Category: Living up North

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.

Tulita is serviced by Canada Post – we have a little post office that’s open for a few hours every weekday. Due to the remote location, however, we are considered an “Air Stage Office“, which is a Post Office to which all mail must be airlifted for more than six months of every year as a viable surface transportation alternative is not available. This means that shipping rates can be astronomically expensive. You can play around with the Canada Post rate calculator here and see for yourself (our postal code is X0E 0K0).

Companies vary in how willing they are to ship to remote northern locations. MEC honours its “free shipping on orders of $50 or more anywhere in Canada”, which is great for us. Some companies are accustomed to shipping up North and have well-established policies (like this company that I recently learned of). Many companies have never encountered Air Stage Offices before and therefore offer reasonable shipping rates until they realize how much money they’re losing (or they try to FedEx the package, which then gets stuck in Edmonton or Yellowknife). Other companies will charge prohibitive amounts to ship up North. Amazon used to ship for cheap, but changed their policy last year.

But, fun fact: lettermail through Canada Post is the same rate to anywhere in the country. So if you ever want to send us a normal-sized letter, it will only require a regular stamp. You can reach us here: PO Box 157, Tulita NT, X0E 0K0