Amazing Yellowknife
The name of this city made me stop to read and then made me want to share. Yellowknife in the Canadian Northwest Territories is a city which only has 19,000 residents and was a city which was booming in the 1930s during the gold rush days. Today it is quite a charming city and well worth taking a visit to.
Gold was discovered in Yellowknife in the 1800s. When it started to get crowded for miners in the Klondike they were glad to hear that there was another place to dig for gold. Since the surrounding area was mostly forested the first settlements were made in outcroppings along a lakeside hill. As the city began to develop trading posts were set up such as Weaver & Devore, bistros, bars, and cafes all along the shores of the Great Slave Lake.
Today visiting Yellowknife you can still see the original downtown now called Old Town and a great deal of the sites of the golden ages have been kept alive through heritage protection programs. One of the must sees is the Bush Pilot Monument which stands on top of a rock. It was dedicated to all of the bush pilots who would fly out of and into the city because there were no other options. Once atop of the rock you can see panoramic views of the Old Town and the surrounding waterways, aqua planes and rainbow-colored floating houses. .
There are many interesting shops and galleries. The Gallery of the Midnight Sun displays Inuit art and contemporary paintings offering some of the very best of local talent. You can find most everything here even $20,000 polar bear skin rugs and simpler items such as souvenir street signs “Ragged Ass Road’ and ”Lois Lane” (which is an actual street that was named after Margot Kidder who is a Yellowknifer and played Lois Lane in Superman).
You can get a sense of what life was like here during the time of the gold miners at Bullock’s Bistro. They have good food but it is centered on the catch of the day so if it happens to be whitefish that’s what you’ll get either stewed, deep-fried, or pan-fried along with a salad and French fries.