Month: January 2017

You can use Aeroplan points to travel up North! Not all the way to Tulita of course, but First Air is an Aeroplan partner and flies to destinations such as Norman Wells, Inuvik, and Fort Simpson. Which means that you can use 25,000 points to get between anywhere in Canada or the continental US and Norman Wells (flight rewards chart here), and then pay only $233 (each way) to do the short hop to Tulita.

The key detail is that you can’t book the flight on Aeroplan’s website. I tried doing this a while back and concluded that points-based flights were impossible, but I recently learned that you have to call Aeroplan to make the booking. There are limited seats available. I was chatting with a guy from Inuvik who flies on points to visit family in Newfoundland, and he said that he usually books 10 months in advance. I’m not sure if that’s standard for all the northern routes, but it’s definitely worth investigating.

If you wanted to redirect all this money you just saved on flights into making your trip up North more awesome, one option might be to fly up to Norman Wells on points, then do a canoe trip down the Keele River (which brings you from near the park back to Tulita), and then you can either fly or paddle back to Norman Wells and depart from there.

Read our earlier posts about Northern Airlines and Paddling Trips in the NWT.

As mentioned in an earlier post, Tulita is accessible for a few months of the year via the winter road system:

The 15-year historical average opening dates for the road to Tulita is January 1 to March 28. This season, it opened in late December, but it’s still not open to large trucks. The road mostly follows the alongside the river, but there are several places where it goes right over the river, which requires a minimum ice thickness (25″ for large trucks).

Once the ice is thick enough for large trucks, there will be an influx of supplies making their way into town.

Of course, this system is not foolproof. Last year, a fuel tanker went through the ice on the road to Deline:

So hopefully we won’t see a repeat of that this year.

I went to Norman Wells for a meeting this past week, and we drove there. It took 2.5 hours to cover the 90km distance (I’ve heard that it can be done as fast as 1.5 hours). Overall, it is not a smooth ride. The day we left had heavy winds, leaving a large amount of snow drift on the road. The route is bumpy, with regular descents to creek crossings. The bridges over the creeks are permanent, which would make an all-season road to Norman Wells reasonably feasible, if it weren’t for the Bear River crossing. The estimated cost to build that bridge would be about $80 million. An all-season road up the Mackenzie has been discussed for decades, but is unlikely any time soon.