88 • DECEMBER 2021
with a population of roughly 20,000.
Until 1960, the whole region was
inaccessible by road, and until about
ten years ago, Yellowknife was not a
major tourist destination. Its winter
visitors were mainly miners, trappers,
and a few travellers seeking a
hideaway. By 2019 there were almost
six times as many visitors as residents.
A large proportion of visitor
spending here is related to the aurora
borealis. Viewing it is often promoted
as a kind of primeval encounter
with nature. Just as people yearn
to see megafauna such as lions
and elephants, we seem to have a
collective desire for the cosmic view,
for those things large enough to push
us down into our place, close to the
skin of the planet.
After two nights at the Explorer
Hotel, I joined the CAS group for a
trip to Blachford Lake Lodge, about
60 miles away. Small bush planes
are a common way to get around
in this vast territory of more than
100 square miles of fresh water.
There were about a dozen people
from the United States, England,
and Australia going up in the Air
Tindi turboprop. We crammed in
among luggage and supplies, and the
unpressurised craft slid over a quilt of
spindly trees, frozen lakes, and satiny
mounds of snow. This is part of the
immense Canadian Shield, where the
continental crust was swept clean by
ice, and the oldest rock in the world
was found. The boreal forest of black
spruce scribbled across the white
in all directions, a fraction of a vast
biome stretching around the globe.
Except for a few snowmobile tracks
just outside Yellowknife, there were
no signs of humanity at all.
We landed on the lake; a smooth,
fast slide between small islands. The
lodge, at the top of a hill, was to be
our living room for several days. Our
cabins were down the long slope,
along interlacing trails, their paths
compressed by snowmobiles. The
surrounding snow was deep and fine;
I learned to beware of the trail’s edge
when I stepped off it and into powder
up to my waist.
Three of us from Oregon shared the
cabin farthest from the lodge, near
the shore. The low trees leaned every
which way in the permafrost, small
and dark and ancient, and the lake
stretched out of sight around layered
hills under virgin blue sky.O
ur time at Blachford Lake
was marked by shared meals
and conviviality. We gathered
every evening in the lodge. One
night, Elizabeth MacDonald, aCHASING THE NORTHERN LIGHTS
TO INDIGENOUS
COMMUNITIES, THE
LIGHTS ARE WORTHY
OF RESPECT