Old Town Yellowknife

Some stuff we learned on todays tour of Yellowknife's Old Town:

Although European explorers and cartographers came to this area of the Northwest Territories as early as the 1700's, Yellowknife, as we know it today, didn't see any settlement until the 1930's when gold was discovered here. The first gold claims were staked in 1934 and, by 1938 Yellowknife was a boom town with hundreds of settlers and three gold mines in operation.  The name Yellowknife was coined by those early explorers for the copper tools the indigenous Dene people carried.

During the gold rush, the first inhabitants set up shop around "The Rock", a prominent mass of Precambrian rock that towers over the surrounding area. Along with the tents and shacks covering the area, a commercial strip comprised of restaurants, hotels, a billiard hall, barbers, bakeries, dance halls and trading posts sprung up. I suspect there was also likely a house of ill repute, but that didn't make it into the guide book.

Today, the ramshackle homes and tents have mostly all disappeared, but there remains a good number of the original buildings and businesses from the '30s.

We climbed up "The Rock" to start our tour, which offered us a 360 degree view of Yellowknife, Old and New. Unfortunately, visibility was low, so the view was less spectacular than it would be ona a clear day. Atop The Rock is a monument to the bush pilots without whom the city would not have grown so fast. Right next to The Rock is the Yellowknife Cultural Crossroads that features carving, sculptures and some very beautiful indigenous art. 

After that, we just meandered through the streets, browsed in a couple of art galleries and stumbled upon an outdoor exhibit of fossilized stromatolites, which, at 3 billion years old, are the oldest fossils on the planet. We wrapped up our tour with a stroll down Ragged Ass Road, so named by the unsuccessful and impecunious resident miners of the day.

Without a doubt, Yellowknife is an interesting city with a short, but quirky history to explore. It's a place filled with colourful characters, great successes and great failures, with a feel about it that one has taken a step back in time to a kinder, gentler world.

That being said, this is also one of the very few cities we've visited where we haven't sought out a realtors office to check out property prices. It's a nice place to visit, but.....Read more