Faro to Little Salmon Lake Road — Tatchun Hills Wilderness Circuit

Faro was built to service the Anvil Mine — once the largest open-pit lead-zinc operation in the world — and after the mine closed for good in 1998 the town half-emptied and the roads beyond it went feral. This route pushes southeast from Faro through the Tatchun Hills along deteriorating resource roads that see almost no traffic, dropping eventually toward Little Salmon Lake on the Campbell Highway corridor. The terrain is rolling boreal with spruce-covered ridgelines and creek bottoms choked with alder. You’ll ford unnamed tributaries of the Pelly River drainage at least twice — crossings that are knee-deep on a good late-summer day and axle-deep during June runoff. Navigation requires a paper topo and a working GPS; trail markers are nonexistent beyond the first few kilometers.

Rated difficult. This route demands a capable 4WD with a lift, all-terrain tires, a high-lift jack, and recovery gear. A winch is not optional — it’s cheap insurance. Run it August through mid-September for the lowest water levels and before early snow hits the ridgelines. Faro has fuel; the nearest supplies east are at the Campbell Highway junction or Ross River. No cell signal anywhere on this route. The payoff is legitimately big: raw Yukon boreal, Dall sheep sightings on the high ground, and the near-certainty that nobody else is back there with you.