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Houseboats on Great Slave Lake, Yellowknife |
This wasn't our first visit to Yellowknife. We were in Yellowknife one February probably 25 or so years ago. Yellowknife is a great place to see Northern Lights because the weather is mostly clear. It does snow, but it is so cold that the snow stays around until the spring thaw. It was so cold that February that one day without drying my hair I walked from the B&B to the taxi and my hair froze solid in seconds. It is so cold that we had to rent blue one piece snowsuits to survive. We looked like Smurfs.
We did see the Northern Lights several nights. One night we stood on the frozen solid Great Slave Lake and to the disconcerting sound of the ice groaning beneath our feet, we watched the lights dance overhead.
The houseboats that dot Great Slave Lake are here all year. In warm weather, residents use boats or canoes to get to the mainland, and in the winter they walk across the ice.
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Houseboats and Jolliffe Island, Yellowknife |
Much of Yellowknife and Canada resides on rock known as the Canadian Shield. This rock is what is left of the world's oldest mountains. If you are lucky or unlucky enough to have a home on the Canadian Shield, then you do not have either a septic tank or sewer system and you also don't have water. You have a "honey bucket" to collect waste and you must have water delivered to another tank. The "honey bucket" must be periodically pumped by trucks that euphamisitically declare "Nectar of the Gods" on the back of the tank.
A muskox sculpture stands near Yellowknife's City Hall. In the winter it is covered with mosses and grasses instead of flowers.
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A muskox with a clean coat at the Heritage Museum |
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Old Town Bikeworks |
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Derrald Taylor, Inuvialuit carver, from Tuktoyaktuk, NWT |
Yellowknife is a good place to hang out in the summer, but bring your mosquito spray.
Flying home very early on July 14.
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