History Made Every Day™

In 1953, Canadian officials decided to build a brand-new town inside the Arctic Circle, in the Northwest Territories near the Mackenzie River and the Beaufort Sea. The Circle already had a capital city of sorts: Aklavik, a tiny, aging trading post for the Hudson’s Bay Company that was squeezed between a low-lying branch of the river and a waterlogged plain splotched with muskeg (a type of bog), flood-prone lakes and channels, and an astonishing amount of mud. But more and more people were moving north—to work for the government; to prospect for oil, gas and gold; or just to find a little peace and quiet—and there was no way they could all fit in Aklavik. So, surveyors went looking for a place that was everything Aklavik wasn’t: flat and dry, on relatively high ground with plenty of room to expand. Here, officials promised, they would build a modern, model city from scratch.

Soon, they found the perfect spot. The site, which Canadian surveyors called East Three and everyone else called New Aklavik, had everything the engineers hoped it would: On the east side of the delta about 120 kilometers south of the ocean, New Aklavik was flat enough for a big airport, near (but not under) plenty of clean water, and chock-full of construction materials like lumber and gravel. Also, since it was sandwiched between Inuit territories to the north and Dene territories to the south, the site was practically empty—another plus.

Still, no one imagined that building a whole new town from scratch would be easy. For example, engineers had to figure out how to anchor buildings on the permafrost and run utility lines from place to place above the ground. (Today, the town’s water and sewer lines run through long sheds called utilidors.) But the next summer, upon the arrival of several million board-feet of lumber from Alberta, they began to build. Soon the town had an airport, a wharf, storage warehouses and rows of barracks and bars for its construction workers. By 1958, when the town got an official new name—Inuvik, or “place of man in the local Inuvialuktun dialect—it had 21 streets and had begun to build schools, a hospital, a police station, a power plant and a sewage-treatment plant.

According to its charter, Inuvik was established to bring “new opportunity to the people of the western Arctic,” and it did. The Mounties built their northern headquarters in the town; Canadian intelligence agents established a secret office where they could listen in on Russian radio broadcasts and scan the skies for Soviet missiles; scientists built laboratories; and native people and Anglo migrants alike began to move to Inuvik, 1,200 miles north of the nearest big city, by the hundreds. In 1971, Inuvik became the first—and it’s still the only—town north of the Arctic Circle.

Inuvik had another growth spurt in the 1970s, when speculators discovered oil and natural gas under the nearby Beaufort Sea. Meanwhile, workers wrapped up construction on the 460-mile-long Dempster Highway from Dawson City, in the Yukon, to Inuvik. The highway made it possible, for the first time, for people to get to Inuvik by car. (Before the Dempster, travelers to the Arctic had to take a boat, a prop plane or a dogsled.) The Dempster is no ordinary highway—it’s a two-lane road, paved with dirt and crushed shale, on top of a deep gravel bed that floats atop the unstable permafrost—but, to the people of Inuvik, a road was a road. The town’s fortunes rose and fell over the next few decades, but other kinds of technologies have had the same effect as the highway: As radios, telephones, television and the Internet arrived in Inuvik, they’ve drawn the town closer and closer to the rest of Canada and the world.

Today, about 3,500 people live in Inuvik. The town’s population is overwhelmingly young and hardy—in a place where the temperature can range from 60 degrees below zero to 90 degrees above, and where the sun does not rise at all for one long winter month, a certain amount of fortitude is required—and remains a fairly even mix of Inuit, Dene Indian and Anglo. The town has a state-of-the-art hospital and a prison, an apartment building with an elevator, and even a tiny suburb! Thanks to government investment, the region’s rich natural resources, the tourism industry and the determination of its residents, the Canadian Arctic is thriving. Even the original Aklavik, the town everyone thought would wash into the river more than a half-century ago, still stands on the edge of the Mackenzie.

Watch video about life in Inuvik!