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I've been following the daily temperatures in places like Whitehorse, Yellowknife, Churchill, Winnipeg: surreal numbers for days. https://twitter.com/ctvnews/status/1359041893175341056
Whitehorse has been somewhat better than Yellowknife but now the situation is reversing & abating somewhat. Yellowknife is a fascinating & strange place—although I have only visited there via hours spent touring the Great Slave Lake region on Google Earth.
The far north of Canada has a vital network of roads that only exist in the winter. These are the ice roads. Lakes are everywhere.
EVERY. WHERE.
& in winter ppl get around on snowmobiles as well as cars. But the ice roads are an eerie spine-tingling marvel.
EVERY. WHERE.
& in winter ppl get around on snowmobiles as well as cars. But the ice roads are an eerie spine-tingling marvel.
The Great Slave Lake, straight north of Alberta, is huge—Just short of 62° latitude, it will not surprise you to hear that this giant puddle freezes pretty solid in the winter. There's a network of ice roads in the inlet anchored by Yellowknife at one corner & Detah at the other.
Here's some Google Earth views of this Tolkienesque landscape:
Detah is a largely indigenous community. In the heart of winter the main ice road goes from Detah to Yellowknife. It's a wide-scraped shiny flatness across a featureless plane until you get close to shore & then it isn't quite so unnerving.
I'm sure you have to forget that you're driving across a lake. I know I would have to. But some of these folks have houseboats that they live in year round. Half the year on seemingly solid ground.
Yellowknife has a peninsula out into the water & a community of houseboats nearby. The photo sphere feature of Google Earth is the way to properly visit these houseboats in winter. Houseboats that have suddenly acquired yards.
I've spent hours snooping around this fabulously strange place. Imagine driving from Detah to Yellowknife at night with nothing but the northern lights to light up the road for you.
The road from Detah to Yellowknife is heavily traveled in deep winter. The ice road even has signs all its length. They are probably necessary to keep folks oriented. It must be disorienting at night trying to keep clear what is land what is air.
But if you drive it during the day, this is what it looks like as you come in for your landing at Yellowknife: impossible to know quite when you leave the lake behind & are once again on actual ground.
The surrounding countryside looks empty of ppl until you zoom in; then you can see that there are small communities all over the landscape: mostly indigenous.
The Google Earth car doesn't get to these places easily, but ppl on foot & ppl traveling by snowmobile have provided photo spheres & short tours. The ppl on foot walk around the village with the specialized camera equipment stuck on a pole above their head.
I have no idea what strange geological processes made Great Slave Lake so odd-looking–especially the east arm of it. It looks like Godzilla scraped his tail across the landscape as he went rampaging farther eastward. In the middle of it all is Lutselk'e.
Lutselk'e is another tiny indigenous community of ~300 ppl. You can get there by snowmobile in winter as these ppl have done who came to take photos.
