Category: Around Town

It is rare for someone to accidentally find themselves in Tulita. There are plenty of out-of-town visitors for work, meetings, or other assorted reasons, but given the difficulties in getting here, it is usually a very intentional decision.

I saw this post on the community facebook group today:

“Weird thing happened last nite when working. As i was driving the back by pass, I seen two people walking in the dark, carrying big backpacks. At a distance, I was wondering what it was. Looks like moose walking into town lol. Pick them up and they hitch hike from wrigley yesterday. And they’re on there way to Inuvik. And wanted to know if there was a road from good hope to inuvik? I said nope. And they look sad … ohh they said. By the way, there from Belgium. Arrive in Canada 4 months ago. Hitch hike all the way up here since then.”

As it turns out, they are clowns who are doing some kind of hitchhiking-around-the-world as an interactive art project or something.

These clowns are not Tulita’s first inadvertent eccentric French visitors, however. In fact, they’re not even the first in the past year. This past August, a Quebec man was (willingly) blindfolded and dropped by helicopter somewhere in the Yukon wilderness, with a packraft and minimal other supplies. He found his way onto the Keele River, so Tulita was the first point of civilization that he encountered.

Here are some news articles about his expedition:

• http://www.rcinet.ca/en/2016/06/16/quebec-adventurer-to-be-dropped-into-yukon-wilderness-blindfolded/
• http://www.ctvnews.ca/canada/this-canadian-adventurer-is-about-to-be-helicoptered-into-the-yukon-blindfolded-1.2976457
• http://www.cbc.ca/news/canada/north/yukon-adventurer-dion-1.3727358

The North certainly attracts interesting people.

Another quirky thing about the North is the street names. They do actually have names, but most people don’t know them. If you’re trying to give someone an address here, the standard thing to do is to refer to the previous occupant (“the house that so-and-so used to live in”), or a physical description such as “the blue house next to the cemetery just down the road from Ron’s house”.

Mail delivery is to PO boxes, so the street addresses mean nothing here. For example, our street address is Unit 13 – 359 Mackenzie Drive (as far as I know, there are no units 1-12), while my coworker just down the street has some more sensible address like 12 Mackenzie Drive. These numbers aren’t written on the houses or anything, so I don’t know why we even have them.

Most towns up north have a Sesame Street. People just think that it’s a funny thing to name a street. It’s often the “party street” in town.

There’s also a poor understanding of what a crescent is. For example, Sesame Street is actually a crescent, while Cranberry Crescent is not.