They had barely stepped out of their car at Miles Canyon when a voice rang across the parking area.

“Rabbis! Rabbis!”

The man calling after them was a Jewish visitor from Southern California, astonished to encounter two Lubavitcher bochurim in the Yukon, thousands of miles from the nearest major centers of Jewish life.

It was an early sign of what awaited Avremy Matusof of Calgary and Shloimy Stern of Brooklyn during their Merkos Shlichus journey through Northern Alberta, the Yukon and the Northwest Territories.

The two 23-year-old bochurim began in Fort McMurray and continued through Grande Prairie before heading farther north to Whitehorse and Yellowknife. Along the way, Jews repeatedly spotted them and came over, some local residents and others travelers who never expected to encounter Chabad in Canada’s Far North.

In the lobby of their Whitehorse hotel, the shluchim met Ben, an English visitor preparing to compete in a 1,000-mile paddle race down the Yukon River.

The conversation turned to Yiddishkeit, and Ben soon put on tefillin for the first time in his life. What began as a chance meeting between strangers in a hotel lobby became his bar mitzvah.

Elsewhere in Whitehorse, a woman named Tali spotted the bochurim near her workplace and ran over.

“Are you guys Chabad?” she asked. “This is amazing! Tell whoever is responsible that we need more of this up here.”

By then, it was clear that the shluchim had not arrived in a place lacking Jewish interest. They had reached Jews whose access to Yiddishkeit had been limited largely by the immense distances separating them from established Jewish communities.

Several residents had contacted the bochurim before their arrival, asking them to bring tefillin, mezuzos and seforim north. One Whitehorse resident purchased a new pair of tefillin and used them to put on tefillin for the first time.

The journey marked Chabad of Alberta’s first Merkos Shlichus visit to Canada’s Far North, made possible by Rabbi Mendy Kotlarsky of Merkos 302.

The trip was arranged by Chabad Lubavitch of Alberta, led by Rabbi Menachem and Rochel Matusof, together with Jewish community leaders in the Yukon and Northwest Territories.

Although the bochurim were the first to make the journey in person, the connection with Whitehorse had been quietly developing for years. Chabad of Alberta regularly sent shmura matzah, Chanukah kits and Jewish calendars containing the local Shabbos candle-lighting times.

This summer, that long-distance connection finally appeared at residents’ doors.

Across Northern Alberta, Yukon, and the Northwest Territories the shluchim distributed close to 60 packages of Jewish materials for children and adults, while over ten new mezuzos were affixed to homes. Their planned arrival in Yellowknife also prompted previously unknown Jewish residents to contact the local community before the bochurim had even reached the Northwest Territories.

The journey is part of this summer’s worldwide Merkos Shlichus program, with more than 500 bochurim visiting over 1,000 cities. In Whitehorse, where even obtaining a pair of tefillin can require arranging for it to be brought from thousands of miles away, the arrival of two bochurim carried unusual weight.

“They’ve moved the community to a whole new place,” said Rick Karp, president of the Jewish Cultural Society of Yukon. “We’ve never had anything like this here before.”