Yellowknife--for a day or a lifetime!

So, we arrived in Yellowknife and found a great campground. Camping on the tundra can be challenging, but these folks up here have it figured out! We had a great little tent platform. Right as we arrived, a flock of seagulls tried to fly off with our dinner--and we were worried about bears! Seagulls are sort of like goats--they will eat anything. We did not try the bear spray on the seagulls. Our dinner was saved!

I neglected to mention that on our way up the road to Yellowknife, we stopped by a little burn area to see what might be going on in the mushroom world. This year I didn't find a single morel in Idaho. I just had to travel 2500 miles up to the Northwest Territories to find them! Not a bad camping dinner...









In the morning, it was time for motorcycle maintenance. I do not recommend doing any work on your motorcycle in a Wal-Mart parking lot, because everyone within a 400 yard radius will wander by to tell a tale or offer advice, and you may end up staying a fair bit of the day there!! Fortunately, after tightening up one of the bolts on the head, Mark's oil leak problem was solved. The chain continued to be an issue, and we will be picking up a new one and a sprocket in Fairbanks. The wind was really blowing during the oil changing process, making it a little messy. We changed to knobby tires, too, because we'd be hitting the dirt soon.



We explored the town a bit. Yellowknife sort of came to be when gold was discovered here in the 1930's. Recently, diamonds have been found and that is the big deal now. There is an old part of town here that has a little artists' community and a bush pilots' memorial. At the visitors' center, this fish was on the wall. Is was a trout caught in the late 1960's that weighed a whopping 74 1/2 pounds! They estimated that it was 120 years old.

Overall, Yellowknife is a great place--lots of fishing, some art, good restaurants, really nice people. I'd like to come back in the wintertime to see the Northern Lights. Mark would like to come back to be an ice road trucker.