The lure of the far north is inescapable for anyone who’s ever dreamed of exploring the vast, empty reaches that serve as a prelude to the ice caps at the top of the world. In fact, the land immortalized by Jack London’s ‘Call of the Wild’ has become an obsession for some, especially the thousands of German tourists who every year invade Canada’s Yukon Territory in search of White Fang and the endless frontier.
My own sub-Arctic quest came about no less poetically, although I doubt London ever would have conceived from his Dawson City cabin of a vehicle quite like the 2015 GMC Yukon being christened after his beloved wilderness. And yet there I was, being given the rare opportunity to sample a vehicle in the land of its namesake, and to push the full-size SUV to the limits of what the largely unsettled and generally harsh northern terrain had to offer.