Minister Michael Miltenberger was quick to blame public anxiety over wildfires on uninformed social medial commentators, but his own words and statements on the Department of Environment and Natural Resource’s website have done as much to fan the flames. In an interview with CBC radio last week, the minister marveled at how quickly one fire
Forest fire season didn’t get my attention until mid-July, the time in a normal year when rain quenches fires sparked by early summer electrical storms and wind carries away the smoke that can leach the heat from the warmest day. This year has been anything but normal. Instead of rain, dry electrical storms swept across
KATIE WEAVER: What’s it like to do standup comedy for a Yellowknife audience? ALEX SPARLING: It’s a blast. It’s a little different, I definitely have a bit of a home-ice advantage and all of my friends are here. I only come home every six months to do a show. This one’s especially different though, because all the
My face stuck on the window in the small propeller plane I boarded in Calgary, I saw the roads getting longer, straighter, sparser, then just disappear as I drew nearer to my new town. I could really grasp its remoteness. The Bristol Freighter plane near the “Welcome To Yellowknife” sign, the planes flying low over
Some people can have a few drinks and then stop. I’m often one of them – but admittedly, I’m often not. Yellowknife is known as a hard-drinking town and social options regularly revolve around drinking and socializing. In fact, we’re some of the hardest drinkers in the country. The 2009 NWT Addictions Report, conducted by
A loud rapping at the front door interrupted our quiet Friday evening. Fran and I had stayed behind to check out charts we’d picked up of the Nahanni River after everyone left our Willow Flats shack for the party on Latham Island. Planning a summer canoe trip on a cold night was our remedy for
Cows grazing in a field at Bevan’s Farm in Yellowknife | NWT Archives/Henry Busse fonds/N-1979-052: 4665 I am told that some 59 years ago I was delivered by Dr. Stanton in the old Red Cross Hospital. Dr. Stanton delivered a lot of my Yellowknife friends; I was one among many. At the time Dad was
Earlier this year, the Department of Education, Culture and Employment announced a new junior kindergarten initiative to provide free school-based programming for four year olds across the NWT. There has been a great deal of concern from school boards and parents about the money required to implement this new program, and in June, MLAs passed
“Yaaa Homos!” exclaims Iman Kassam from behind her drum kit at last year’s Folk on the Rocks Music Festival. Kassam, who came to Yellowknife from Africa by way of Toronto, holds her drumsticks in the air, flashing the audience a glimpse of her tattooed arms and rows of colorful braided bracelets. She’s just finished telling
The bullshit flew in the coffee shop as Scotty told us again, about the time some pilots messed up and it happened way back when. Back in the spring of seventy-eight Finger, Linger, and Ben, three young lads, all working late at Gateway Aviation. Yes Finger and Linger, buddies with Ben knew each other since
Excepting ursine silhouettes riding truck bumpers, a polar bear sighting on Franklin Avenue is in the realm of fantasy, or hallucination – unless you wander through the retail wasteland of Centre Square Mall to Arctic Jewellers. Since 2009, when the last cutting and polishing factory on Diamond Row closed, the store owned by April and
If you watched this year’s Canada Day parade, you might have seen and heard the unmistakable sounds of the NWT Pipe Band blowing and beating out a version of Scotland the Brave and a dozen or so other tunes. The 2014 parade marked my 18th march down Franklin Avenue since I signed up for bagpipe
As a magazine publisher, we think about stuff like trademark, copyright and intellectual property a little more than most. When Courtney Holmes submitted the “little tree” concept that would eventually become our December/January 2013 cover, we loved it right away: But we also thought there would be some sort of trademark held over the iconic
In a perfect world, Barry Buckley could count himself among the luckiest of fishermen. He works on water so clean and pure that some drink it straight from the lake teeming with whitefish, trout, pickerel, pike, burbot and inconnu that fill his nets. When he parks his big black Ford in front of the KFC
No one gets to where they want to go alone. That thought keeps coming back to me as I prepare for YK2HR – an annual 500 km bicycle ride from Yellowknife to Hay River. I am not an athlete by nature, but this journey is about much more than athletics. Just a few years ago,