Dettah

This past week I went to a conference in Dettah, a small community about a 40-minute drive away from Yellowknife on dirt roads.  In the winter, there is an ice road that connects Yellowknife and Dettah over the Great Slave Lake, and it takes the travel time down to 10-15 minutes.  These are some pictures I took during my time in Dettah.

Since I took these pictures last week, we've had a bit of a warm snap in Yellowknife.  It got up to 5C this weekend, and the snow turned to slush.  The chains we put on our car don't do so well when the ice melts.

Images from Yellowknife in October

Mural on a building

Houseboats in Great Slave Lake

A shot of downtown Yellowknife

Float-planes and houseboats

Mural from a building

Radio Star

Today I had an interview with Radio Taiga, a French radio station serving Yellowknife.  It wasn't exactly an interview, but more of a promotion for our Small Business Week workshops which is coming up next week.

Small Business Week is one of the many projects I'm currently working on.  I've been busy organizing presenters, arranging food, confirming locations, and creating publications for the local newspapers.

One event which recently happened which I also helped out in was a job fair (journée carrière) for francophone students in Yellowknife and Hay River.  We arranged for 9 students to fly in from Hay River, which is on the South Side of the Great Slave Lake.  The day went by great; in the afternoon I took a group of 12 to 17-year-olds around town to visit different employers.  We went to visit the GeoScience Office of the NWT, Diavik (a mining company specializing in diamonds and operated by Rio Tinto), and an Engineering firm downtown.

Winter in Yellowknife has begun!  It is October 15, and last night we got about 10cm of snow.  People keep warning us that this is just the beginning, and to not be surprised at -20 weather in November.  We've been hearing stories about how kids at Halloween still go trick-or-treating, just with full snowsuits underneath their costumes!  We don't have any plans yet for Halloween, but are open to ideas...   

New Apartment

Exciting news this week: we found a place!  It's in a great location downtown, and about a 2-minute walk from where I work.  We will be moving in today and tomorrow, and bringing all our boxes.

We saw the Northern Lights for the first time since we were here last Saturday, and they were amazing!  It lit up the whole sky in green and blue.  We didn't take the picture to the left, but it was taken in Yellowknife, and that's pretty much what it looked like.

I still have to figure out what setting to put my camera on to catch the Northern Lights.  All my photos turned out black!