Ok, so moving on from High Level to Northwest Territories, onward and upward! To the North! The roughly two hour drive to the Alberta / NWT border was fairly uneventful, save for the massive flying beasts smashing into my windshield. The biggest flies, bees, and have I mentioned dragonflies the size of baby dragons?!! Poor things splatting on my windshield and grill! I’ve always kind of liked dragonflies, I just can’t believe how gigantic these ones were, wow! I wouldn’t want to get dive bombed by one. One landing on me would probably be similar to the size of a small bird perched on my shoulder.
Speaking of birds… Ravens. On the sides of the highway picking at whatever roadkill or whatnot they managed to find. I LOVE ravens. And these ones like the bugs, are HUGE… Bigger and fatter than my head!!! They’re AWESOME. I wish I could have got a picture or two of them, to show their size or even just because. Maybe I’ll find a decent shot in my dashcam footage later. I’m going to go through all the video footage when I’m back at home, as the files I’m guessing are going to be too large to transfer over cruddy wifi (from dashcam to phone) in a timely manner. I did not experiment with this beforehand! And I don’t have the means to plug the dashcam’s Micro SD card into my computer right now so… Later!
Below is one dashcam still shot of me approaching the NWT border. Nice big fancy sign it has, and that’s what it looks like, the scenery around it. The 60th Parallel, woo hoo!!
Had to do a selfie at the sign since there was absolutely no one around!! But I should mention when I first parked, I was TERRIFIED to get out of my truck! The flies and bees were maddening, I could even hear them buzzing outside. Then I remembered Frodo outside Shelob’s lair and Gollum saying, “Go in, or go back.” And Frodo, “I can’t go back.” So I put on my hoodie even though it was probably 30 degrees out, then I doused bug spray on every millimetre of exposed skin I had, and I ran for it. And then I noticed something… While the bugs were flying around everywhere around me, they actually LEFT ME ALONE… Maybe it was the bug spray or maybe they just looked worse than they were but nope I don’t think so, must have been the bug spray.
The side of the the tourist information centre:
Bison or buffalo? I think they might be the same thing, although I thought buffalos have that fluffy tuft of fur on their head while bison don’t, but what do I know… This is a neat monument outside the tourist centre with some fancy bathrooms in the background.
Inside the building was all kinds of information on anywhere you would want to go in NWT. I had one burning question due to all the conflicting information I had previously seen online. At the junction of where Highway 1 (Mackenzie Highway) meets Highway 7 (Liard Trail) is a little place called Checkpoint. Google wouldn’t even find it for me but I read about it in people’s very old blog posts and some of the more recent NWT government website information. I planned to travel through there from Fort Providence to Fort Liard (just under 500 km distance and mostly gravel highway) and was attempting to confirm if there or is not a gas station there??? Some info says there is and some says not. Most of the articles I read said there is a Bed & Breakfast but no fuel, and one of the government articles says there are gas pumps, including the board in the visitor centre here. After all I had read online I was still pretty skeptical about which information is accurate, but figured the visitor centre would be more up to date, wouldn’t it?
There was someone working in the building to greet visitors and answer questions. When I asked about Checkpoint, she had not heard of it until I explained where it was. At that point it wouldn’t have mattered whether she said yes or no to gas there, I would have remained just as skeptical, ha. I also asked if she knew how long the drive would be (on a good day) from the junction to Fort Liard, as Google was suggesting 8 hours for a 223 km stint which seemed off, but who knows with a gravel highway that long? She said it’s only about a 3 hour drive. We shall find out!
There was free coffee inside the centre too, and it was good, score!
