Urban Legends in The Northwest Territories Canada

Explore these mysterious sites and you’ll agree: It’s weird at the top of the world

You can’t make this stuff up. During winters that plunge to 60-below, and summers where a day lasts for months, the world gets downright bizarre. Frozen volcanoes bulge from the tundra, erupting in super-slow motion. Lakes vanish, draining through a hole in the permafrost. Underground fires spit sparks in the Arctic night. And rivers rage with waves so big they're a perpetual tsunami.

Up here, you’ll see things you could never imagine. Welcome to the land of mystery – the place that is stranger than fiction.

Bear Rock Sinkhole

Between the towns of Tulita and Norman Wells, in the great roadless core of the Northwest Territories, dozens of sinkholes pit the forest – odd, disfiguring pockmarks in the face of Mother Earth. The most famous is this one, northwest of Bear Rock, with plunging sides and deep aquamarine waters. Scientists say it was formed by the collapse of a vast subterranean cave.

Scimitar Canyon

Nahanni National Park Reserve is slashed by all sorts of gaping gorges, but the most dramatic is this dangerous, dark, sheer-sided, unexplored incision – legendary Scimitar Canyon. It’s 20 kilometers long, very narrow and mysteriously deep. It was formed eons ago when the Ram River slit open the Ram Plateau, carving the most fearsome chasm you’ll ever peer into.

The Smoking Hills

On the shores of Cape Bathurst in the Western Arctic, the bleak Smoking Hills have smoldered for centuries, sending sulphuric soot billowing over the Northwest Passage. A place of fire and brimstone, the area is underlain with oil shales that spontaneously ignite when exposed to air. Just to the east is the community of Paulatuk – the name of which means, appropriately, “place of coal.”

Lotus Flower Tower

Revered as "one of the most aesthetically beautiful rock faces in the world," Lotus Flower Tower is a sheer, breathtaking 2,200-foot cliff – one of the world's tallest, most severe walls of stone. The signature face in the Cirque of the Unclimables, this skyscraping escarpment attracts world-class alpinists. It's not for the faint of heart: It takes iron guts to keep your cool when there's a half-mile of thin air between you and terra firma.

The Bottomless Lake

Beneath Great Slave Lake’s whitecaps lies a deep secret – a mysterious, watery abyss unrivaled in North America. At a point not far offshore from the community of Łutselk’e, the lake-bottom falls away two-thirds of a kilometer – the deepest point in North America. It’s unclear how far down it goes. The official figure is 614 meters – 2,014 feet. But according to researchers who recently conducted bathymetric soundings, there are trenches that reach even farther down – by 30 meters, or maybe more. 

The Ice Roads

Each winter the length of the highway in the Northwest Territories doubles, as a network of ice roads are built atop frozen lakes, rivers and even the Arctic Ocean. Most of the routes are underlain by ice four feet thick – strong enough to hold up a jumbo jet. But every so often the highway gives way, threatening to send unlucky vehicles to their watery doom. 

Rabbitkettle Tufa Mound

Like a bizarre lunar stalagmite, the largest tufa mound in Canada rises near the shores of the Rabbitkettle River in Nahanni National Park. Thirty meters tall and 10,000 years old, the mound is formed by thermal springs that burble from the volcanic ground, leaching calcium carbonate that hardens into a crust of tufa. Take off your shoes and follow park officials on a barefoot hike to the delicate summit.

The Rapids of the Drowned

The name's no joke. Where the vast Slave River crashes into the Precambrian Shield just shy of Fort Smith, it explodes into a maelstrom of house-high waves, log-eating whirlpools, and galloping currents. The features have names that range from the sublime to the ridiculous – like Rollercoaster, Rockem Sockem, Land of A Thousand Holes, and the one pictured above, legendary Molly's Nipple.

The Bottom of Con Mine

Plunging 6,240 feet into the Earth's crust, the bottom of Yellowknife's defunct Con Mine is one of the deepest man-made points on Earth. Despite Arctic conditions up at the surface, miners at the base had to contend with sweltering heat. Indeed, at nearly two kilometers down, the mine is so warm that the city of Yellowknife has considered tapping its geothermal potential, pumping hot water from the depths to warm local buildings.

The Fairy Meadows

Described as a magical oasis in a cathedral of peaks, or as the eye of a mountainous hurricane, the legendary Fairy Meadow is the Shangri-La of Nahanni National Park Reserve. A plush pasture, luxuriant with delicate alpine wildflowers, it is ringed by the impossibly steep Cirque of the Unclimbables – an amphitheater of sheer peaks that beckon the best rock-climbers in the world.

The Lake That Fell Off a Cliff

Now you see it ... now you don't. A few years ago, residents of Fort McPherson were warned of the impending "catastrophic drainage" of this 1.5-hectare lake, about 20 kilometers west of the community. Soon after, in a massive, muddy, five-story-high waterfall, the lake all but emptied – the victim of thawing permafrost, which undermined its embankment. No one was injured in the resulting flash-flood, but 30,000 cubic meters of water engulfed the downstream drainage.

Ibyuk Pingo

The most popular attraction in Tuktoyaktuk is this great green mound, swelling high above the Arctic coast. As tall as a 15-story the building, it’s called Ibyuk Pingo – the most massive pingo in Canada. Engorged with ice, it is slowly expanding, like a Coke can bulging ominously in the freezer. Eventually, like that can, it will split its top and burst, then sag back into the tundra.

The Peak with No Name

Trivia question: What’s the name of the NWT’s tallest mountain? If you said “I don’t know,” then you’re correct. The territory’s highest peak – a 2,773-metre summit in the Ragged Range, just east of the Yukon border – doesn’t have a name. Informally, the icy rampart is sometimes called Mt. Nirvana, or Summit 2773, or Summit 9027 (its height in feet), or simply Unnamed Peak. Yet the Geographical Names Board of Canada doesn’t accept these names. The official name must come from the Nahanni Butte Dene Band, in whose traditional territory the peak lies. Thus far, the band has not supplied a name.

The Salt Plains

Just off Highway 5 near Fort Smith is the famous Salt Plains, where visitors can trek across a vast sparkling-white field, formed by saline water burbling from deep inside the Earth. The crystalline landscape supports unique species of salt-tolerant plants and attracts animals (wolves, bison, bears and more) that use the area as a salt-lick. People, too, have long gathered salt here – it was harvested commercially during the fur-trade days, and it's tempting to pinch a bit today.

The World’s Biggest Beaver Dam

Beavers are famously busy – but in Wood Buffalo National Park, they’ve been working overtime. In the remote corner of the vast park lies the planet’s biggest beaver dam – the work of generations of beavers that have been gnawing away at the forest since at least the 1970s. Nearly a kilometer long, it impounds a decent-sized swamp. The dam is so big that it can be seen from space – indeed, researchers discovered while poring over satellite data.