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At the end of the road — no, really, the road just ends — is Yellowknife, a city of about 20,000 that overlooks one of the world’s largest and most beautiful lakes. It’s a fascinating place, a strange brew of government town, frontier city and a community where deep socioeconomic problems are visible and difficult to solve. It’s a complicated place, but everyone I met up there seemed to love it. I fell in love too.

Yellowknife and the surrounding area brought out the best in me, a try-anything sense of adventure that led to long (and frightfully ill-equipped for a bear encounter) hikes and a fly-in fishing trip where the pilot’s response to a question about satellite phones was, “You wanted a (expletive) wilderness adventure, here it is” before getting into his De Havilland Beaver and taking off, leaving us with a boat, a case of beer, and not much else.

Visitors should also aim to hit the Wildcat Cafe and the Gold Range, one of the country’s legendary bars. If you go to the NWT Brewing Co., chances are you’ll end up with a table of friends, old or new. If you travel in the summer, soak in the near-constant sun; in the winter, take the ice road to Dettah and get out on the bay at night. Whenever you go, explore the Woodyard and the other neighbourhoods off the beaten path. Sit on the community dock overlooking Back Bay and watch the float planes come and go.

If you’re going North, spend time with the people who live there. No community is perfect, but northern Canada’s problems are unique and not always easy to understand. Think about building a road: It takes years and tens of millions of dollars just to connect one community to the highway system. Every southerner, myself included, has much to learn about a place that hardly ever makes the national news.

I miss my friends in Yellowknife. I miss sitting on the rocks, looking out over Yellowknife Bay, under the midnight sun. But most of all I miss the sensation of discovering, as if for the first time, how big this country really is, and what it means to see it one kilometre at a time.

Canada’s north is enormous, so big you can’t drive to most of its communities. But you can get to many of them, and I am already hatching plans.

amacpherson@postmedia.com

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