To see through Marcel Dulac’s eyes, you have to fly with him.
“You have to see it to believe it,” says Dulac, a pilot, about the beautiful landscapes he sees from his cockpit.
Dulac was born in the Yukon to a French father and a British mother. A true-blue Yukoner, he plans to live the rest of his life here despite the many opportunities he has had to reconsider this choice. Because he has French citizenship through his father, Marcel did his military service in France.
“I spent 16 months with firefighters in Dijon where I got a taste of life in a big city,” he recounts. It also gave him the opportunity to perfect his French. A few years later, he left Haines Junction again - this time for Alberta where he studied to be a pilot and obtained his licence. As enjoyable as all these experiences were, make no mistake: “Yukon is where I really want to live,” he says proudly.
At age 34, Marcel is a father of six. Together with his spouse Elodie, he heads an aviation company that serves Yukon, from Alaska to the Northwest Territories. Their four-aircraft charter company serves miners, explorers and scientists travelling to and from remote locations. They, too, travel by plane to their little gold mine, which they operate a few weeks a year.
“It’s for sale,” he laughs, but he’s serious. “I just don’t have the time to everything I want to do.”
Come summer, tourists keep him busy, as his airplanes are based a few minutes from a one-of-a-kind nature preserve along the boundary of Canada and the United States.
The Kluane/Wrangell-St. Elias/Glacier Bay/Tatshenshini-Alsek national park system comprises the largest non-polar icefield and boasts the world’s longest and most spectacular glaciers, as well as Canada’s highest peak, Mount Logan.
What’s more, these sites are listed as UNESCO World Heritage Sites.
“Flying over the glaciers, people are totally awestruck by their majestic beauty,” he says, adding that he never gets bored of flying over the same mountains, the same valleys.
“Each flight is different,” he says. “The light is never quite the same, and the colours change with the seasons and the time of day.”
His favourite time of year, though, is the summer solstice.
“Flying under the midnight sun is truly magical,” he says, but points out that the most unique colour contrasts are to be seen in August: green, yellow, purple and white, not to mention the different tones of blue reflected from the sky, lakes and glaciers. There’s no doubt about it: to get a bird’s eye view of Yukon with Dulac, you have to have eyes all around your head just so you don’t miss a thing.
This article is excerpted from the second edition of a tourism brochure created by RDEE Yukon, the economic development branch of the Association franco-yukonnaise (AFY). You can get a copy of the brochure (in French) at the Centre de la francophonie in Whitehorse or at the tourism information centre in
your community.