Yellowknife

Sister cities

• Reno
• Yakutsk
• Fairbanks

History

The area around the community is the historic and traditional home of the Yellowknives Dene, the land's First Nations residents. Dettah was the first formal settlement in the area, which was founded by the Yellowknives in the 1930s and located on a point of land on the east side of Yellowknife Bay. The name Dettah means Burnt Point and refers to a traditional fishing camp that the Dene used for hundreds of years. The current municipal area of Yellowknife was first occupied by prospectors who ventured into the region in the mid-1930s. A Klondike-bound prospector, E.A. Blakeney, made the first discovery of gold in the Yellowknife Bay area in 1898. The discovery was viewed as unimportant in those days because of the Klondike Gold Rush and because Great Slave Lake was too far away to attract attention. In the late 1920s, aircraft were first used to explore Canada's Arctic regions. Samples of uranium and silver were uncovered at Great Bear Lake in the early 1930s, and prospectors began fanning out to find additional metals. In 1933 two prospectors, Herb Dixon and Johnny Baker, canoed down the Yellowknife River from Great Bear Lake to survey for possible mineral deposits. They found gold samples at Quyta Lake, about up the Yellowknife River, and some additional samples at Homer Lake. The following year, Johnny Baker returned as part of a larger crew to develop the previous gold finds and search for more. Gold was found on the east side of Yellowknife Bay in 1934 and the short-lived Burwash Mine was developed. When government geologists uncovered gold in more favourable geology on the west side of Yellowknife Bay in the fall of 1935, a small staking rush occurred. From 1935 to 1937, one prospector and trapper named Winslow C. Ranney staked in the area between David Lake…

Geography

Yellowknife is on the Canadian Shield, which was scoured down to rock during the last ice age. Trees such as spruce and birch are abundant in the area, as are smaller bushes, but there are also many areas of relatively bare rock with lichen. Yellowknife's high latitude causes a large variation between day and night. Daylight hours range from five hours of daylight in December to 20 hours in June. Civil Twilight lasts all night from late May to mid-July. Yellowknife has a subarctic climate (Köppen: Dfc, Trewartha Ecld). Although winter is predominantly polar, rapid heat waves emerge at the summit of summer due to the immense path south. The city averages less than of precipitation annually, as it lies in the rain shadow of mountain ranges to the west. In an occasional year, the first fall frost does not come until October. Most of the limited precipitation falls between June and September, with April being the driest month of the year and August having the most rainfall. Snow that falls in winter accumulates on the ground until the spring thaw. Yellowknife experiences very cold winters and mild to warm summers. The average temperature in January is around and in July. The lowest temperature ever recorded in Yellowknife was on 31 January 1947, and the highest was on 2 August 2021. The area has elevated levels of arsenic due to the region's geology and past mining operations. The bedrock contains arsenopyrite, a naturally occurring mineral that contains arsenic, iron, and sulfur. Gold mining in the 20th century released large amounts of arsenic into the environment. The roasting process used to extract gold from arsenopyrite ores created arsenic trioxide as a byproduct, which was often released directly into the environment. The Giant Mine, which operated…

Most-observed species

• Common Raven

  Corvus corax Linnaeus, 1758 · Aves
  2,539
• Black-billed Magpie

  Pica hudsonia (Sabine, 1823) · Aves
  1,707
• Mallard

  Anas platyrhynchos Linnaeus, 1758 · Aves
  1,323
• Ring-billed Gull

  Larus delawarensis Ord, 1815 · Aves
  1,237
• Yellow-rumped Warbler

  Setophaga coronata (Linnaeus, 1766) · Aves
  1,198
• American Wigeon

  Mareca americana (J.F.Gmelin, 1789) · Aves
  1,186
• American herring gull, Smithsonian Gull

  Larus smithsonianus Coues, 1862 · Aves
  1,116
• Bonaparte's Gull

  Chroicocephalus philadelphia (Ord, 1815) · Aves
  1,099