DAWSON CITY – Brad Firth, better known as Caribou Legs, took a short break last Wednesday and Thursday from his 1,200-km run from Inuvik to Whitehorse to attend fund-raising meetings honouring his quest in Mayo and Dawson.

The Dawson evening was held at the Tr'ondëk Hwëch'in Community Hall.

It drew about 60 people to a dinner and a chance to meet the Gwich'in runner and hear him speak about his dedication to the cause of preserving the Peel watershed.

"I was surprised when I came here to find that you people have a real flavour for the Peel,” Firth said.

"I didn't realize how important it is to you people.”

He said he started this campaign when he realized how upset a cousin of his in Aklavik was over the Yukon government's decision to set aside the the Peel watershed planning commission's final report and advance its own counter report permitting more potential development.

"I wanted to comfort her – ease her pain – ease her suffering,” Firth said. "She was really disturbed by it, and that was why I formulated this run.”

It's not his first long run. Last year, he ran from Fort Smith to Yellowknife.

Firth has been running steadily since he kicked a decades-long history of alcohol and crack cocaine abuse that saw him living on the streets in Vancouver before he finally faced what he had become and forced himself to run away from those addictions.

This run started April 2, and he hopes to complete it in Whitehorse between April 28 and 30. He had originally planned on being in the capital around today.

He's carrying a symbolic satchel of letters, which he hopes to present to Premier Darrell Pasloski at that time.

He's running with Trixie, his six-month-old pitbull/shih tzu, who paces him and sometimes nips at his ankles.

"She soothes the pain and she makes me laugh.”

An example of this is the day that Trixie became distracted by a piece of caribou carcass at the side of the road.

It was a while before Firth and his driver, Angela, realized the dog was missing in action.

When they went back about a kilometre and found her, she had to be pried away from her feast.

"I just had to laugh. What can you do, right?”

On this leg of the run, his companion in the support vehicle (which was loaned to him for the run) has been Whitehorse resident Angela Sabo, herself a bit of a runner.

While in the Klondike, the trio stayed at TH's R-22 camp just a few miles up the Dempster Highway, returning there at night after side trips to Dawson and Mayo and after the first few days running from the Dempster Corner.

"I feel really strong right now,” Firth told his Dawson audience.

"The two days I had off just now – it feels like a week. I'm so used to pounding the pavement every day that these two days have just been dragging on.”

What has been good about it has been the chance to meet lots of people who understand and are supportive of his cause.

"You guys have been with it since day one, and I just showed up a couple of months ago. It's through your hard work and your continued support – I'm just adding to what your guys have already done, right?”

Firth likes to cover 50 to 60 kilometres a day when conditions permit. They don't always. So far on this trip, he's had to face rain, mud and snow.

In the Blackstone Uplands, he was joined by a contingent of runners from Dawson, and others have joined him from other communities along the way.

Leaving the Dempster Corner on Easter Sunday, he was joined by 14 runners ranging in age from nine to middle age. On that day, his Facebook blog records that he ran 50 kilometres before returning to R22 for the night.

Asked why he started running in the first place, Firth related taking the advice of an elder who helped him when he was first overcoming his addictions.

"He told me to go back to what I used to do when I was a kid. And I couldn't answer that, I couldn't think of that.

"And he asked me, ‘What did you use to do as a kid?' And I said, ‘I don't know.' And he said, ‘You ran. You ran as a kid. We all run as kids.' And I thought about it and it's true,” Firth said.

"I ran from high school, and the police and, when I was little, from my grandmother,” he added jokingly.

"I used to cross-country ski and play hockey.”

Getting back to being active helped him kick his bad habits.

He said he just seems to have been built for running.

While he may be tired and sometimes sore at the end of a day, eight or nine hours' sleep seem to be a reset button for him. He gets up in the morning ready to go.

At one point, Firth was told that someone in Whitehorse was looking into whether he needed a permit to do this highway run.

"I said, ‘Are you kidding?' We just laughed at the idea.”

They asked how long it might take to accomplish this and were told it would be three weeks. Firth expects to take not much longer than that to complete the entire run.

"I told Angela that if the cops pull us over and shut us down, we'll just run at night.

"We'll put the headlamp on, get Trixie all lit up, and we'll run at night.”

It doesn't seem likely it will come to that.