Canada Guide
The North
Yellowknife
Nothing about YELLOWKNIFE – named after the copper knives of aboriginal Slavey people – can hide the fact that it's a city that shouldn't really be here. Already surreally inappropriate in a region of virtual wilderness, it's also not really worth the 640km round-trip drive from the Mackenzie Hwy to see. But since it's the main transport hub for flights throughout the NWT and Nunavut you might find yourself passing though; if so, there are plenty of diversions for a day or two, as well as a mind-boggling selection of canoe routes and fishing spots.
Yellowknife's high-rise core of offices and government buildings exists to administer the NWT and support a population of some 20,000 in a region whose resources – despite the recent discovery of diamonds to the north – should by all rights support only a small town. Even the Hudson's Bay Company closed its trading post here as early as 1823 on the grounds of economics and, except for traces of gold found by prospectors on the way to the Klondike in 1898, the spot was a forgotten backwater until the advent of commercial gold and uranium mining in the 1930s. This prompted the growth of the Old Town on an island and rocky peninsula on Great Slave Lake, and then in 1947 the New Town on the sandy plain behind it. In 1967, the year a road to the outside world was completed (Edmonton is 1524km away by car), Yellowknife replaced Ottawa as the seat of government for the NWT. Oiled by bureaucratic profligacy and the odd gold mine, the city has blossomed ever since, if that can be said for so dispersed and unprepossessing a place.