North West Territories!! The wild and the wooly...

We have arrived! Sticker achievement!! ( High fives!!! ) The Northwest territories are as beautiful as they are remote... seems a long way to go for a sticker, but very well worth it.

 Our first passing into NWT, was the 60th parallel!! :)  A brief stop in at the visitors center to get our bearings, and then its off to Hay river for a couple nights of camping and aurora borealis scouting.... not much luck there unfortunately, we arrived during its "quiet" time, but we still did manage to glimpse the pale greens streaking across the sky like ghosts. Not a bad place for star watching though, and had some pretty epic moon through the clouds looking too. Hay river is a nice town, bigger than we had imagined, and kind of odd as well, they have one lonely highrise sprouting up amongst the smaller buildings in the town.

From there, we made our way to Yellowknife, home to many highrises and a small city with a population of about 20,000 people. We treated ourselves to lunch, and then we were off to Prelude lake for a couple nights of relaxation and entertainment. ( Bruce, a local who runs the campsite during the summer, gave us a good rundown on the nightlife, scenery, and the aurora borealis. ) We lounged, built grand campfires, and even had an evening visit with a rather surprised fox.  The lake itself is quite nice, with a pretty excellent hiking trail with odd meandering steps and tilted walkways that lead up the rocks to an overlook of the lake. Pretty, and cold.... the nights are definately getting chilly up here.....

Back down from Yellowknife we go, to Twin Falls, for  one more night of camping before we trek back down this bison filled highway... Twin falls is  pretty stunning in itself, you can follow a few trails to lookout points and pathways to various falls that traverse their way down the river gorge. Its neat too, how you can see where the treeline and the cliff meet so perfectly on  the opposite side of the river. We got some pretty good photos, some of which I will post to this blog to share.

All in all, NWT was well worth the trek, we saw a tonne of bison and their calves running along the side of the highway, plenty of eagles, our lone fox, and more squirrels than you could shake a stick at. The aurora borealis may have been elusive, but we'll catch it in its full glory one of these days!

 Jasper and the ice fields bound! Until the next trip,

                                   C & R.