to around twenty thousand people (good god!). It sure as hell wasn’t New York City, but after two years on Baffin Island, it may as well have been.
Yellowknife hasn’t changed all that much in the years since I last called it home. The city still manages to elegantly blend its frontier history with its cosmopolitan present. Everywhere you look, old and new stand side by side and somehow manage to work together.
The city is perched atop and around the two primary geographic elements that define its boundaries: rocks and water. Frame Lake forms the unofficial centre of town, and many of the city’s most significant downtown buildings—City Hall, the Prince of Wales Northern Heritage Centre, and the Northwest Territories Legislative Assembly—share its waterfront views. Jackfish Lake, Niven Lake, Kam Lake, Range Lake, and Rat Lake all add to Yellowknife’s watery landscape.
Yellowknife’s Old Town strikes an eclectic pose from the air. Like many parts of the city, Old Town has evolved around the outcrops of Canadian Shield that pepper the northern landscape.
Yet for all the lakeside views the city may offer, it’s ultimately the gritty but smooth grey rock that defines the place. No matter where you are in the city, you’ll find random outcrops, often in the unlikeliest places. Intrepid developers and homesteaders have tried to tame the rock, blasting it into a more manageable shapes and sizes, but usually the rock prevails, forcing them to come up with unique designs so their domiciles will fit over and around the lichen-flecked stone.
Yellowknife’s pioneer roots lie in Old Town, which sits on a small, rocky peninsula jutting out into Yellowknife Bay, a protected arm of Great Slave Lake. For me, this is the city at its most interesting. Turn one way and there’s an old, weathered cabin that speaks to decades of hardworking people trying to scratch a living from a land that does not easily yield its secrets or riches. Turn the other to find a modern, funky home designed by a local architect and perched high on a rock, its spacious deck overlooking the lake. Visitors are always delighted by the frontier feel of Old Town’s Ragged Ass Road; at some point in the town’s colourful history, three local fellows enjoyed some refreshments at the Gold Range Hotel and decided to rename their street as such, erecting a hand-painted sign that very night. Soon afterwards, Ragged Ass Road was adopted as the street’s official moniker.
Aptly enough, New Town is the more modern part of Yellowknife; its settlement began after World War II, when Old Town became overcrowded. Since then, the city has continued to expand outward, and what was once New Town is more commonly regarded as downtown. This is the commercial hub of the city, and where you’ll find most of its larger buildings.
From New Town, Yellowknife sprawls. Maybe that’s why it sometimes feels more like suburbia than the subarctic city it is. Here you’ll find most of Yellowknife’s modern-day amenities, such as its pool, recreation facility, and even a Walmart. Most Buffalo employees live in that sprawling—and more affordable—part of town. The McBryans live in Old Town.
As I continued my reacquaintance with Yellowknife in earnest, I realized that despite any cosmetic changes that may have occurred since I left, the heart and soul of the place is the same. A few subdivisions weren’t here back then, and some of the buildings had changed shape and purpose, but the heart and soul of Yellowknife was the same. And at its core, Yellowknife is a hard-working, hard-playing, hard-living town. For Buffalo Airways, it’s the perfect place to call home.
Yellowknife is the largest and most cosmopolitan city in the Northwest Territories, covering an area of 105.2 square kilometres (40.6 square miles). Actress Margot Kidder, who played Lois Lane in the Superman movies, was born here in 1948.
Mikey McBryan understands well that few other places on Earth could support an airline like Buffalo. From Yellowknife, Buffalo can serve the entire Northwest Territories, all 1.17 million square kilometres (450,000 square miles) of it (not to mention the 2.1 million square kilometres, or 810,000 square miles, of neighbouring Nunavut). There may be only 42,000 people living in the Northwest Territories, but half of them are scattered over a land mass twice the size of Texas. And for many of those people, there’s only one way in or out: by air.
Here, on the Earth’s last frontier, mavericks are still free to set their own course and dictate their own fate. It’s a perfect milieu for someone like Buffalo Joe, who runs his business according to a simple mantra that rings true throughout northern Canada: get ’er done.
Since Joe founded Buffalo, the airline has made a name for itself by connecting people living in remote northern communities with the goods they need to live. Up here, the company serves as a lifeline to the North. Take Buffalo out of the picture, and precious food and supplies wouldn’t reach the many northern communities that are otherwise cut off from the rest of the world. Although Buffalo delivers freight throughout the year, its effect is most acutely felt during the long, dark winters.
There is no way to characterize a day in the life of Buffalo as “typical.” I watched Mikey arrange flights to carry heavy equipment to remote mining camps, deliver massive diesel generators to Inuit communities that rely on them for electricity, ensure a group of bureaucrats would make an early-morning meeting in Whitehorse, and move a single man and his dog to a distant town to start a new life. In other words, if it needs to be moved, Buffalo can move it—and likely already has.
The backbone of Buffalo’s winter freight operation is its so-called “valley run,” a trip that sees the Curtiss-Wright C-46 fly the 1,700-kilometre (1,056-mile) round trip up and down the Mackenzie River from Yellowknife to four communities that can be accessed only by air nine months of the year: Déline, Tulita, Norman Wells, and Fort Good Hope. Several times each week, the C-46 starts its engines and soars over the valley. And if I was impressed by the DC-3 when I first laid eyes and hands upon her beautifully dimpled frame, I had no idea what lay in store for me when the C-46 was moved into the hangar. It is nothing short of a massive, yawning beast.
The Curtiss-Wright C-46 Commando made a splash when it was introduced to the world at the 1939 New York World’s Fair. It was heralded as the latest and greatest in high-altitude pressurized aircraft, ready for the enjoyment of the flying public.
The plane was not formally released until two years later, just as World War II was taking over the global stage. The designers of the C-46 may have envisioned it as a glamorous passenger airplane, but fate turned it into a bare-knuckled military aircraft. Instead of carrying passengers to the far corners of the globe, the C-46 played host to war supplies, paratroopers, ammunition, artillery, and wounded soldiers.
A total of 1,430 C-46s were built, a far cry from the more than 10,000 DC-3s that dominated the skies during the war. But the C-46 offered benefits that the DC-3 couldn’t even touch. Known by a variety of nicknames to the flyboys who manned her controls in both the European and Pacific theatres (she was called the “Killer Whale,” the “Curtiss Calamity,” the “T-Cat,” or “Dumbo,” after the flying elephant she resembles), the Commando could fly at high altitude and carry massive payloads, two of its most important traits.
The twin-engine C-46 was helped by the addition of its power plants, the newly invented 18-cylinder Pratt & Whitney R-2800, each of which delivered 2,000 horsepower. They were so powerful that they could keep a lightly loaded C-46 in the air even if one engine failed, an attractive characteristic at a time when bullets were routinely screaming through the skies. When both engines were firing, the plane could carry as much as fifteen thousand pounds of cargo.
Though the 46 made its presence known throughout the war, it was perhaps best known for its role in the China-Burma-India
