The Ice Pilots. Michael Vlessides

      THE KNIFE

      Taking Joe’s words to heart, I made it a point not to sit on my ass, particularly when I was in his presence. Even when I was on my own, I relished the opportunity to explore Yellowknife.

      Set on the northern shore of Great Slave Lake some 400 kilometres (250 miles) south of the Arctic Circle, Yellowknife is as colourful as it is cosmopolitan. For every government bureaucrat walking its streets in a suit and tie, there’s a miner, prospector, drunk, or raconteur (sometimes all wrapped up in the same body) regaling some newcomer with derring-do stories of gold hunted, fortunes made, loves lost, and blizzards survived. Aboriginals have called the lands around Yellowknife home for thousands of years (the city gets its name from the local Yellowknives Dene peoples, who made tools from copper deposits in the area), but the city’s modern era began in the 1930s, when gold mining became its primary commercial focus.

      The discovery of gold in Yellowknife is widely attributed to a prospector named B.A. Blakeney, who was on his way to the Klondike gold rush around Dawson City, Yukon, in the late 1890s. With the frenzy surrounding the riches being unearthed in the Klondike, people paid little or no attention to Blakeney’s Yellowknife discovery. Little wonder: since 1896, when Skookum Jim made his serendipitous discovery of gold along Rabbit (Bonanza) Creek, more than 385,000 kilograms (850,000 pounds) of gold have been taken from the Klondike. There may have been gold around Yellowknife, but nobody seemed to care.

      Flying changed the face of prospecting—and of Yellowknife—forever when, in the late 1920s, aircraft were engaged in the search for precious metals across the globe. When uranium and silver were unearthed at Great Bear Lake, about 400 kilometres (250 miles) northwest of Yellowknife, the hunt began in earnest.

      In 1933, prospectors Herb Dixon and Johnny Baker found gold in two small lakes near Yellowknife. One year later, gold was found on the east side of Yellowknife Bay, leading to the construction of the Burwash Mine. Though Burwash did not have a particularly long life, the establishment of the mine helped put Yellowknife on the prospecting map. The long-lived Con Mine soon followed. Yellowknife became a full-blown boomtown. Southerners flocked there for both work and adventure.

      By 1942, Yellowknife had five gold mines in production. After the lull induced by World War II, the Giant Mine uncovered a significant gold deposit on the north end of town, a discovery that led to yet another staking rush in the area. Before long, Yellowknife was the economic hub of the Northwest Territories; it was named capital in 1967, the centenary of Canadian confederation.

      Prospectors braved the ravages of weather and loneliness for a chance at the gold the North was rumoured to hold. Here prospector Curtis Smith searches for the motherlode in the bush around Prairie Creek, Northwest Territories, 1952.

      By the time the 1980s rolled around, Yellowknife’s precious-metals era had begun drawing to a close (the last of the gold mines shut its doors in 2004), only to be replaced by an even more desirable product. In 1991, diamonds were discovered a few hundred kilometres north of the city, and the second boom was on. The Ekati Diamond Mine—one of the most prolific on Earth—began operation in 1998. Today, Yellowknife serves as a hub for industry, transportation, communications, education, health, tourism, commerce, and government activity in the territory.

      Coincidentally enough, my first experience of Yellowknife occurred the same year that diamonds were discovered at Lac de Gras, though profit was the farthest thing from my mind. Eager to carve out my own simple niche in the world, I wanted nothing more than the twenty-dollar weekly stipend Frontiers Foundation afforded me, as long as the organization continued to provide room and board. So after a three-day drive across some of the most remote and unpopulated regions of Canada, I glanced up from the passenger seat of a mid-1970s Chevy Blazer and saw something I never thought I’d see this close to the Arctic Circle: a skyline.

      Dozens of small communities pepper the lands that stretch across the 60th parallel. Settled and built almost exclusively by the Canadian government, most of these hamlets boast cookie-cutter homes and a few roads, surrounded by thousands of square kilometres of wilderness.

      Any urban dweller worth his salt will tell you that Yellowknife’s profile is a far cry from New York’s. But for me, I’ll never forget the moment I laid eyes upon the buildings of the Northwest Territories’ capital rising from the frozen subarctic landscape. Three days later I was on a flight bound for Inuvik, itself a four-hour drive from Fort McPherson. As our pickup rumbled down the gravel bed of the Dempster Highway toward our destination, my path became clear: with six months of construction experience under my belt and full of the piss and vinegar of young adulthood, I would meet the North head-on and throw all my energy into my volunteer work. And if that meant pounding nails into the side of a house as outside temperatures dipped low enough to freeze my eyelids shut, so be it.

      Yet as fate so often has it, the Arctic had other plans for me.

      “You’re going to meet your wife up there,” one of my Park Avenue colleagues had said to me as I packed up