Faye and Maciek's Adventures in the frosty Canadian North
I don’t have any videos of my own (yet), but here are some outfitter videos of the South Nahanni River – the whole route from Moose Ponds down (I did the section after Virginia Falls).
For those of you with some money burning a hole in your pocket, here are the outfitted trip details. If that’s not epic enough for you, you can paddle all three major rivers in Nááts’ihch’oh.
Canada’s North is large and sparsely populated. There are about 44,000 people living in the Northwest Territories, spread over 33 communities – although roughly half the population lives in Yellowknife. This is over an area of 1.35 million km² (Yukon has 34k people over 0.5 million km²; Nunavut has 32k people over 2 million km²). Perhaps unsurprisingly, people south of 50°N don’t know much about what’s going on up here. Here’s a quick NWT geography lesson, in FAQ form.
Where are you moving to again? Toledo?
Tulita. Toledo is in Ohio.
Are there roads there?
There are roads within town, but you can’t get very far on them. There’s a winter road system that’s open from ~January to ~March every year. Here’s a map of the NWT road system: 
Are you north of the Arctic Circle?
Not quite. You can see on the map above that we’re still a bit south of the Arctic Circle.
Are there trees there?
Yes there are. The treeline goes quite far north around here, so we are solidly within boreal forest:
Is it flat there?
We live on the cusp between where it is pretty flat and where it starts to get mountainous. As you can see on the map above, to the east of us it is flat, and to the west are the Mackenzie Mountains. The park is located fully in the mountains:
Is the ground permafrost?
Yup:
Are there polar bears there?
No, there are not. This is where polar bears live:
We hope this answers some of your burning questions!
We’ve had a lot of people talk about wanting to come visit us. While we are really enjoying Tulita and would love to see you guys, I can’t in good conscience recommend visiting. This is mostly due to the prohibitive cost: it is $1,700 for the round-trip flight to Tulita from Yellowknife. You can get literally anywhere else in the world for that much money. Also, once you get here, it’s somewhat difficult to get from here to… well, anywhere. And there are limited tourist attractions in town. Here are some alternatives that we recommend:
Drive the ice roads
Sometime in the January to March window, you can drive here on the ice roads. This is a substantially cheaper option than flying, but also substantially more time consuming. It’s about an 8 hour drive to Tulita from Fort Simpson, and Google Maps can tell you how long it will take you to get there. You will also need an ice road suitable vehicle. On the plus side, driving the ice roads will be an adventure in and of itself, and there will be tons of aurora in the winter. The downsides include two hours of daylight per day.
Join us on an exciting northern adventure
If you’re going to spend the big bucks to get up here, we should go on an adventure. This would involve some advance planning (see the part about the costs to get out of here). I will post more about some of the exciting adventure opportunities up here as I learn about them. Most of them will have a pretty hefty price tag though.
Charter a flight
For groups, even very small groups, it may be cheaper to charter a flight than to take the regularly scheduled flights. I’m not sure about which companies to use or what the price would be, but this is definitely worth looking into.
If for whatever reason or by whatever means you do make it up here, there is a guest bed waiting for you.
