On a north/westward bound stretch of my springtime journey through the Yukon, I got to meet two rugged individuals on the road – one of whom is visibly queer in one of our world’s oldest professions – dog mushing, and the other in a profession that has only emerged within the last century – long haul trucking with heavy equipment movement.   Each time I’ve journeyed north along this route, I feel myself falling in love with this vast region, and feel my heart sink as I leave it to drive south.  While the elements and wildlife still dominate this land in a rare way, human beings still find ways to thrive here too.  This includes queer folks finding ways to be visible on the fringes of North America, while still passionately working in the hearts of careers not often associated with queer stereotypes. 

My Journey North: Vancouver, BC to Haines Junction, Yukon 

While on the road, I followed & friended a smorgasbord of visibly queer social media accounts, then waited for people who were enthused about the project to start reaching out. During this process, I made a mental note of an Instagram account I found using the hashtag queer trucker.  Troy’s posts were an eclectic mix of gourmet looking vegan dishes on the road and massive trucks slogging their way through the most dangerous, snowy highways of the north. I assumed he would be in Alaska for awhile, so decided to wait on contacting him while I focused on meeting the folks who were reaching out to me further south.  He shot me a message before I left Vancouver though, inquiring as to when I would be heading north on the ALCAN.   It turned out he was on one of his last driving assignments in Alaska before flying back to the Lower 48.  That last assignment might possibly overlap with my travel time on the same stretch of highway by a day or two, or even just a few hours. 

So, the timing for this journey north partly revolved around corresponding with Troy every time I had a rare spot of cell reception, and getting updates on frequent changes in his tightly run work schedule with long days that he had little control over.  We determined that there was one tiny and remote town in the SouthWest Yukon where our paths might possibly cross to meet-up for photos and exchange our queer stories, but that fluctuating window of viable time in this small town was so slim.  Keeping this in mind, I started north on a route that happened to be getting pummeled by climate change related issues. 

My original route through British Columbia involved a road with massive frost heaves high enough to send a low speed car flying (known from experience!) and long stretches of unpaved road, but I initially felt comfortable with the route having driven it last spring.  That is until I realized that record flooding from rapidly melting snow in the mountains was indiscriminately washing out huge chunks of this precariously maintained highway, closing the only northbound highway in western BC for days at a time. 

My Plan B from Vancouver didn’t look much better; it involved adding 200 more kilometers driving further inland again, and the route was literally being torched by our warming climates.  Huge chunks of British Columbia were on FIRE and would continue burning for much of the summer.  Not far out of Vancouver, I found myself sitting on a closed highway for three hours with no detours around the fire compromised road.  Further up the road, yet another section of the main highway was closed for fire danger, adding another 2 hours to my route driving around it.  

As I counted my increasing hours on the road past Google Map’s estimated 30 hour drive, that meet-up with #queertrucker in the Yukon was looking a lot less likely, as his trucking schedule fluctuated wildly, and I wrapped my mind around not having a late spring snowstorm blocking the way north, but instead catastrophic floods and wildfires.  In north-central BC, the road finally opened up and lighter plumes of wildfire ash drifted north over crystalline, slushy, blue lakes and patches of snow.  

The wildfire smoke didn’t take away from the experience of being on a wildlife safari driving this highway. I’ve never taken a wildlife safari in a place like Africa, but I’m convinced the Alaska-Canada highway is North America’s extended, and perhaps cheaper version of a safari drive.  You might need $500-600 one way for fuel, the ability to sleep in your vehicle due to lack of lodging options, time, and the willpower to drive it.  Each time I’ve driven this 1400 mile long highway that starts in central BC and ends in Alaska’s interior, there’s been no shortage of wildlife sightings.  Birds range from tiny colorful songbirds to swooping eagles and elegant swans.  Mammals range from ground squirrels to marmots, foxes, coyotes, Dahl sheep, black bears, brown bears, and moose.    

A Black Bear Greeting on the Yukon Border

This particular journey brought dozens of black bears to the grassy roadside as they emerged from hibernation hungry and gravitated towards easy snacks.  For the first time in my life, I started getting bear sighting fatigue as I drove, only taking the time to pull off twice to attempt a roadside bear photograph.  

A few miles shy of the Yukon border, I did stop to photograph one black bear who looked blissfully absorbed in tearing chunks of grass out of the ground on the opposite side of the road. Maybe not as blissfully absorbed as I thought though; as soon as I rolled down the driver’s side window to settle a long lens on the door, hungry bear bounded down into the ditch between us on the opposite side of the road.  They reappeared a moment later, lumbering up out of the ditch, and making a beeline towards my open driver’s side window.  I could picture it saying, “oh hey!  I’m glad you stopped … I could really use a burger if you have one …”    I scrambled to glide the window up and precariously settle my camera in my lap before rolling further up the breakdown lane. 

I paused on the empty highway to put my camera beast away, and when I looked up realized hungry bear was still trailing my car.  I locked the car doors, and waited a moment to see just how curious hungry bear was. Hungry bear was pretty optimistic, sniffing out the car’s perimeter, then standing up to take a peak inside while showing me its drooling, hungry mouth.  Then I gave hungry bear a honk to scare them back into the grass, and continued the drive north, while grinning at this appropriately amusing “welcome back to the Yukon” from a black bear.

Being Queer in Trucking on the Fringes of North America

After a 10 hour driving stretch (900 km/600 mi) with no reception on my phone, my phone finally reconnected to the cellular world when I hit a tiny town on the BC/Yukon border around 5PM.  I checked on Troy’s updated driving schedule, and shoot – it was going to be a lot to make a photo session work.  He had to start heading north from this small Yukon town by late morning, which was still seven driving hours from my location.  I was on my third day in a row traveling from sunrise to sunset with picnic breaks and bear viewing breaks, but I was still feeling energized – I was just stoked to be back in this crazy region of the world!  The sun was not setting until 10:30 that night, so why not keep driving until dark?  If the timing with Troy happened to work out in the morning with a couple more hours of driving, then we would both have another life story to tell. 

Troy’s messages ranged from very succinct and to the point, to more proliferate, documentary style writing that shared small slices of his experience as a queer person in heavy, specialized trucking.  He gave me a detailed description of the truck he was driving, at the only gas station in this small, remote town with enough room to park a large truck.  As a female bodied traveler, my mother’s fearful approach to life rang in my head for a moment – maybe it wasn’t a good idea to meet up with a new internet friend in the remote reaches of the Yukon? … but really, everything in life has some level of risk.  It was a public place in case the vibes weren’t good, my fretting partner on the East coast had my live GPS coordinates, and most noateably – I thought it unlikely that someone could make up the detailed life experiences of a queer truck driver that easily. 

Troy greeted me with a relaxed smile, a washed out red mohawk, and clothes coated with the grease of yesterday’s heavy work day setting up equipment for gold mining camps.  His initial conversational tone was somewhat flat and monotone, matching his more succinct messages.  As he got comfortable with meeting this awkward photographer in the middle of his route, his more stifled conversational style gave way to slightly more animated discussion of his passionate support for other queer folks being as visible as possible in all professions. This passion was also necessarily tempered by the knowledge that he and many other queer folks in similar industries need to protect their own safety while on the job.   

Troy does an incredible job articulating these issues and experiences both in conversation, and in writing … find more of his story on the project’s social media pages.

While we stood on a cold, empty highway admiring one of North America’s highest mountain ranges and formidable ice fields, I asked Troy what dating on the road was like.  He let out a belly laugh at my absurd question, and politely said “I don’t!”   He described other encounters with queer folks in these remote, dangerous and often socially hostile working climates; they may each pick up on the signs that the other is queer, then subtly acknowledge each other with a sense of relief knowing that other marginalized people are quietly working on the same vast stretch of tundra. 

Being Queer in Dog Mushing on the Fringes of North America 

A few days after meeting #queertrucker, I took a hearty detour south to put my car on a ferry and spent another week car camping while getting to know the colorful, urban queer communities of Alaska’s capital.  On the 6 hour ferry ride north, back to the main road system thru the Yukon, my phone lit up with a message from another person in Juneau who really wanted to be part of the photo project.  Still eager to be a part of the project in some way, they gave me the number of their friend in Whitehorse.  That friend had an aversion to being photographed, but enthusiastically gave the contact of another person in Whitehorse.    

That fun chain of interactions led me to meeting Nate, a dog musher living outside of Whitehorse (Northern Sharks Working Dogs).   We met at the home where Nate was renting a humble space for himself and had access to a much larger space for his team of dogs, which was almost more important.   My interactions with Nate, and a few other dog mushers later on, gave me the sense that their lives were truly devoted to their dogs; the dog’s needs always came first, while the musher’s needs are secondary, but also inextricable from their canine connections.  Nate tried to minimize time spent hustling just enough to earn money for living a simple lifestyle that supported the basic needs of a human being and multiple dogs, then maximizes time spent training, promoting his team, and being one with his team in the wilderness of the Yukon’s rolling hills and mountains.  

Only a 2-3 hour drive from where I had photographed Troy in the snow 9-10 days earlier, Nate treated me to a four wheeler adventure a few miles through the bright green blooming trees blanketing the hills where his dogs ran free.  We paused at a few places where Nate finds peace; Nate had an energetic conversational style as he passionately talked about his gender journey, and what it is like being visible as a transgender man in the northern dog mushing world.  

In moments when his trusted companions sought Nate’s attention, his vibe subtly shifted to something mellower.  I could only imagine this mellow calm carried him through hours of training that led up to placing in the Yukon Quest 100 this past year, a historically grueling route that still challenges dog mushers today.  The photos I saw of Nate’s beaming (and cold looking!) face as he came up on the finish line with his grinning dogs and a large transgender flag proudly tucked over his sled are such a monumental way to be visible in his community, and in his profession that stretches back several thousands of years.  See more of Nate’s story on social media pages.

Last Reflections on Queer Visibility

As I reflected on what I learned from the rainbow of experiences of more than 20 people I met in the preceding few weeks traveling north, I marveled over how much courage it takes for so many of these individuals to be “out” in their communities and sometimes even to be queer allies in those communities.  For some, visibility can be momentarily flashing a rainbow tattoo at a safe time to indicate that they are a safe space to another queer human, before resuming their isolated navigation of the most dangerously remote roads of the Arctic world.  For others, visibility can be crossing the finish line of one of the country’s toughest sled dog races with a flag that shouts and celebrates their gender to the world.  Both these forms of visibility are valid, both take courage, and both are so important to slowly chisel out room for other marginalized people to safely be themselves in all professions, in all corners of the world. 

Thank you being here and joining me on this journey! Continue to the next road trip stop with me, in SouthEast Alaska – a geographically fragmented region with vibrantly out, and underground queer communities.

May 2023