shocks felt a little rubbery, although they held their own during the 4000-mile trek back to Ann Arbor.

Our only headache was 20 or so pounds of mud that had accumulated in the inner wheels. It was as hard as concrete and had created the sort of imbalance you'd expect of Gary Busey during Oktoberfest. Twenty-five bucks spent at a manual carwash pretty much cured the wobbles, although that particular outfit's drains might never be the same.

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