Northwest Territory Guide

Although much of Canada still has the flavour of the last frontier, it's only when you embark on the mainland push north to the Northwest Territory that you know for certain you're leaving the mainstream of North American life behind. In the popular imagination, the north figures as a perpetually frozen wasteland blasted by ferocious gloomy winters, inhabited - if at all - by hardened characters beyond the reach of civilization. In truth, it's a region where months of summer sunshine offer almost limitless opportunities for outdoor activities and an incredible profusion of flora and fauna; a country within a country, the character of whose settlements has often been forged by the mingling of white settlers and aboriginal peoples. The indigenous hunters of the north are as varied as in the south, but two groups predominate: the Dene, people of the northern forests who traditionally occupied the Mackenzie River region from the Albertan border to the river's delta at the Beaufort Sea; and the Arctic Inuit (literally the people), once known as the Eskimos or fish eaters, a Dene term picked up by early European settlers and now discouraged.

The north is as much a state of mind as a place. People north of 60 - the 60th Parallel - claim the right to be called northerners, and maintain a kinship with Alaskans, but those north of the Arctic Circle - the 66th Parallel - look with light-hearted disdain on these southerners. All mock the inhabitants of the northernmost corners of Alberta and such areas of the so-called Northwest, who, after all, live with the luxury of being able to get around their backcountry by road. To any outsider, however, in terms of landscape and overall spirit the north begins well south of the 60th Parallel. Accordingly, this section includes not just the provinces of the true north - Northwest Territory and parts of the western Arctic and Northwest Territories - but also northern British Columbia, a region more stark and extreme than BC's southern reaches.

The Northwest Territories (NWT) is the region at its most uncompromising. Just three roads nibble at the edges of this almost unimaginably vast area, which occupies a third of Canada's landmass - about the size of India - but contains only 60,000 people, almost half of whom live in or around Yellowknife, the territories' peculiarly overblown capital. Unless you're taking the adventurous and rewarding Dempster Highway from Dawson City across the tundra to Inuvik, Yellowknife will probably feature on any trip to the NWT, as it's the hub of the (rather expensive) flight network servicing the area's widely dispersed communities.

Otherwise most visitors are here to fish or canoe, to hunt or watch wildlife, or to experience the Inuit aboriginal cultures and ethereal landscapes. More for convenience than any political or geographical reasons, the NWT was formally divided into eight regions. From 1999 a new two-way division has applied, the eastern portion of the NWT having been renamed Nunavut, a separate entity administered by and on behalf of the region's aboriginal peoples. One effect has been the renaming of most settlements with Inuit names, though in many cases the old English-language names appear in much literature.

The Delta-Beaufort region centres on the planned government-built town of Inuvik, embracing the mighty delta of the Mackenzie River, North America's second longest river, and reaching across the Beaufort Sea to Banks Island, the most westerly of Canada's Arctic islands. The delta ranks as one of the continent's great bird habitats, with swans, cranes and big raptors amongst the many hundreds of species that either nest or overfly the region during the spring and autumn migration cycles. It also offers the chance of seeing pods of beluga whales and other big sea mammals, while local Inuit guides on Banks Island should be able to lead you to possible sightings of musk ox, white fox and polar bears.

Nothing about Yellowknife - named after the copper knives of Slavey aboriginal people - can hide the fact that it's a city that shouldn't really be here. Its high-rise core of offices and government buildings exists to administer the NWT and support a workforce whose service needs keep a population of some 18,500 occupied in a region whose resources should by 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's the word for so dispersed and unprepossessing a place. Today, the chances are you'll only be here en route for somewhere else, for this is the hub of many airline routes across the NWT and parts of Nunavut.