Edmonton to Yellowknife

We left Edmonton a day early, in the rain.   We had serviced our car and laundry, and it seemed better to spend a trip day in the far north rather than around the big city (population 700,000).     As we drove north habitation and infrastructure gradually gave way to a nearly straight flat 2-lane road through stunted forest, out of the rain.   We enjoyed our first-ever CD player, listening to a talk about the Alaska Highway, including the recorded voices of Robert Service and workers who built the road in 1942.   We were not on that Highway yet, but would connect to it near Fort Nelson in a week.   We had planned to drive the 940 road miles from Edmonton to Yellowknife in 3 days, but reduced that to 2.   Technology made the remote seem not so.   Our nearly new Super 8 Motel at the half way point of High Level, Alberta, was our fanciest of the trip so far, with satellite TV, free high-speed Internet, friendly people, and an excellent Boston Pizza restaurant next door.    Our next 3 nights would be in Yellowknife.

August 23.  We drove 450 miles from High Level to Yellowknife, capital of Northwest Territories (NWT).   We had left agriculture behind, so all unpreserved vegetables and most meats, except buffalo and fish, were imported.   Some wild wood buffalo had brucellosis and tuberculosis, so the government inspected every one killed for human consumption.   The trees, underlain by permafrost, were steadily shorter and more anorexic as we approached their northern limit, just beyond Yellowknife, which is where the vast Barrens begin.   (Note: "permafrost" is "permanent frost",  below the "active layer", which thaws in summer and allows plants to grow in it.). Sometimes the road was quite straight for 10 miles, with no other cars in sight.   We chatted with the lonely man at the tourist information post at the Northwest Territories border, the 60th parallel of latitude.   Soon after that we crossed the MackenzieRiver on a free ferry.   The river, which drains Great Slave Lake and thousands of square miles around it, here flowed at 18 knots as it was compressed to a narrow width.  Because of the current the bow of the ferry was pointed about 45 degrees to its path.   From there the river flows more than 1000 miles northward until it empties into the Arctic Ocean near Inuvik.   Northern rivers, especially the two biggest, the MacKenzie and the Yukon, were vital paths before the airplane, and are still useful avenues.   Heavy equipment originating in lower Canada is trucked up to Great Slave Lake, then barged down the MacKenzie and along the Arctic coast to Prudhoe Bay, Alaska, and other petroleum exploration sites.   North of the MacKenzie we passed many buffalo-beware signs, and a few small groups of grazing buffalo.   We began to see many inukshucks, which are aboriginal rock cairns used to mark trails, locate things, and assert "we are (Dene, etc.) and this is our land".   An example: 

At 8 PM we enttered Yellowknife, on he north shore of Great Slave Lake, an oasis of urbanity in the subarctic desert.   With 18,000 residents and buildings up to 15 stories, it prospers from:

**  MINING.   Only those products with a high value per pound are worth the cost of extracting and shipping them south.   There's so much copper along the Coppermine River further north that the "Copper Eskimos" (that's an Inuit word: "Eskimo" is offensive to them) extracted and used it, but copper from Chile is far cheaper.   Yellowknife had three waves of prosperity in the last 2 centuries: beaver skins, then gold, then diamonds. The last gold mine closed the year before our arrival, but diamonds had arrived just in time.  When diamond deposits were discovered in 1991, the biggest claim rush in Canadian history ensued.  Production/extraction began in 1998.   Production in 2003 was worth 1.7 billion Canadian dollars, quadruple that of 2002.   Since GE-made diamonds and cubic zirconia are just as pretty, Yellowknife's economy rests on vanity, imagination and hype.   Of course the DeBeers cartel has offices there.   Other minerals are mined, and emeralds were discovered in 2003.
**  GOVERNMENT.   In 1999 this province was split in two, with the greater area, including all the islands of the high Arctic, and peopled almost entirely by a few thousand aboriginals, became the province of Nunavut. The national and NWT governments still have to oversee the remaining 65,000 people and  1.3 million square miles in the Territory.  That's about 20 square miles per person.  In 1965 when Canada's big neighbor, the USA, sent its first ice breaker and oil tanker across the Northwest Passage, Atlantic to Pacific, Canada was compelled to pay more attention to its far north.

It takes (in 2004 ±) about three fall weeks for the great MacKenzie River to freeze thick enough to support trucks, and about 3 spring weeks to allow ferries to resume operation.  During those periods lettuce etc. comes in by air., and prices surge.   What's not imported: lake fish, three ingredients of concrete (sand, gravel, water), and buffalo meat.   Gasoline was about $3 US per gallon during our trip.  Headlines declared "The End of Cheap Oil".   However, Canada has tremendous reserves of fossil fuels.   About 2003 pipeline work began from the Arctic shore to the existing grid in the south.   In northeast Alberta (much nearer the USA) are the Athabaskan Tar Sands, more petroleum than in Arabia but up to 2009 too expensive to extract.   Then extracting petroleum from those Sands became a huge business, attracting many workers from Newfoundland, where cod fishing had nearly ended.   I remember from the 1950's that on two Nunavut islands oil seeps from the ground, too remote to harvest yet.   East of Inuvik whalers long ago found smoke from smoldering coal seams, which are still slowly burning.   Halfway between Yellowknife and Inuvik is Norman Wells, where the Canol Project started producing oil in WWII just as it was no longer needed or worth the expense.   From revenues of its oil fields nearer the USA, in the year of our trip Alberta had paid off all its government debt and was running a big surplus.

Consistent with what we read, pedestrians we saw on Yellowknife streets were about 40% Dene (Indian) and Inuit (Eskimo), 40% Caucasian, 10% Asian, and no blacks.   The legislature had an aboriginal majority, as did mine workers.

I wished I had time and energy to write here about the many friendly helpful Canadians we met there.