For the Inuvialuit of Paulatuk, Tuktut Nogait National Park is their backyard/Parks Canada

The challenge for Stephanie Yuill was how to celebrate the 25th birthday of a remote park in the Northwest Territories that sees a handful of visitors a year at the best of times and is closed for the second year in a row because of the COVID-19 pandemic.

The solution has been to have fun celebrating Tuktut Nogait National Park in the nearby community of Paulatuk/Paulatuuq — population 300 — and then work on spreading the word across Canada and beyond about the park most people have never heard of.

“Yeah, we have this pretty amazing park and you have to visit it to truly experience,” explains Yuill, Tuktut Nogait’s site manager. “But there are all kinds of ways to virtually experience the park.”

She has been doing media interviews and virtual school trips to share how Tuktut Nogait was created June 5, 1996 with the signing of an establishment agreement between Parks Canada, the Government of the Northwest Territories and four Inuvialuit organizations on behalf of the Inuvialuit people to protect the Bluenose-West caribou herd.

The park gets its name from the Inuvialuktun word for “young caribou.” It’s 170 kilometres (105 miles) north of the Arctic Circle. At 18,890 square kilometres (about 7,300 square miles), it’s bigger than Northern Ireland, Jamaica, Fiji or Kuwait. To get there, you must fly to the capital city of Yellowknife, then to town of Inuvik and then to hamlet of Paulatuk before hiking or boating the rest of the way (at least a day’s journey).

Tuktut Nogait was created to protect caribou/Parks Canada

Tuktut Nogait has recorded just 69 official visitors since 2010 — averaging between two and 21 — but that number doesn’t include the locals. “It’s their backyard,” says Paulatuk-based Yuill. “It’s theirs to use to hunt and fish. We have no need to track them.”

Birthday celebrations launched in May with a 25-day scavenger hunt run via the Paulatuk Community Events and Daily News Facebook group, and 25 fun facts about the number 25. Radio bingo was a hit, with 102 people out of a population of nearly 300 taking part.

“There are 25 squares on a bingo card,” points out Yuill.

A birthday dinner with traditional food and live music included 25 people who helped negotiate and sign the establishment agreement, or who have worked at the park and its annual culture camp.

June 5 — which is also Inuvialuit Day — was full of games, mascots, Parks Canada’s iconic red chairs pulled out for photos and a time capsule with postcard messages that will be opened in 2046. Yuill will head into the park this summer to figure out how, factoring in permafrost, to best leave the time capsule.

Now Parks Canada is working with Tusaayaksat Magazine — which celebrates Inuvialuit culture, heritage and language — on a double issue devoted to Tuktut Nogait and Paulatuk. Come fall and winter, the birthday year celebrations will likely wrap up with a music night and a tea for elders.

La Roncière Falls is one of the park's iconic spots/Parks Canada

Parks Canada has two year-round staff assigned to Tuktut Nogait and is getting one summer student. The staff are also working on the second management plan for the park. The last one was released in 2007.

Here are some of the facts they dug up about Tuktut Nogait.

• The park boasts more than 300 known archeological sites, some 1,000 years old. You’ll see tent rings, hunting blinds and food caches the Copper Inuit used to store caribou meat.
• The sun rises on Tuktut Nogait on May 18 and doesn’t set until July 24. In the winter, the sun sets on November 28 and doesn’t rise until January 13.
• The mean annual temperature is minus 11C (12F) with a summer mean of 5C (41F) and a winter mean of minus 26C (minus 14F).
• The Bluenose-West caribou that calve in the park are well adapted for northern living. Their guard hairs are similar to a drinking straw — the hollow hairs trap air inside and act as insulation for the caribou's body heat. These hollow hairs help them to be buoyant in the water making caribou excellent swimmers.
• The 300-kilometre long Hornaday River flows through the park, starting at Blue Nose East Lake in Nunavut and emptying into the Amundsen Gulf and the Arctic Ocean.
• The Hornaday River was name after William Temple Hornaday, a zoologist, taxidermist, author and pioneer in the early wildlife conservation movement in the United States.
• Paulatuk’s name means place of coal after the smoking hills northeast of the community. The cliffs are underlain with oil shales that spontaneously ignite when exposed to air. The community is also known as Southwind Capital of the Arctic after the prevailing southerly winds that roll off the barren lands. The mean wind speed is estimated at 5.84 meters per second (that’s 21 kilometres/hour or 13 miles/hour).
• Like in the Italian alps, the dominant rock in Tuktut Nogait is dolomite.

The Hornaday River sometimes has low water years/Parks Canada

The park may be treeless but there is a lot going on in the flora and fauna department.

• The gyrfalcon nests on the rocky ledges of the Brock and Hornaday River canyons that wind through the park. It’s the largest falcon species and the territorial bird.
• The fierce wolverine lives here. Its scientific name, Gulo gulo, literally means glutton and these omnivores are insatiable. “Plant, animal, alive, dead. They’ll eat it all. Even teeth and bones,” says Parks Canada.
• Muskox and caribou are the only hooved mammals in the Arctic to survive the end of the Pleistocene Era which came to a close about 10,000 years ago.
• Muskox have two layers of fur. The outer layer (called “guard hairs”) and the inner layer of shorter hairs called “qiviut” that fall out for the summer season. Spun qiviut is eight times warmer than a sheep’s wool and is one of the warmest natural fibers in the world.
• Of the 92 species of butterflies in the Northwest Territories, the Arctic White, Common Branded Skipper and Silvery Blue all call the park home.
• You can see at least one of the territory’s 22 bumble bee species — the red-tailed bumble bee — here. The white-tailed, winter and brown-tailed bumble bees also hover in areas near the park.
• The white eight-petal mountain-aven can be found throughout the park. This member of the rose family is the territorial emblem of the Northwest Territories.
• From late June until the end of July the tundra is carpeted with showy wildflowers, such as arctic lupine, moss campion, purple saxifrage, Siberian phlox, lapland roseberry, oxytropis, cinquefoil, hedysarum and river beauties.

Brock Canyon shows thousands of years of erosion/Parks Canada

Flying above the park, you will likely see ice polygons. Parks Canada says these honeycomb patterns are created by an annual crack, freeze and thaw cycle in the active layer of the soils above the permafrost. 

The Arctic is indeed a desert. The mean annual precipitation ranges from 200 to 300 millimetres (20 to 30 centimetres, or eight to 11 inches). That's more than five stacked golf tees but less than a bowling pin, according to Parks Canada.

At 23-metres (75-feet) high, La Roncière Falls is more than half the height of 56-metre (184-feet) Niagara Falls. But, as Parks Canada puts it, “you don't have to share it with 13 million people.”

You can have La Roncière falls all to yourself/Parks Canada

Yuill — who is originally from Ottawa and has lived in Paulatuk since September 2020 — loves the seasonality and rhythm of life in the north. Several weeks ago, thousands of geese arrived. Before that it was the caribou, and locals were careful not to hunt the pregnant cows. Right now, it’s egg season and there’s plenty of fishing.

There aren’t any plans at the moment to make the park more accessible to visitors, and Parks Canada doesn’t host any guided trips. There is still much to learn about the park’s ecosystem and the all-important caribou.

“There’s so much wonderful land here,” says Yuill. “The park is just part of it, and it was created out of respect for the caribou.”