Hay River wasn’t in my original plan of attack, as loose of a plan as it was. I was going to head straight to Fort Providence from the border, as that is where I wanted to visit and camp for the night. There was actually a geocache at the AB / NWT border and I had been reluctant to go look for it since it’s location pointed to the other side of the highway from where the visitor centre was which would have meant crossing the highway (not like there was any traffic!) and then wandering off into the ditch and remote woodland, alone. It seemed odd to me that the cache wouldn’t be on the same side as the visitor centre, unless it was and my GPS or the cache GPS was off? But the other side of the highway appeared a bit ominous to an adventurer in training such as myself. I could have mysteriously disappeared real easy! And bears!! This is bear country. What if, what if!! So I guess you could say I wimped out.
After I drove away from the border I remembered that I need to find at least one geocache in NWT to earn the Northwest Territories souvenir in my geocaching profile, GAAAAH! Why didn’t I think to ask the visitor centre employee about it? UGH. I had looked in my app previously and didn’t recall seeing any caches in Fort Providence, and I wasn’t sure but some of the ones around Fort Liard looked a bit too remote for my liking. I wasn’t planning on going to Yellowknife or Fort Simpson, just wanted to do my little loop from the AB border to the BC border and move on. There was one displayed at the BC / NWT border which I could go for, but what if I couldn’t get that one either? The other border is the end of the line for NWT! Alright, Hay River here I come!! Well, and it’s only a half hour one way out of my route and it was still early, and maybe I could go far enough into the town to catch a glimpse of Great Slave Lake, and it’s not like my schedule is set in stone, so why the heck not?
So Hay River is a small town, according to Google a population of around 3,500 as of 2017. I went into the town centre looking for souvenirs, knickknacks, trinkets, whatever. I don’t know why I didn’t take pictures of any of the buildings other than the tourist centre. While the tourist centre (below) looks pretty nice and somewhat modern, everything else looks real old school, like a real… old… town… And small, small compared to what I’m used to seeing, even for small towns.
I went into a pharmacy that had a TON of apparel that said Hay River on it, along with the typical souvenir items. A lot of the smaller items were generic Canada, everything said Canada rather than Hay River or even straight up Northwest Territories! Except fridge magnets. There were tons of Hay River fridge magnets!! Maybe they don’t have stainless steel fridges up there, I don’t know. Sigh. They had those generic NWT license plates, the polar bear ones that you see people with with the 000’s instead of a legit plate number. I kinda wanted to get one, but didn’t. I did find a patch that says NWT on it, so I got that.
Went to a Home Hardware, the visitor centre, and a gas station, NOTHIN’. I asked about souvenirs at the gas station and the guy said that souvenirs were a great idea and he didn’t know why they don’t have them and that he’ll look into that. Sigh!
Saw a nicely painted garbage can, somehow I thought to take a picture of it!
So then I went hunting for geocaches, the first two were a bust because of the remoteness of them when I got to the point where I had to park and then disappear into the woods, although one took me up near a campground that was along Great Slave Lake so I caught a glimpse of the lake, WIN!
The third took me to a memorial park which has a beautiful view of Hay River, the actual Hay River, not just the town. It has picnic tables and fire pits as well, super nice to hang out at, EXCEPT THE BUGS. Actually they didn’t seem as bad, maybe my bug spray was still keeping them away.
I still had to walk into the woods for this geocache, but the trail here was a bit more open in that the highway ran along one side of it with a smaller road running parallel. And the trees weren’t as heavily populating the area which was a good thing since I had to walk through them to find the cache! I still kept my hoodie on which came in handy, even though it was very warm.
Found the cache under some wood and left two travel bugs in it that I had been packing around for awhile:
I GOT MY NORTHWEST TERRITORIES GEOCACHING SOUVENIR!!!! Funny how that relieves the STRESS of having to find a cache before leaving NWT 😛
And that was Hay River, NWT. Onward to Fort Providence!
