Camping in the Yukon, Canada

I used to think that the main advantage of having a dog is that you could fart all you like and blame someone else!

Whilst wilderness camping in the heart of Canada's Kluane National Park a second advantage in canine companionship became obvious, they are very good bear detectors. If you happen to be camping with Tahvi the Siberian husky, there is a third advantage, she will very kindly decoy the bear away from you and harass it until it decides there are easier things to eat than a world famous blog writer!

With these commendable actions Tahvi immediately restored her reputation, previously tarnished for knocking over a glass of wine, a limited and precious commodity when the nearest habitation is 45 miles away!

The interaction between the dog and the bear emphasised what all the parks literature and trail signs provided in the Yukon try to remind you, that this is true wilderness country. We were camping with Tim and Ann, Tahvi's owners and our hosts, at a place called Shorty Creek.

The creek was the scene of a brief and ultimately fruitless season of gold panning in the late 1890s as prospectors rushed through to the Klondike area of the Yukon River seeking an instant fortune. Since then it has seen nothing more than the occasional group of hikers or campers passing through and no doubt plenty of bears, one of whom decided to eat the timbers on to which the Shorty Creek interpretive signboards have been placed.

We slept well that night confident in the knowledge that our ursine detector would save us from any potentially nasty four legged encounters. Imagine then how we felt for the next two nights when Tim& Ann left for business commitments and took the dog with them! Angela and I slept lightly, hugging the bear spray canister like it was a close relative, wondering why we didn't volunteer to "look after" the dog!

You may feel I'm over dramatising this but having spent every day seeing bears in the back country (fortunately in the distance) and seeing evidence of their passing (literally) in steaming black piles of berry remains, we were understandably cautious.

We began to wonder if you could tell the size of a bear by the scat it leaves but gave up that speculation when our imagination began to run riot! Suffice to say some of the paw prints in the trail mud were longer than my Size11 boots, and the claw marks were like mini ravines compared to those left by lions in Africa!

We were in the Yukon for a long weekend, having driven up from Haines on what must be one of the most scenic stretches of road on the continent. To the south and west of us was an unbroken chain of mountains that includes Canada's highest peak, the 19,524ft Mount Logan and the largest non polar ice sheet.

Combined with adjacent wilderness areas in Alaska (Glacier Bay and the Wrangell-St Elias National Park) and British Columbia (Tatsheshini-Alsek Park), Kluane National Park is the world's largest protected area at over 97,000 square kilometres.

The edge of this park and the first ridge of mountains that hides the larger peaks, is the view that awaited us when we arrived at Tim & Ann's house in Haines Junction, a tiny settlement on the Alaskan Highway which is famous for…being on the junction to Haines, Alaska! A short walk from their house found us in wild flower meadows surrounded by quivering Aspen trees whose leaves were already turning golden after the first frost of winter (August!)

A stunning landscape, so beautiful that we are going back soon! Sadly my efforts to spot some overlooked gold nuggets in the Yukon streams to make Angela a ring were as successful as my attempts to find her a diamond in Namibia and Botswana, good job she doesn't like jewellery!

As you will have realised we managed to avoid being bear food in the Yukon and returned back over the Canada/US border to Haines, but more of the attractions of Haines (including the world famous Hammer Museum) in our next blog.