Here's The Coolest Car I Found At A Junkyard On Top Of The World

I am writing to you now from Inuvik, Northwest Territories in Canada at the very top of the Dempster Highway, just a couple of hours drive from the Arctic Ocean. This is the most populous town in Canada north of the Arctic Circle, and as you can imagine, it's not very big. A bit over 3,000 people live in this town, and it's rare that anything here goes unused. When new things cost significantly more to transport, or the nearest car dealership is hundreds of miles south, you tend to make what you have stretch a little longer. As such, the junkyard here isn't exactly packed with prime specimen to choose from. As I was driving out of town I was intrigued to see what lay in the weeds, sinking into the permafrost. 

This isn't the kind of place where I would imagine many Camaro have ever been, and an even rarer place for one to come to die. The nearest Chevrolet dealership is a 20-hour drive away, in Alaska, a completely different country. When this car was sold new you may not have needed a passport to go pick it up, but almost certainly today one would be necessary. This piece of American muscle history was once somebody's pride and joy, it made the long and (occasionally) arduous trek up the Dempster to presumably live here. And now it's long gone, a distant memory of the past. Except it isn't, it's still here, still waiting for the family it once loved to come back for it. If they're still here they have to see it sitting in the lot, visible from the main road, looking forlorn. 

I know cars don't actually have souls, but if this were once my car, I couldn't bear to see it languishing like this. I would have needed to save it from a fate of ignominy. There is, understandably, not much car culture up here in the frozen north, but I'd want to keep the connection alive. 

What you're looking at here is a second-generation Chevrolet Camaro. More specifically one built from 1978 to 1981, judging by the front bumper. With body-colored urethane bumpers and tri-color taillights, this was a really stylish alternative to the then-new fox-body Mustang. While the Mustang might get more love today, I have a soft spot for this era of Camaro. Chevrolet seemed a bit more ostentatious and vibrant in the 1970s and 80s than Ford was, and these cars are the pinnacle of that. 

I'm not Camaro nutty enough to know exactly which year or options this one had, and there was a big mud bog keeping me from getting too close to investigate. When this car debuted Chevrolet was moving over a quarter million units of the Camaro per year. In fact 1978 was a high water mark year for the Camaro at that point, and most of them were the bog-standard base model. Judging by the tan-over-tan colorway and statistical probability, this was much more likely to be a base model than a fun Z28. 

I don't know how this Camaro met its demise, but the car is way too intact and without much rust for it to have been a crash. Somewhere along the line someone apparently just gave up on trying to keep this thing running through the long, cold, and dark Inuvik winters. Even though it probably isn't, I like to think this was one of the rare 1981 Canadian-spec 350 V8 cars with a 4-speed manual, a configuration the U.S. didn't get that year, but I'll probably never know. If any of you out there know the story of this Camaro and how it ended up in a junkyard on top of the world, could you let me know? 

Every corner I turn in this town I'm blown away by another strange thing I've never seen before. Just minutes after walking away from the Camaro and saying a prayer in its memory, I was greeted by this delightful little sight. 

In the parking lot of the town's only parts store sat a delightful little Daihatsu Hijet kei-jidōsha pickup truck. Unlike the Camaro, this one seems to still be in use, helping the town clear its copious amounts of snow in the cold months. It's not getting much use this week as the temperatures are hovering in the low 60s (on the Fahrenheit scale), but soon it will push snow around again. With four-wheel drive powering a set of four tracks, and a tiny little plow adapted to the front, I've never seen a snow machine with quite as much cutesy gusto. 

This machine may be a utility for the folks of the town, unlike the Camaro, and it probably hasn't ever served as anyone's pride and joy. It brought me joy, however, and I hope that is enough for the car, its owner, and maybe the folks at Daihatsu to built it. 

Though now I'm dreaming of getting that Camaro running again and installing a plow on the front bumper to give it a second lease on life.