While a patrol across the Whitehorse RCMP's territory takes about as long as finishing a latte, it takes Old Crow Mounties days on end to cross their coverage area.

Cpl. Kim MacKellar, who heads up the Old Crow RCMP's three-man detachment, will be headed north on Sunday with five other men on a memorial snowmobile patrol to Herschel Island.

The last time the Old Crow Mounties patrolled that way they were still using sled dogs, though the tradition of using first nation guides hasn't changed.

The Herschel patrol will mark the 35th anniversary of the Last Patrol in 1969 by Const. Warren Townsend and Special Const. Peter Benjamin, each driving a team of sled dogs from Old Crow to Fort McPherson and Red River and back.

As with any great caper, this one started through a conversation over a drink of some sort.

An Old Crow constable, Bryan Lasson, brought the idea of a Herschel Island patrol to MacKellar's attention late last year over coffee.

'In probably late December, I was sitting in the coffee room with (Lasson) and he had mentioned it to me,' MacKellar said in an interview Monday. 'He said that he had mentioned it in years past and that it had been put on the backburner.'

He estimates the 600-kilometre round trip will take four days, but they're setting aside eight days in case of bad weather.

'I thought that it would be something interesting to do. We figured it out and it was 1969 since the last one, so it was a nice, even 35 years. So we started at it.'

Starting at it didn't mean packing gear and tuning up snowmachines.

Instead, the corporal's preparations included several months of tracking down permits and even completing an environmental impact study.

Ivvavik and Vuntut national parks don't let motorized vehicles in their parks, nor do they allow firearms or hunting.

MacKellar's first task was to write letters asking permission from the various parks branches and the two first nations whose territory the group will snowmobile through.

Via e-mail, faxes and the phone, permits took a while to acquire, said MacKellar, noting that one had arrived only that day.

Another modern addition to the trip will be communication with the outside world. They'll phone in their GPS points via satellite phone. That information will be e-mailed to a person who will plot their course on the Vuntut Gwitchin First Nation's website.

To move through Ivvavik National Park on snowmachine, MacKellar had to outline for the Inuvialuit environmental impact study committee how many machines would be on the trip, that refuelling would be done away from water sources and that camp sites would be minimal.

As well, MacKellar had to obtain permission from the Aklavik hunters and trappers committee to use their cabin on Herschel.

'Overall, it's a lot of red tape, phone calls and e-mails and faxes, conversing back and forth as to what we're doing,' said MacKellar. 'Basically what it comes right down to is it's just an RCMP patrol. It just so happens there hasn't been one like this in 35 years.'

From the North West Mounted Police's beginnings in the Yukon in the late 1800s to the 1960s, officers were gone from home for days, weeks and even months on long-range patrols via canoe, dog sled and steamship.

In those days, officers did everything from carry mail and messages to discourage crime by their presence to check up on isolated people living in the bush.

In a 1901 White Horse Star article about the winter patrol the NWMP were conducting between Dawson and Whitehorse, the principles were the same as for patrolling farther north:

'Not only do the police patrolling the Yukon serve as a protection to life and property by keeping off probable highwaymen, but also go provided to care for any who might fall victims to the occasional extreme cold. Their dog teams are always available for picking up anyone distressed and carrying him to the nearest police post or road house.'

It was in the 1930s that Old Crow replaced Dawson City as the starting point for the winter dog sled patrols north to Fort McPherson and Herschel Island.

On his 800-kilometre (500-mile ) Last Patrol in 1969, Const. Townsend noted in his journal the weather and game conditions, dog miles travelled and who they met. Mounties living at remote detachments had been making those sorts of logs to send to head office for some 75 years.

For much of the outgoing trip, Townsend and his native guide broke trail on snowshoe, and twice they had to lower their sleds on chains down cliffs and let the dogs loose to pick their own way down.

On the second-last day of his 26-day patrol, Townsend wrote, 'The last 15 miles of the Hudson Bay portage trail was well packed by caribou and three small herds of caribou were seen (total of approx. 60 caribou). Continued to the police cabin, arriving at 8 p.m. Miles 58.'

Twenty-three kilometres from home the next day, the two were met by the detachment's Cpl. Wheeler, along with Old Crow residents Maynard Ellingson and Stephen Frost.

This year, Frost will be on the long patrol with the RCMP.

The first known Mountie dog team in the Yukon was a four-dog team shipped to Fort Constantine in 1895, wrote Helene Dobrowolsky in her pictorial history Law of the Yukon to mark 100 years of red serge in the territory.

By 1899, the NWMP had 231 four-legged employees. While some detachments hired first nations guides and their teams for patrols, other detachments kept their own teams.

The RCMP started its own dog breeding project in the early 1960s, but by then snowmachines were replacing the furry sled pullers. The 1969 Last Patrol was the Mounties' official closing of the sled dog era.

Though the RCMP's dog-breeding program began in 1960 in Fort Norman, N.W.T., it moved to Herschel Island two years later, and shut down when that detachment closed its doors in 1964.

Even today, RCMP officers in detachments like Haines Junction and Carmacks face a day-long drive to patrol the far corners of their areas.

Next week, the Old Crow group will keep in mind where various cabins are along the route, but doesn't plan on using any of them, except for a cabin they'll stay in for their first night. One of the group members owns that cabin, which he uses to hunt and trap from.

'We'll probably stop there and do a little re-organization, a little checking of fuel,' said MacKellar. 'From there it'll just be straight through to the island.'

Joining MacKellar and Lasson will be auxiliary constable Danny Kassi, Stephen Frost Sr. to represent the Vuntut Gwitchin elders, his son, Dennis Frost Sr., who will represent the hunters and trappers committee along with the renewable resources council, and 20-year-old Kibbe Tetlichi, representing the Old Crow first nation's youth.

Originally, the group had 12 snowmobilers, representing various groups within the community, but it's whittled itself down to a half-dozen.

Andrew Tizya, a Gwitchin elder born in 1921 who guided Mounties' sled dog patrols in the 1950s, is scheduled to escort the group for the first few kilometres out of Old Crow on Sunday.

Leaving north through the Old Crow flats, the patrol will hook onto the Timber River, following it much of its length before swinging northeast through a valley to meet up with the Babbage River.

Following that river will take the group to the coast. Once there, they'll follow the coastline to Herschel Island.

The snowmachine patrol to Herschel isn't the only trip there the Old Crow RCMP have in mind for this year. This summer, they intend to go back to the island in a boat to do maintenance work on two NWMP grave sites.