Another travel adventure this summer took my son and I to the north end of the Hudson Bay. Our long weekend trip had no particular goal other than to travel as far north as practically possible over a long weekend.
While it entailed a bit of flying, our non-rev status was kind to my wallet. We met at DIA, my son flying in from Atlanta, and we flew United to Edmonton. Despite being two hours north of Denver, it was warmer than Denver. We found a good steak house for dinner near our airport hotel.
The next morning, we flew Air North another 2 hours north to Yellowknife, in Canada’s Northwest Territories. Smoke was in the air, visibly and to our noses, due to Canadian wildfires. It is a town of about 20,000 with parks and a lake and our resting point for a day.
Originally part of the gold rush a century ago, Yellowknife is now home to several diamond mining companies. It is also the starting point of the winter ice road featured in the Ice Road Truckers TV show.
The next day we flew two hours east to Rankin Inlet, a small town at the north end of the massive Hudson Bay. It is an Inuit hamlet in the Nunavut province, home to about 3000 residents. Unlike Yellowknife rich in trees and forests, Rankin is north of the tree line, a rugged land of tundra and no trees.
Temperatures are below freezing most of the year with long, dark, and cold winters. Originally a trading outpost, there is now a gold mine and it is a hub for petroleum storage and shipping. Most homes have an ATV for summer transportation and a snowmobile for winter.
There are a few general stores and one restaurant, which was our dinner stop. The day we arrived it was sunny with temps in the 60s but the next morning when we left, it was freezing rain with temps in the high 30s. And this was in June. Imagine January!
We flew back to Yellowknife, had a short layover then another flight south to Calgary where we spent the night at the airport before heading home, Chris to Atlanta and me to Denver.
Rankin Inlet was far off the beaten track but an interesting town to visit. While pretty far north, Resolute is even further north, above the Arctic Circle, and on our visit list for next summer.
There are many remote northern Canadian towns well worth a short visit if you want to see a land and lifestyle far different than in metro Denver.