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Post by 🖕🏿Mörön🖕🏿 on Jul 3, 2019 1:52:09 GMT -5
Yellowknife July 2019Just got back from a beautiful drive eastward so i will post a few pics here.
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Post by 🖕🏿Mörön🖕🏿 on Jul 3, 2019 2:26:26 GMT -5
And yes I will be making many more posts here. For good measure and to show good faith on my part, here are a few more from June 30th. Village of Rae. Really windy there as it is on a sort of peninsula on a lake. Not sure why they chose that site for a village...less mosquitoes? Didn't see any...  |
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Post by Lommaren on Jul 3, 2019 5:10:59 GMT -5
That fox hopefully is spared the rage of knot  Great pictures 🖕🏿Mörön🖕🏿, on vacation over the summer, ensuring we'll see a lot more? |
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Post by Cadeau on Jul 3, 2019 7:32:46 GMT -5
Beautiful photographs from the north! Looking forward to seeing more of your travel stories.
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Post by 🖕🏿Mörön🖕🏿 on Jul 5, 2019 0:45:01 GMT -5
Here's where I drove. I wanted to drive all the way to the end of the "Ingraham Trail" but some active heavy machinery was working on the road, which at that point was a dirt road. The road was blocked. If I had really wanted to, I could've gone out there at 11pm but decided against it. West and southward, I went to Rae (aka Behchokǫ̀) and Fort Providence. East of YK, it's just lakes you can boat, fish, and hike at. Did hiking but unfortunately no boating or fishing.  |
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Post by 🖕🏿Mörön🖕🏿 on Jul 5, 2019 2:17:40 GMT -5
Repost of my first day in Yellowknife from the main picture thread: View from Bush Pilots Monument    Not sure what this was but it jumped like a grasshopper    Urban forest  Urban park...I guess  This is where a friendly drunk indigenous woman was yelling about her lost phone  Aurora Geosciences is in this building. Looks kinda like an Antarctic station.  Place with benches. Looked nice.  Niven Lake at 8:25pm  Mosquito-infested trail at the lake. Got attacked lol  Nice looking black spruce  Mosquitoland  Low sun but not setting till ~23:40. Most of the landscape in YK is a mix of bare rock, short trees (birch, black spruce, jack pine), short grass, and lichens. Too early in the year for mushrooms but they'd show up in August/September.  |
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Post by Lommaren on Jul 5, 2019 7:35:21 GMT -5
Moving into Yellowknife anytime soon? 🖕🏿Mörön🖕🏿
It strikes me as a Kandel thing to do!
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Post by 🖕🏿Mörön🖕🏿 on Jul 8, 2019 0:23:34 GMT -5
More pictures from Yellowknife. I have a few more after this that I may upload but I haven't gone through yet. Rocks on the Rock (Bush Pilot's Monument)  Some boat in Great Slave Lake  Niven Lake  Cropped this shot of the Ravens' Church in Fort Providence  It was cold there...48F at midday (4:12pm):  A random residential area in Fort Providence  Babu 's Birch fantasy  Just reposting this from before. The mosquitoes were fucking aggressive in here...ackh!  Another shot of one of those wild black dogs near Bechoko. This one looked right at me.  YK at 8PM  Next day was the day with 60 km/h winds and rain. Rainy, fucken!  Windy, fuckannn!  Driving  Gloomy, yet bright  Fucked up road ahead  Madeline Lake parking area. So many spruce  Next day on July 2nd I walked around city hall/Frame Lake. They have these steps going down into the water which I thought was interesting:  Various NWT flags, fucken  Fireweed just beginning to bloom  Small creek in here. Pretty lush! Needless to say, I didn't go down there as I didn't want to get eaten alive by mosquitoes...  This shows how close the treeline is to Yellowknife. Going east is more like going north...  July 3rd, drove almost to the end of Ingraham Trail but I couldn't continue due to road construction  Nice forest  And now for my Cameron Falls trek  Birch and spruce. Who needs anything else.  Unless they're lichens! Who doesn't love bouncy lichens...  Well, I reached the falls. Took this shot on the edge of a cliff...  Looking down ~90 degrees...oh my fuck...  But I haven't reached the end. Now I am on a bridge upstream of the falls...  Here's the other side with a nice view of the cliff I was just hanging off of (centre right of the image). Winds blowin', rivers flowin', skeeters rapin', sky's cloudy, forest is empty. Typical summer day in the Northwest Territories.  Really nice place to walk  This area was really cool but it's hard to show how it looks in pictures. In short, it gave me the creeps as it seemed like a prime area for a bear den. In fact, I did see some kind of a den but it was pretty small, so probably it was for foxes. Didn't see any animals though. Very very rocky terrain.  Walked through all that...  Pretty sure this is a jack pine. Smelt very nice!  My kind of forest. I really dislike the extremely lush, tall, suffocating forests we have in more temperate regions. This is perfect though!  Beautiful crooked birches   Red granite. I didn't go up there but now I'm kicking myself for not. Ah well...next time (which won't be during peak mosquito season and if it's snowless, since the next time I go will most likely be December or March/April). Leaving Yellowknife. I didn't think I'd like it so much. I mean, at first its rugged frontiersiness and to a fault, very friendly people, took me by surprise. Coming from Vancouver, it's a very different culture but in the end I think I prefer it out there. It's actually a very international town despite its small size, no Tesla , no (or very little) dirty Chinese money tainting anything, interesting and extreme climate, and a perfect landscape. The main thing lacking is a good liquor store and cheap real estate.  |
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Post by 🖕🏿Mörön🖕🏿 on Jul 8, 2019 0:46:17 GMT -5
Moving into Yellowknife anytime soon? 🖕🏿Mörön🖕🏿
It strikes me as a Kandel thing to do!
I would certainly like to. It's just a matter of getting a job, like anywhere else. Unfortunately, the real estate, as I mentioned in my above post, is a bit on the high side compared to Quebec and Atlantic Canada, despite little to no mainland-Chinese money tainting the market. And yes I know, it reaches -40 almost every winter in Yellowknife and April/May and September/October are cold as fuck most of the time; (-40.6C record low in April and -22.8C in May!) and it's average precipitation is very low but to be honest, it doesn't feel that dry there. That's the beauty of subarctic climates. |
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Post by Morningrise on Jul 8, 2019 8:38:15 GMT -5
Great photos, Candle! I definitely want to visit the Territories some day, I think it's unfortunate that they're so little explored by Canadians.
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Post by nei on Jul 8, 2019 9:17:01 GMT -5
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Post by 🖕🏿Mörön🖕🏿 on Jul 8, 2019 21:06:54 GMT -5
Great photos, Candle! I definitely want to visit the Territories some day, I think it's unfortunate that they're so little explored by Canadians. Thanks! And yeah it is unfortunate but I think a big part of it is the expense of seeing the NWT, especially outside of Yellowknife. And the only reason anyone would think to go there in the first place is just for the aurora, which is definitely an amazing thing to see but there is much more to experience there than just that, whether it's winter or not. Anyway, maybe someday I will venture out to Nahanni National Park, Virginia Falls, and the Cirque of the Unclimbables. I probably wouldn't do it if I didn't live in NWT though since it's ~350 miles west of YK as the raven flies. Thanks to nei for even letting me know those mountains exist but here's a couple pic for anyone who hasn't seen 'em yet (posted pics of these 3-4 times already). Desolate beauty    Another angle:  And Virginia Falls:   Interesting read on the area... raven-talesoftheweird.blogspot.com/2011/02/valley-of-headless-men.html |
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Post by Steelernation on Jul 8, 2019 23:59:11 GMT -5
Great photos 🖕🏿Mörön🖕🏿! Sounds like you had a great trip, would certainly be cool if you moved there. Theres no mountains but I just love the untouched vast tracts of boreal forest like those, just something about it feels like quintessential wilderness to me. |
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Post by 🖕🏿Mörön🖕🏿 on Jul 9, 2019 0:38:05 GMT -5
Great photos 🖕🏿Mörön🖕🏿 ! Sounds like you had a great trip, would certainly be cool if you moved there. Theres no mountains but I just love the untouched vast tracts of boreal forest like those, just something about it feels like quintessential wilderness to me. At first I was a bit disoriented due to no mountains or even big hills. Felt very weird since I'm so used to that. But yeah, it's a vast untainted wilderness. I really felt very relaxed there compared to here. I mean, no drivers tried to kill me. In fact, they were very courteous drivers. Not used to that either! I saw so much potential for growth in YK itself though. And no knot, I would never want it to turn into Vancouver but there are definitely opportunities to be had for entrepreneurial people to make YK even better. |
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Post by Lommaren on Jul 9, 2019 6:06:29 GMT -5
At first I was a bit disoriented due to no mountains or even big hills. Felt very weird since I'm so used to that. But yeah, it's a vast untainted wilderness. I really felt very relaxed there compared to here. I mean, no drivers tried to kill me. In fact, they were very courteous drivers. Not used to that either! I saw so much potential for growth in YK itself though. And no knot , I would never want it to turn into Vancouver but there are definitely opportunities to be had for entrepreneurial people to make YK even better. Wouldn't it be way more realistic to properly develop the interior of BC into a densely-populated area instead? That's the most underdeveloped zone of Canada based upon its geography and climate in my opinion. Your favourite location Fernie for example is a whole lot more liveable than anything east of the Rockies on the same latitude. |
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Post by 🖕🏿Mörön🖕🏿 on Jul 9, 2019 21:04:33 GMT -5
At first I was a bit disoriented due to no mountains or even big hills. Felt very weird since I'm so used to that. But yeah, it's a vast untainted wilderness. I really felt very relaxed there compared to here. I mean, no drivers tried to kill me. In fact, they were very courteous drivers. Not used to that either! I saw so much potential for growth in YK itself though. And no knot , I would never want it to turn into Vancouver but there are definitely opportunities to be had for entrepreneurial people to make YK even better. Wouldn't it be way more realistic to properly develop the interior of BC into a densely-populated area instead? That's the most underdeveloped zone of Canada based upon its geography and climate in my opinion. Your favourite location Fernie for example is a whole lot more liveable than anything east of the Rockies on the same latitude. Climatically speaking, yes. But like I said, I wouldn't want anywhere in the NWT (or Fernie for that matter) to turn into Whistler or some mega resort filled with dickheads. I just mean that I see potential niches to be filled in NWT/YK. They only opened their first and only brewery in 2015. NWT will never be densely populated though... |
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Post by shalop on Jul 11, 2019 3:42:31 GMT -5
Next day on July 2nd I walked around city hall/Frame Lake. They have these steps going down into the water which I thought was interesting: In the winter there's a little ice skating rink that they carve out there on Frame lake just out front of the park, and I believe those steps lead down to it. I wanted to skate on it but unfortunately there are no skate rentals in Yk, so you have to bring your own. Yeah I thought it sucked pretty hard when I had to leave the place. It had its sketchy parts and its share of pollution downtown, but all in all I thought it was a great place. Great pics by the way. You explored more extensively than I did; would've liked to do that but wasn't possible given the length of day and the road conditions. Seems like the summer gives a totally different feel to the Territories, but it still looks really enjoyable, esp the Ingraham trail (referring to the Cameron Falls trail pics). I went out there on Route 4 around midnight once when it was about -35F outside and naturally I didn't have too much fun (though somehow, there were still other people out there on Prelude lake)... def would like to explore it in brighter conditions and perhaps see some fauna, as you did. |
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Post by 🖕🏿Mörön🖕🏿 on Jul 11, 2019 20:51:53 GMT -5
Next day on July 2nd I walked around city hall/Frame Lake. They have these steps going down into the water which I thought was interesting: In the winter there's a little ice skating rink that they carve out there on Frame lake just out front of the park. I wanted to skate on it but unfortunately there are no skate rentals in Yk, so you have to bring your own. Yeah I thought it sucked pretty hard when I had to leave the place. It had its sketchy parts and its share of pollution downtown, but all in all I thought it was a great place. Great pics by the way. You explored more extensively than I did; would've liked to do that but wasn't possible given the length of day and the road conditions. Seems like the summer gives a totally different feel to the Territories, but it still looks really enjoyable, esp the Ingraham trail (referring to the Cameron Falls trail pics). I went out there on Route 4 around midnight once when it was about -35F outside and naturally I didn't have too much fun (though somehow, there were still other people out there on Prelude lake)... def would like to explore it in brighter conditions and perhaps see some fauna, as you did. I think mid-March would be perfect for a winter visit. Skies are usually clear, good day/night distribution, aurora visibility, lakes are still completely frozen, and temperatures are usually not frigid. It's also one of the months with least snowfall. |
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Post by Morningrise on Jul 14, 2019 12:53:53 GMT -5
Great photos, Candle! I definitely want to visit the Territories some day, I think it's unfortunate that they're so little explored by Canadians. Thanks! And yeah it is unfortunate but I think a big part of it is the expense of seeing the NWT, especially outside of Yellowknife. And the only reason anyone would think to go there in the first place is just for the aurora, which is definitely an amazing thing to see but there is much more to experience there than just that, whether it's winter or not. Yeah, not to mention the time it takes to get there. I know Whitehorse is a 3 hour flight from Vancouver, so for people from Toronto/Montreal/Ottawa/etc it's basically 5-ish hours to get to Vancouver, a layover, and then another 3 hours to get to the Yukon. They could fly to Europe in less time than that (and probably for less money too). I imagine NWT is probably similar as well, maybe slightly closer but still comparable to overseas travel. How did you go about getting there? I imagine through Edmonton is probably the main route? |
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Post by 🖕🏿Mörön🖕🏿 on Jul 14, 2019 13:46:11 GMT -5
Thanks! And yeah it is unfortunate but I think a big part of it is the expense of seeing the NWT, especially outside of Yellowknife. And the only reason anyone would think to go there in the first place is just for the aurora, which is definitely an amazing thing to see but there is much more to experience there than just that, whether it's winter or not. Yeah, not to mention the time it takes to get there. I know Whitehorse is a 3 hour flight from Vancouver, so for people from Toronto/Montreal/Ottawa/etc it's basically 5-ish hours to get to Vancouver, a layover, and then another 3 hours to get to the Yukon. They could fly to Europe in less time than that (and probably for less money too). I imagine NWT is probably similar as well, maybe slightly closer but still comparable to overseas travel. How did you go about getting there? I imagine through Edmonton is probably the main route? On the way there I flew direct from YVR to Yellowknife (YZF) and that only took a little over 2 hours thanks to the speedy plane (CRJ900). The landing at YZF was pretty rough and the deceleration was pretty hard which was cool. The way back was via Edmonton and the Yellowknife to Edmonton leg took 2 hours, on a much slower plane (Dash 8). Edmonton to Vancouver was on an A330 and took just over an hour. It was my first experience flying with Air Canada and I have to say they are pretty bad compared with other airlines I've used. Interiors are dirty and overly-used, fees for seat selection (like WestJet), checked baggage fees (like WestJet), inefficient boarding procedures, etc. And with them, you pretty much have to reserve a seat or they might put you on a different flight because they (and many other airlines) overbook flights. Flight attendant service was below average to average but don't really care too much about that aspect. Just leave me alone and we're good.  On an additional note, Yellowknife is pretty much the gateway to the Canadian Arctic, with direct flights to Gjoa Haven, Inuvik, Kugluktuk, Taloyak, Cambridge Bay, Rankin Inlet, and Kugaaruk. But for some reason, not to Iqaluit or Baker Lake (must go through Rankin Inlet for Baker Lake). For most airlines, you have to go through Ottawa or Montreal to get to Iqaluit which does not make any sense! Looks like First Air is the only airline which goes to Iqaluit from Yellowknife (via Rankin Inlet) but it's $4000. Oh Canada... |
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