Where to Stay in Yellowknife, Northwest Territories

What is Yellowknife known for?

Yellowknife is the way most visitors reach the Northwest Territories at all, and what pulls them is the northern sky, the water of Great Slave Lake, and a way of living the territory kept rather than staged. The Prince of Wales Northern Heritage Centre holds the territorial collection indoors. The Wildcat Cafe and the Log School House stand on the same short list of named buildings.

What are the main landmarks in Yellowknife?

The named sites run to buildings rather than monuments. Prince of Wales Northern Heritage Centre keeps the territorial collection, and the list beside it holds The Wildcat Cafe, the Log School House, the Bank of Toronto building, the Hudson's Bay Warehouse and Weaver & Devore Trading. St. Patrick Co-Cathedral is the church on it.

Fireweed Studio, the Yellowknife Post Office and Back Bay Cemetery close the list, along with the Canadian Pacific Airlines floatbase on the water.

What is the history of Yellowknife?

Yellowknife starts on the record in 1936, and what survives from near that date is commercial rather than ceremonial: the Hudson's Bay Warehouse, the Bank of Toronto building, Weaver & Devore Trading, and the floatbase entered under the name of Canadian Pacific Airlines. The Log School House sits on the same list. So does The Wildcat Cafe.

The territory's business sits here. Yellowknife is the capital of the Northwest Territories, its largest community, and the only place in the territory that holds city status, and the Prince of Wales Northern Heritage Centre keeps the territorial collection in it. St. Patrick Co-Cathedral stands on the same register.

Back Bay Cemetery, Fireweed Studio and the Yellowknife Post Office fill out the rest of what the record names, which for a capital is a short list. Distance shaped the list. Great Slave Lake and the Yellowknife River fixed the site, about 400 kilometres south of the Arctic Circle, and the floatbase recorded to Canadian Pacific Airlines is the plainest sign of how a place this far north was reached at all.

Buildings that would pass unnoticed further south carry names on the list here: a bank, a warehouse, a trading store and a schoolhouse.

Where is Yellowknife?

Great Slave Lake sets the terms. Yellowknife stands on the North Arm of that lake, on the western side of Yellowknife Bay and near the outlet of the Yellowknife River, so water frames the built ground on more than one side. The Arctic Circle lies about 400 kilometres north.

Back Bay Cemetery is filed on that shoreline, and beyond the city the Northwest Territories hold no other place with city status.

What is the climate of Yellowknife?

Great Slave Lake does the moderating, and not much of it. Water that big holds its cold well into the warm months and gives it back in autumn, so the bay freezes late by the standards of the ground around it and opens late as well. Yellowknife Bay ices over.

What the long nights buy visitors is the Northern Lights, and the summer answers with a sun that barely commits to setting over the North Arm.

How do you get to Yellowknife?

Great Slave Lake was the first runway. Yellowknife works as the main entry point for visitors to the Northwest Territories, so a trip into the territory almost always opens and closes in this city rather than in one of its smaller communities. The Canadian Pacific Airlines floatbase records the era when the lake did that work.

Nothing else in the Northwest Territories holds city status, so the routes gather here.