DRAWN BY SPECTACULAR SKIES
The Northwest Territories claims the best aurora borealis viewing in the world
The smartphone alarm ripped me from a peaceful slumber — 2 a.m. I woke my brother, pulled on some clothes, picked up the camera and stepped bleary-eyed into the subarctic dead of night on the deck outside our room at Blachford Lake Lodge.
We could hear murmured voices of a few other guests who had also ventured outside, but otherwise it was the silence of the Canadian frontier. We were the only humans on the lake, far from the nearest settlement in the Northwest Territories.
A few stars were showing through the cloud cover but we were not sacrificing sleep simply for astronomy.
And then my brother pointed directly overhead. “There they are!” These were no clouds. They were shimmering white bands, with tinges of green and purple: the aurora borealis.
The Northwest Territories claims to have the best aurora viewing in the world. That was what drew us to the north in late summer — that and the prospect of staying in the same lodge that famously hosted Prince William and his new bride Kate, not to mention catching some trophy-sized fish.
Everyone starts N.W.T. visits in Yellowknife, where the flight connections are frequent and convenient.
It is a young city, founded in the 1930s when miners started digging up gold nearby.
The rustic Wildcat Cafe in the Old Town counts as a heritage building, even though it only dates from the Depression era. We shared a bench with a local family as I dined on the signature bison burger and heard stories of real and mythical creatures from Great Slave Lake.
The real ones were massive lake trout and pike, with photographic evidence to match. The mythical was Ol’ Slavey, their version of the Loch Ness Monster — a primordial leviathan that supposedly surfaces occasionally from the depths of North America’s deepest lake.
To get to Blachford Lake Lodge, we hopped aboard a Twin Otter float plane for a 20-minute flight to the southwest, soaring just a couple of hundred metres above a land of endless lakes and few signs of humanity.
In July of 2011, the lodge enjoyed a brief moment of international fame when the Duke and Duchess of Cambridge visited for a few hours during their Canadian tour. With a bank of British paparazzi recording every move, the royal couple canoed out to Eagle Island, a kilometre off shore, for a romantic lunch. With absolutely no one watching, and a minimum of romance my brother and I did the same.
We did not have quite the multicourse meal that Will and Kate did, but a lodge staffer cooked a delicious shore lunch of gourmet burgers over an open camp fire, served with homemade focaccia buns.
We were joined by Don Cadieux, a local First Nations guide who spent many years setting up camps for mining companies and who built the first cabin on the lake in 1974 — which still houses visitors to Blachford Lake Lodge.
“I just liked the colour of the lake,” he told us. “Reminded me of Lake Louise.”
The purity of the experience is a departure for those of us accustomed to the south’s crowded cottage country. The lodge and its cabins are the only buildings. You can dip your cup directly in the lake and drink the water.
On our visit there were only about a dozen guests. All were Canadian — unusual because most of the lodge’s visitors are foreigners, many from Asia.
While the fishing is good, the food tasty and the wilderness hikes spectacular, tourists are overwhelmingly drawn to N.W.T. by the Northern Lights.
“The aurora is by far the largest attraction,” said Greg Robertson, a veteran outfitter. He took us out on Yellowknife Bay on one of his Bluefish Services boats.
Robertson does a good business running day trips from Yellowknife for the more casual anglers who come to N.W.T. mainly to see the Northern Lights. He brought us to a series of sheltered bays where we pulled in pike at a regular rate, two of which he expertly cleaned and cooked for us on a rocky shore with a panoramic view of the big lake.
The Great Slave Lake fishing trips draw a cosmopolitan crowd. When we went out with Carlos Gonzales of Yellowknife Outdoor Adventures, our fellow fishermen included a prominent Canadian diplomat and two men who had travelled all the way from Lyon, France.
As he prepared a lunch of Great Slave Lake whitefish over a campfire, Gonzales proclaimed to the visitors from the French centre of gastronomy: “this restaurant has SEVEN Michelin stars!”