The City
Visitors are steered carefully down the main street, Franklin Avenue (50th Ave), and the long hill from the New Town to quaint Old Town cabins such as the still-operating Wildcat Cafe , 3904 Wiley Rd (June-Sept daily; tel 873-8850), an atmospheric and endlessly busy little cafe opened in 1937. Elsewhere the old town is a shakedown of pitted and buckled roads (the result of permafrost) and a few quaintly battered buildings on the aptly named Ragged Ass Road and Willow Road. These are more or less the only remnants of the old times - though if you venture to the outskirts you'll find shanty settlements and scenes of poverty that take the lustre off the high-rises of the city centre. This lends some irony to one of the city's promotional tags - "Where Yesterday Rubs Shoulders with Tomorrow" - coined to underline the city's undeniably striking juxtaposition of the old and new. Just west of New Town's core lies the Prince of Wales Northern Heritage Centre (June to early Sept 10.30am-5.30pm; early Sept to June Tues to Fri 10.30am-5pm & Sat-Sun noon-5pm; free; tel 873-7551), three blocks from downtown on Frame Lake. Yellowknife's key sight, the modern centre peddles a more sanitized view of northern history and aboriginal culture than is on offer in parts of the Old Town, offering extensive displays of northern artefacts, Inuit carvings and persuasive dioramas of local wildlife and habitats. Shops around town also sell a variety of northern aboriginal crafts, still expensive, but cheaper than you'll find in southerly cities; most are beautiful products of a living culture - even if the culture is not at its healthiest in the city itself. The centre's South Gallery deals with displays on aboriginal people, the North Gallery with life in the north after the arrival of Europeans; there's also an Aviation Gallery, devoted to the planes and pilots who for years played (and play) a vital part in keeping the north alive. The centre also houses the NWT Archives, a collection of maps, books, photographs and documents devoted to the region. Just northwest of the centre, also on Frame Lake, stands the $25-million Northwest Territories Legislative Assembly , opened in 1993 to house the Territories' 24-strong Legislative Assembly. It's an impressive piece of architecture, much of it open to public view (June-Aug 3 tours daily Mon-Fri at 10.30am, 1.30pm & 3.30pm, Sun 1 tour at 1.30pm; Sept-May 1 tour daily Mon-Fri at 10.30am; free; tel 669-2200). Otherwise the only things to do close to town are walk the trails around Frame Lake and from the campsite on Long Lake . Or you can drive out on the Ingraham Trail , an 81-kilometre highway that was to be the start of a major NWT "Road to Resources" but which was abandoned in the 1960s. There are plenty of boat launches, picnic sites and campsites en route, as well as short walking trails like the Cameron River Falls (48km from Yellowknife) and lakeside beaches where the hardier of the city's population brave the water.
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