N.W.T. Trip – 2005 – Enroute to Yellowknife

From Fort Providence, it is approx. 350 km to Yellowknife.  The highway, which is paved, is called the Frontier Trail (we’re back to ‘trails’).  Right at the start is a sign warning you to use extreme caution because of the potential for Buffalo to be on the road.

and it didn’t take long to find them!  The vegetation is kept well back from the highway, on both sides, which gives a grazing area and room for the Buffalo to roam..

That is a pretty young Buffalo calf, one of many….

 about a third of the way along the ‘trail’ we reached this day use area at Chan Lake.  It was a beautiful day and we’d made good time, so decided to rest for a while and threw the canoe in the water…

First Ernie and Dave tried their hand at some fishing…with not much success….then Ernie and I headed out, across the lake, just to see what we could see…

there, in the distance…were a pair of Sandhill Cranes!

We crept as close as we dared, without upsetting them too much….something I am always very mindful of not doing…besides these are BIG birds…I wouldn’t want one coming after me!

 

If you look very carefully, towards the bottom on the left hand side…you will see a fledgling….I have no idea what the correct term is for a baby crane…

I do know that after spotting this baby and snapping one quick photo, we veered away and headed back over to the day use area.

Here is a close up of a Blue Flax which is a wild flower found in a lot of places…including this far north.

Another hundred kilometres or so and we reached another large day use area at North Arm Territorial Park

we are now back on the shores of Great Slave Lake..looking eastward in the direction of Yellowknife, another hundred kilometres away.

this view was looking sort of south west, pretty much in the direction we had come from.

there were a few of these Ring-billed Gulls here, but what thrilled me the most were these tiny little…

Arctic Primrose!  That is a dime there for size comparison.  I’ve since seen them in Northern B.C. and the Yukon….as any of you who have followed our Yukon Trip adventures will now…but this was the first time I’d ever seen them.  They were growing right at the edge of the lake where the bank was eroding from the waves, and the plants were getting constantly splashed from the wave action.

Back on the road, as the day wore on…and then got longer as the last 50 kilometres or so of the road were under re-construction and travel was extremely slow and the road extremely rough….it took so long that this was the only time on the entire trip that we had to pull out our reserve supply of gasoline…we might have made it…but we would have been running on fumes!