A 12 000 Kilometre Trip To Yellowknife, NWT

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Forlorn lakes dotted the landscape.

BISON SIGHTING!

My first ever bison sighting. Pretty amazing. I was becoming afraid that I wouldn't see any, but it was true that you're pretty much guaranteed to see one on this route.

All the bison I saw travelled in herds, usually with a large, shaggy alpha male and a few calves and many sizes of bison in between.

At a pullout.

At every pullout, I was swarmed by either deer flies or black flies. At this stop, it was deer flies. Supposedly they give painful bites, and will even bite repeatedly, but I was never bitten by one.

My second bison herd.

And a third herd of bison. By now, it was getting boring... Just kidding.

Watch out for... you know what!

 

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Made it!

And I rendezvous with Katherine, who is flying in from Nunavut this day.

About 1800 kms from Calgary to Yellowknife in two days. 6947 kms for the whole trip so far.

Next day Katherine give me a tour of her boring workplace, Trinity Helicopters. Yawn. She maintains helicopters or something.

The red arrow sign seems to have been applied by Captain obvious.

Katherine lays out her spiffy new tool roll. She told me she still has many, many tools on her wish list. A woman's tool shopping is never done!

Wednesday was Wing Night at The Black Night pub, so we went there with Jack and Roberto.

The Black Knight is a Yellowknife institution. Sadly, there were no fist fights or patrons getting booted out.

And Katherine's company is advertised on the coasters! How cool!

So I ordered two dozen "Wicked Wings", which is a level of hotness not even mentioned on the menu (that sounds like a pick-up line). The cook basically just made a special batch of wings using whatever fatal seasonings he had on hand, including cayenne paste.

I must say I was impressed with them. They were perhaps the hottest wings I'd ever had, and after half a dozen, I was sweating! Roberto tried one of them, and had to gulp down a beer and two mugs of water to calm the burning. I ended up finishing all of them except for this one!

 

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Downtown Yellowknife. There is an odd sheen of newness here, since none of the buildings are very old.

The skies over Yellowknife are constantly abuzz with small aircraft.

Colourful houseboats in Yellowknife Bay. Check out the capsizing one.

On the weekend, Katherine and I went for a walk up the road from where she lives towards Old Town, which is where Yellowknife was originally settled. This boardwalk nature trail was on the way.

Old Yellowknife is a visual feast of bright colours and rickety and charming structures. Even the sheds and greenhouses are interesting.

We walked down Ragged *** Road, which was once the home to poor miners. It's now lined with very expensive homes. People kept stealing the street sign, so they replaced it with this one.

Signs of Yellowknife's mining heritage. But today, they dig for diamonds, not gold.

This is how people park their vehicles in Yellowknife.

Katherine beside a 1945 600 hp Pratt & Whitney radial plane engine (and no, I didn't know that offhand).

 

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Katherine and I went for a ride out along the Ingraham Trail, which is a road leading east out of town towards recreational country.

The winding road was dotted with beautiful lakes. Katherine borrowed the helmet from a cruiser bike riding friend from work.

Katherine makes a panoramic shot with her new digital camera.

This is Giant Mine, just outside of town.

Giant Mine produced 220 000 kgs. of gold, and closed in 2004.

I had to pose with this sign, as it's in the opening of the reality TV show "Ice Pilots", which is about Yellowknife's Buffalo Airways. In that opening, the temperature depicted is a lot lower than it was this day.

After a lovely stay with Katherine, it was time to head back to Toronto. On the way out of town, I stopped by Katherine's work one last time.

She was busy working on this...

I'm guessing she was adjusting the what-cha-ma-callit and shimming the thing-a-ma-jig. I would have helped, but I needed to get going.

Bye Katherine!

 

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Beautiful pics! Bet it was a blast!

Thanks, Scott. Here's the weird thing... Although I had a pretty amazing adventure, I don't think I was ever in the right head space for an epic adventure. I was feeling restless and unsettled and vaguely unsatisfied most of the time. I attribute it to being out of work and not knowing what direction my life should be going at the time. Maybe if I could have managed to be a little more zen about the shortcomings of my life at the time, I could have really enjoyed myself. But I was feeling oddly low. Even depressed.

I think when we travel, we see amazing things, but no matter how exotic they are, they are filtered through our personal perceptions. My perception was clouded with feelings of lack of self-worth. I saw beautiful, incredible things, but I was feeling small and lost in the world.

Happily, I'm feeling much better about myself these days. I would love a do-over of the trip. I'd probably have a lot more fun.

Having said all that, Nelson B.C. was a blast. Something about that hippie town really gave me the munchies... for life!

 

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The highway out of Yellowknife.

I'm feeling kind of melancholy at this point. It felt sad leaving Katherine, and I was worried about Katherine and her job, as it was up in the air at this point.

More bison!

I should have had the Bison Mixed Grill for dinner. You can order that at some Yellowknife restaurants.

This was cool to see. A number of the bison would "wallow". The bison would lie on its side or back and grind itself in the dirt. No one knows for sure why they do this, but with the number of deer flies around, my guess is that they're giving themselves a good scratch.

Oh crap... Dark clouds moving in (as per usual).

Behind me is this... BAD!

In front of me is this... GOOD!

This explains why roads up here are so long and straight... The land is pancake flat for the most part.

My goal at this point is just to get home quickly, and I make it from Yellowknife to the Alberta border in seven hours.

I love the asymmetrical design of power poles here.

Yet another stop to fiddle with my rain gear.

I'll spend the evening in North Battleford, Saskatchewan, which lies right on the Trans Canada.

 

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Here's one of the many resident kitties of the Battlefords Inn. The entire reception desk counter was covered in kitty. I had to go to four motels in order to find one that was reasonably priced ($75 in this case). Usually, you can use your intuition to figure out which motel is cheapest. Using intuition, crappiest=cheapest, most of the time, but not always.

Another on-and-off rainy riding day.

I managed to fit a few interesting back roads into my route this day, but buckets of rain made things somewhat oppressive.

 

[Bert-Aus]

Man what an awesome trip!

Thankyou for sharing and reminding me that the world needs more discovering

That is so friendly that Canada translates its accent for everone

J/K

 

[Biker-Phil]

Beautiful pics! What an awesome trip! The furtherest north I've been is Edmonton, AB. I hope your rear survived. I would love to do a long trip, but I would need to replace the stock seat. I can't imagine going that long with my current seat and windshield.

 

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At this point, a massive, dark storm front sweeps in from the north. I think I can out ride it, but I am very violently hit by a hurricane force cross wind which threatens to literally blow me off the highway. I try leaning into the wind, but it's so gusty and so powerful that I realize it's actually dangerous, especially since I'm sharing the highway with big rigs.

I consult my GPS and find the tiny town of Carberry, Maitoba, just a few kilometres off the Trans Canada. Light rain begins to fall as I check into the Carberry Motor Inn. Then the skies open up just as I park my bike in front of my motel room.

The word for this is type of rainfall is biblical. I watch through the window of my motel room as the flood waters rise rapidly and sweep my bike away in a river of destruction... Just kidding. It was raining pretty hard.

Sweet deal! At $44.80, including tax and all the one-ply toilet paper you can use, this is the best (cheapest) deal of the trip. Luckily there's nowhere good to hang yourself from, so I make it through the night.

Main street Carberry.

I was apparently still on some kind of hot wings kick, so I got an Original 16 draft ($2 each, I kid you not), and a basket of "Third Degree" wings in the hotel bar. These were very good, spicy wings.

 

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I was blessed with almost no rain the next day.

I stop for the evening in Nipigon, Ontario at this surprisingly expensive motel.

There was a microwave in my room, so I had this for breakfast the next day, along with a Coffee Crisp.

Morning of the last day of my trip.

The moon is still clearly visible at 6 am.

I ride through Ontario like a man on a mission, stopping only to take on and let go of liquids (gas, water, pee). I need to cover 1300 km today, and don't want to do much of that after dark.

I stop somewhere in Muskoka to take this picture (I'm a sucker for beautiful skies), twelve hours into the day's ride.

And I'm back in Toronto just after 8 pm, so I avoided any night driving.

This day I was on the road for fourteen hours, and only stopped for a total of seventy-two minutes, which is pretty good for a motorcycle. I've covered over 12 000 kms. on my odyssey and gone through four provinces and one territory and a set of tires.

I give Allie a huge hug when I come through the door to our condo. I have decided two things for sure... One, I really, really need to get some waterproof motorcycle boots. And two, I never want to be apart from Allie for this long again.


THE END

 

[Superzoom]

Man what an awesome trip!

Thankyou for sharing and reminding me that the world needs more discovering

That is so friendly that Canada translates its accent for everone

J/K

Thanks, Bert! I really love travelling in my home country of Canada. I've been to almost every province and territory, and every one is beautiful in its own way.

The sign comment is hilarious! I of course have NO Canadian accent!

 

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Beautiful pics! What an awesome trip! The furtherest north I've been is Edmonton, AB. I hope your rear survived. I would love to do a long trip, but I would need to replace the stock seat. I can't imagine going that long with my current seat and windshield.

Thanks, Phil!

I'm impressed you've been as far north as Edmonton. I assume you didn't do it on a bike.

My rear BARELY survived. I put some extra foam into my stock seat, which helps maybe 50%. I also have an Airhawk seat cushion, which helps another 30%, although it has issues of its own. So I've now got a seat which is relatively comfortable for up to three or four hours. But AFTER that time, it's all pain, all the time! I really need a touring seat for the way I use my bike.

I'm using an MRA Variotouring screen right now, and so far, it's rocking compared to any other option I've tried. It's pretty noisy, but the turbulence is drastically reduced. So pretty good compromise.

 

[Nastybutler]

That last set of pics doesn't show up. Gives a Flickr "unavailable" message instead. All the others show up fine.

 

[Biker-Phil]

Thanks, Phil!

I'm impressed you've been as far north as Edmonton. I assume you didn't do it on a bike.

My rear BARELY survived. I put some extra foam into my stock seat, which helps maybe 50%. I also have an Airhawk seat cushion, which helps another 30%, although it has issues of its own. So I've now got a seat which is relatively comfortable for up to three or four hours. But AFTER that time, it's all pain, all the time! I really need a touring seat for the way I use my bike.

I'm using an MRA Variotouring screen right now, and so far, it's rocking compared to any other option I've tried. It's pretty noisy, but the turbulence is drastically reduced. So pretty good compromise.

No... didn't do it on a bike. But I did drag the family on two road trips (in a car) to Canada. The first time we went straight north from Dallas, TX to Winnipeg and then to Saskatoon and finally to Calgary. We stopped at each point along the way and visited my wife's family (She's Canadian). We went to Edmonton for a day with my father-in-law for a change of scenery. He basically had to go to Edmonton for work. I can't really say I liked Edmonton very much :-(. We did go to Banff and that was absolutely awesome. There were moments on some of those twisty mountain roads that I just yearned to be on a motorcycle.

The second time we drove to Canada we went through the southwest and headed north through California, Oregon, and Washington before entering BC and hitting our final destination in Kelowna. Of course, we stopped at many points along the way. My wife's parents basically retired and left Calgary for greener pastures. Kelowna, BC is absolutely beautiful. Again, there were many moments when I thought "If only I could be on a motorcycle on this road!" Western Canada is absolutely beautiful. I love visiting and taking in the scenery and the fresh air. Oh... and my wife doesn't have a Canadian accent either.

 

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That last set of pics doesn't show up. Gives a Flickr "unavailable" message instead. All the others show up fine.

Try again... I was playing with permissions settings on Flickr.

 

[MichaelInVenice]

Try again... I was playing with permissions settings on Flickr.

Nope. Still can't see them.

 

[Nastybutler]

Me neither.

Sent from my Nexus 7 using Tapatalk HD

 

[Spiff666]

Me neither.

Same here. And I do so much want to see these photos!

 

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Some problem with Flickr. Don't have time now to sort it out, but will fix it soon!