A New Plan

The decision to call the canoe expedition was a hard one and I keep going back to the NWT Fire pages to see if we were too hasty in our decision. I do not have a lot of experience with wild fires, so we were relying on information from many sources.

But even today (07/18/2023) both the Tulita and 12 Mile Creek fires are still “Out of control.” The Tulita fire has grown to 16,000 Hectares. According to satellite data, it has reached the Mackenzie River on the East shore in places.

The 12 Mile Creek Fire is now 23,500 Hectares and is burning further south along the West shore of the Mackenzie River, this would have extended the intense fire area we would have had to paddle through.

I know we made the right call, but the decision still stings.

Since we travelled South to Hay River with our friend Daniel, we spent a couple days camping in Hay River Territorial Park. We were able to catch a Folk Music show at the Hay River Historical Museum.

We spent the better part of a day and a half reconfiguring our camping gear and repacking the truck for overlanding, otherwise known as car camping. Our new plan is to explore the Northwest Territories and Yukon by truck. We are likely going to drive the Dempster Highway. All of the girls are unanimous that we “Just have to get to Tuktoyaktuk!”

Sarah decided that since we were back in the area, we should go see the capital, and largest city in the Northwest Territories, Yellowknife (Population 20,000 of the total NWT population of about 45,000).

On Friday 07/14 we drove from Hay River to Yellowknife. We arrived in the afternoon and immediately went to the Prince of Wales Northern Heritage Centre. A museum about the Northwest Territories that included exhibits on Tundra, Taiga and the Natural Resources of the Northwest Territories.

The Centre also had exhibits on the First Nations cultures of the vast NWT.  There was an extensive exhibit showcasing the contributions that aboriginal people made to help the Royal Canadian Mounted Police patrol the vast territory by dog-sled, snowshoe and eventually airplane. It was a very well done museum that balanced the traditional with the modern.

The premiere exhibit in the museum was a Moose Hide boat. The traditional means of the Moutain Dene to bring their meat, furs and supplies back down to the Mackenzie, via mountain river tributaries after the hunting season.

The art of building these boats was almost lost, but it has since been revitalized. The boat in the museum is a boat that was built for a documentary called, THE LAST MOOSESKIN BOAT. You can watch the documentary on YouTube:

We camped at Prelude Lake Territorial Park, just outside Yellowknife, at an interesting site to say the least.

The next day we went back into Yellowknife and climbed “The Rock” in the old town and it was a fantastic view. Yellowknife is firmly in Canadian Shield rock. The Western end of this primordial rock is the West end of Great Slave Lake and it extends East, all the way to the Atlantic Ocean.

We felt at home since the Canadian Shield is common in Northern Wisconsin and Minnesota, as well as Ontario.

We walked down “Ragged Ass Road” to the Wild Cat Cafe to have lunch. The Wild Cat Cafe has been a Yellowknife institution since the 1800’s. The road was named for the boom and bust economy of the local gold rush at the turn of the last century.

After spending the second day in Yellowknife, we headed back down Southwest through the Mackenzie Bison Sanctuary toward Fort Providence. Driving both North and South along this route, we saw dozens of Wood Bison.

Fire haze has been a constant since Wrigley, it is odd that we really only had one day of light fire haze during our entire canoe journey from Hay River to Wrigley, but since we arrived in Wrigley we have had fire haze bad enough to cause sore throats and dry, red eyes almost every day since. 

There are just so many fires all over up here. There are fires burning in NWT, Yukon, Alberta & British Columbia, no matter where we go, no matter the wind direction, the fire haze comes in from some fire nearby.

It is always strange to go back through places in the truck that we have paddled past.

It is just such a different perspective to view the landscape from a vehicle you drive 60 miles in an hour versus a vehicle that it takes two and a half days to travel that same 60 miles.

We’ll be posting a few new short videos from our road trip over on our YouTube channel: Umingmaq Paddle Touring Center.

We hope you’ll still follow our new adventure!

More soon,

Matt, Sarah, Olive and Petra