I’ve posted before about my first real flying job, that took me and my family North, to the Northwest Territories in Canada.
Going through my photo-reel, I found some pictures of our humble home when we moved to Hay River semi-permanently.
After having come up on my own for the first summer and living in my employers RV behind the hangar, for my seasonal flying job, we made the decision to move up as a family and live year-round in the NWT.
We had a new-born daughter, she was 18 months old at the time, and I had a 3-month summer seasonal flying job. That’s all we had. I suppose we have the proceeds from the sale of our condo in Vancouver, giving us a small amount of money, but everything else was theoretical. Everyone told us that finding off-season work for me and year round work for my Wife ( ex-wife now ) would be fairly easy.
We did however have to find somewhere to live. The rental market was pretty dismal and we had the condo-money that we wanted to put back into a real estate “ holding “ so it didn’t evaporate.
The NWT at the time didn’t participate in the online real estate of Realtor.com, something about the real estate board of the NWT and the national association not getting along. No one really cared as the market was so small in any case. Hay River was a town of about 3500 people and was the second? Third? Largest settlement in the NWT, after Yellowknife and Inuvik. Finding available properties for sale was either through word of mouth, postings on paper pinned to the corkboard at the post office, or through one of the two realtors based in town.
Given that we needed to secure housing before moving up and not wanting to move twice, once into a short term rental and again into our permanent digs, once found, we scoured the two websites of the local realtors on a daily basis.
There really wasn’t much available at the time we were looking. Our budget being fairly meager, most of the listings were out of our range. We also had to consider our limited finances as we really had no idea what our incomes were going to look like for a couple years. Biting off a high-overhead mortgage seemed risky, especially if we ended up moving away again in just a couple years.
Up popped a little trailer, a mobile home, that was quite cheap and well within our range. I had a friend go over and do a quick video walk-through and we spoke to the realtor a few times.
After a couple weeks with our moving date coming at us without pause, and feeling the pressure to lock something down, we pulled the pin on it and put in an offer. We ended up buying the place, sight “ un-seen “ , other than the video walkthrough.
It was a small trailer, I think it was 12 feet wide and 50? Feet long. It sat on the large lots of Old Town. Hoooked up to the power system but without water or sewer lines. Hay River had moved the town site up the river a few miles due to the risk of spring flooding in Old Town, and wanted everyone to move away. Therefore, they wouldn’t be putting in water or sewer lines anytime soon. Their decision to move the townsite and “ abandon “ Old Town, made the property values very cheap, if you were willing to put up with septic and water services via delivery or vacuum truck.
Our road was gravel and access to old town was limited to a single road in and out. About 70% of the lots in old town were vacant, their houses long since relocated to the new town site. Those that elected to stay in Old Town, or decided to build there, were a mix of trailers, warehouses, modern homes and derelict storage lots filled with old boats with trees growing up through abandoned decks and trucks rotting in the over growth. There was a park with a playground down the street from us, complete with a hockey rink that got filled with water and frozen for outdoor skating in the winter. It got very little use though, with a good chunk of the winter being below -20C and not very enticing for the kids to go outside and play.
Trailer life wasn’t all that bad, wasn’t all that great either, haha. Aside from the small space, there were a few challenges. Some of the challenges were specific to living in a prefabricated home, others were the fact that we were doing it in Canada’s North.
As I mentioned, Old Town in Hay River had been quasi-abandoned, in that they really didn’t want anyone to live there, but they also had to accept that the lack of municipal services, the rick of catastrophic flooding every spring drove the land prices down significantly. Cheap land wasn’t neccassarily a rare thing in the NWT, but this cheap land had been a town once. Streets were in place, power infrastructure was all there, the lots were a decent size and the actual location, right on the shore of the lake, made it a fairly decent place to live.
Power was provided by overhead cables, like most of Canada. Although I was told by someone that the spacing between the wires in the NWT was non-standard as they were trying to make the wires further apart than the outstretched wingspan of the Ravens. Most of our power outages were inevitably the fault of a zapped raven, so I could see there being some truth to it.
No municipal water or sewer existed though, all of it had to be trucked in and out. They didn’t abandon or tear up that infrastructure, it had never existed. A lot of northern communities are like this. The challenges of installing and maintaining underground pipes and drainage are considerably expensive to overcome when you’re dealing with permafrost soil.
We had a septic tank outside our trailer, but I don’t remember having it pumped out very often. I don’t remember if it had a traditional septic field attached to the tank. Something tells me it must have, due to the fact that it didn’t seem like we needed it emptied very often. I do remember it having a pump-out pipe that was essentially just a long PVC pipe “ straw “ that stuck out of the inspection hatch on the top of the buried tank. You could look down into it to see the level of the sewage. It also never froze up, even in the deepest, darkest depths of our northern winters. That always surprised me, I suppose it must be due to the fermentation process creating heat? Maybe?
Water was provided by a truck. By necessity, the water tank had to be inside your house to avoid it becoming a giant ice cube. In the case of a Trailer, where space was at a premium, this meant that there was a closet-sized space, right in the middle of the trailer, that housed our water tank. As you walked down the hallway from the kitchen back to the bedrooms, you passed right by the water plastic water tank. It was about 3 feet in diameter and went to the ceiling, so about 7.5 feet tall. It was translucent plastic, so you could see the water level in the tank as well. Two adults and one small child, with associated dishwashing, laundry, bathing, toilet flushing and consumption, it was a stretch to make the water last between deliveries. We had water delivered three times a week but it was a challenge to not take up too much of your precious living area inside the small trailer and still have enough water to get you through between deliveries. At one point I did the math and came up with a figure of 45 Gallons of water, per person, per day. This shocked me, I mean that’s an entire drum of water every day. Most of my hydration came in the form of coffee, so I certainly wasn’t drinking all that water, but all that other stuff sure adds up.
The extreme cold temperatures in the winter was another challenge for trailer life. Since most trailers are built around the fact that they neeed to be moved over public roads, there was a size limitation that was hard for the builders to get around. Since that made every inch of space so valuable, most of them simply do not have the luxury of wall space for the insulation demands of northern winters. I seem to recall being told by the realtor that our trailer was built with the “ Arctic Package “. Someone told me that it simply meant the walls were framed in with 2x6 lumber instead of 2x4s, to give a little more room for extra insulation….perhaps.
Primary heating was provided by a forced air Oil Furnace, fed from an outdoor Oil storage tank. At that time, it cost around 1200 bucks to fill our tank and in a typical winter we’d go through about a tank and a half over the winter. Higher consumption due to poor insulation, but offset by the smaller size of the space being heated. I was glad in hindsight that we went with the cheap housing option as the costs of Furnace Oil and Electricity costs up there were pretty dramatic and I really hadn’t accounted for that. Had we moved into a larger, “ normal “ house I think the running costs would have been a hard pill to swallow, especially at the beginning of our time there when things were a bit tight financially. It would have been nice to have a secondary heat source, for both comfort but also for peace of mind. When temperatures fall to 40 degrees below zero, a failure of your furnace meant that you only had a few hours before your home was unlivable and possibly severely damaged, what with bursting pipes.
When I delivered home heating oil as my winter job, you’d see it a few times a winter, the frantic calls at 3AM when someone runs out of Oil and needs a truck NOW. You’d show up in the middle of the night and everyone is bundled up in winter clothes and blankets and the oven is on, door wide open and all the burners on Maximum with a fan blowing over them to try and fend off the cold.
The Electricity was also really expensive. Coming from BC which has extensive Hydro ELectric Power and consequently, some of the lowest prices electricity in Canada, possibly North America. Side note, but all the legends about “ BC Bud “, the high quality indoor grown Marijuana that BC is fairly well known for, is a direct result of the availability of cheap hydro electricity, rather than any inherent wisdom of the generations of hippies that live in BC. If I remember correctly, a KW/h of electricity was in the order of 6-9 cents in BC at the time and well over 30 cents in the NWT. Our little trailer cost us, on average, about 300 dollars a month, just for electricity. I don’t even want to think about what a standard house would have set us back on a monthly basis.
When we showed up with our little moving truck and all the possessions from our little condo, we very quickly realized that there was no way everything was going to fit in the trailer. There simply wasn’t the floor space fora lot of closets or other storage areas. The underside of the trailer was “ skirted “ in that it had boards up so that the crawlspace underneath wasn't subject to the wind and that left quite a bit of room under the trailer itself. The problem was that in order to access that space you had to crawl and shove everything through one little 3 foot square access door that would be buried under the snow for half the year, so it wasn’t really practical.
To help with storage I promptly went down to the local hardware store and bought a large wooden outdoor storage shed that had shelves inside. Everything that could handle being stored in a “ freezer “ went in the shed. Anything that you only needed to access once a year, in the summer, would get crammed under the trailer.
When they brought the shed out to our property to deliver it, they brought it on a flat deck truck and brought a large front end loader to pick it up and drive it from the street, over the “ lawn “ and place it up next to the trailer. This was in the early spring and the ruts that the loader left in our soggy, half mud, half weed infested gravel that made up our lawn, haunted me the whole time we lived there.
One of the few closets that we did have in the house was in the master bedroom, the larger of the two bedrooms, taking up the back end of the trailers floor plan. I remember dedicating one of the shelves in the closet to linen storage, including spare towels and bed linens that we never really used as we had way more than we needed. When we went to move out of the trailer three and half years later, it was wintertime and the linens in the closet had acted like another layer of insulation, being up against the wall of the trailer. The funny part was, in addition to helping keep our expensive heat from escaping, they also did a really good job of insulating that particular piece of the wall against receiving any of that heat. As a consequence, the extreme cold of the exterior wall, had, over time, chilled the towels that were upo against the wall. With no access to the heat and only the cold seeping in over a couple years, the last 6 inches of towels were a block of ice…..inside our house, hidden behind a pile of towels and sheets.
The cold temperatures were a constant battle. Windows would get so cold that the damp interior air condensed on them, causing them to constantly being wet on the inside…te water would then run down the window and cause all kinds of problems with the window frames. Even more so when it inevitably turned to ice, even inside the house. We were advised that you could buy sheets of plastic to put up over the windows and create a barrier preventing the interior air from touching the window. Essentially “ double paning “ the window and creating some trapped air for more insulation. Every fall I’d go buy the plastic and double sided tape to secure over all the windows and seal us in for the winter. Not that it really matters as within a couple of weeks there was layer of ice on the outside of the windows and in the frames, rendering them completely sealed anyways.
One time I came home from grocery shopping with my daughter in the car with me, I think she was 3 at the time. Since I’d be opening and closing the car doors to bring all the groceries in, I decided I’d unstrap her from the car seat first, bring her inside where it was nice and warm and then make my two or three trips with the groceries.
Once she was inside, I closed the front door and went back to the truck to get the first load of groceries. Imagine my shock when I got back to the front door and found that it had locked behind me somehow, trapping my daughter inside the house, unattended and trapping me outside. That’s when I found out that all of the windows to the house were completely sealed in by the ice. Luckily, my wife and a spare set of keys were only a ten minute drive away and she had to come home from work to quickly rescue fail-dad.
Anorther challenge was the fact that the inlet for the water delivery Truck was located outside the house. Every time they came and hooked up to the pipe, a little bit of water would be leftover in the pipe where it ran outside the house. Over time this would build up and eventually block off the pipe. This was quite a nuisance as it meant we didn’t get that days much needed water delivery and would have to pay for an extra trip once we cleared the pipe. I had an electric heating pad, like you use for a sore back, that I’d wrap around the pipe and then wrap a towel or two over top of it and leave it for a couple hours and that would usually thaw out the blockage. If we went out of town for more than a day or two as well, you’d leave a tap left open just enough to drip, this would keep the water flowing in the pipes I was told and help to keep it from freezing up. Frozen pipes were a big problem. Not only would it likely destroy the pipe or pipes, it would also need to be thawed out again somehow. Since most of your pipes run inside and underneath walls and floors, they aren’t always easy to access. My heating-pad-o-matic worked a few times when we had issues, but only if I could access the offending pipe and blockage.
There was a small benefit of having the outside air temperature never above -10 for months at a time though. Freezer space in the winter was not a problem anymore, I’d simply leave items out on the porch in a box, or buried in the snow. We had a deep freezer outside on the back porch and in the winter still used it, but I could just unplug it till May-ish.
The ground itself kinda sorta looked like a lawn when the snow was melting on our spring arrival. Within a couple weeks though it was pretty clear that it was simply a mix of weeds growing up through some tortured gravel. You could see evidence in the gravel of previous owners having used the lawn for a storage facility for old vehicle,s or perhaps a hill billy chop shop. Busted glass, bolts, oil stains and pieces of broken bricks. I took it as a challenge to try and make a lawn out of it, but had very little success. WE simply didn’t have the water to spare to germinate any grass seed in the crappy dirt/gravel mix and a very short window. Nevertheless, he persisted. Over the four summers we were there, through sheer force of will, it was a mix of weeds and grass by the time we left. We did get rid of the playground set at some point, if memory serves it was actually in pretty rough shape and starting to fall apart. The outdoor elements up there can be pretty unforgiving.
We had fantastic neighbors on one side, a semi retired couple that liked to collect boats and motorcycles. I think when we moved in two of there boats were actually parked on our front “ lawn “ and they would stay there for a year or so before they moved them. It wasn’t like we needed the space and they weren’t hurting anyone sitting on our lawn. If anything, it made it look like we had the means to afford some toys…which we clearly didn’t, haha.
I do miss that aspect of Old Town, that you could park anything on your property and do as you pleased without any fear of judgement or sternly worded letters from the municipal bylaw folks. It was pretty much a free for all.
Eventually, my employer donated to us an old Trampoline that was stored under their house, their children having long since grown out of it. In fact, their kids were my age, that’s how long it had sat dormant. It was old school build quality, the kind of trampoline that I remember from my childhood in the 80s. If your friend had a trampoline back then there parents were very well off.
The trampoline didn’t come with a safety net, and we let the Little One bounce around for the first summer unencumbered as she was so small that there wasn’t too much worry about propelling herself off the edge onto the glass and brick infested gravel lawn below. By the second summer though, we bit the bullet and put one up. We ended up dragging that trampoline around with us for another 5 years or so, with the occasional welding repair to its legs and at least one trip to the Emergency Dept at the local hospital. Every fall it would be disassembled in preparation for the winter and every spring, dragged out of its storage spot and reassembled. Sometimes delayed till the accumulated ice had thawed enough to actually access it, frozen into a block behind the garage.
The neighbour on the other side was decent enough, when he was sober. More than a couple times he could be found wandering up and down the gravel road out front, shirtless, barefoot, drunk and angry at the world. Just like the lawn “ ornaments “ in old town, this sort of thing was mostly ignored as long as no one got hurt. Him and I would chat occasionally when I was out doing yard work and we both contributed our yard waste and clippings to a shared depresssion on the border of our properties, to slowly fill it in. He popped by a couple times too with bags of freshly caught whitefish off the big lake.
Every spring would be a bit of a stressful time though. The Hay River that gave the town its name, empties into Great Slave Lake right at the site of Old Town. In fact, Old town is actually on a large island at the mouth of the river delta. The river Ice always broke long before the Lake Ice and there would be a week or two of violent emptying of the broken up ice into the lake. The lake being frozen however, had to make room for all the run off water and Ice. The force of the ice coming out the river mouth would break up the decaying Lake Ice that was at the mouth, and some room would be created that way. Some of the ice was also pushed underneath the lake ice as well. But, every spring, there was the potential for this to not work as desired by the folks living in Old Town.
The Alluvial fan/delta of river silt where it empties into the lake creates a large area of shallow water. This shallow area typically freezes right to the lake bed. In the spring, if it didn’t get broken up by the river ice coming out, would sometimes create a natural Ice Dam. All of the river ice emptying into the lake would suddenly stop, with nowhere to go. The pressure would build up in a relatively violent fashion and, hopefully, eventually force its way into the lake. Many times though, it couldn’t and disaster would ensue. It’s amazing watching the river ice during breakup, the sheer weight and unstoppable force of the ice and moving water is impressive.
I remember once watching along the shore, along with other groups of townsfolk out for the show, and seeing a large floe, maybe 4 metres square, get pushed up onto the shore by this building pressure at the river mouth. It got pushed right up the shore, maybe 3 metres up the bank and right up to the road we were standing on, watching the spectacle. The guardrail along the road, with its wooden posts and metal rail came in contact with the floe as it pushed up and along the bank. Shearing off the wooden posts buried well into the ground as if they were made of paper. The floe didn’t slow, hiccup or lurch as it took out the guardrail, the force and weight behind it were so large.
The story I heard was that back in the 60s, a certain prominent, airline owning businessman of recent TV fame, his father used to assist the big lake in accepting the river ice, with the help of a box of dynamite placed out in the big lake to make sure there was a weak spot in the ice and to to prevent a dam from occurring. It didn’t always work, and I think it was in the 60s when they had a big enough ice jam and ensuing flood in old town, that they gave up and moved the townsite. In any case, the old man, we will call him Red, decided eventually that the cost of the box of dynamite shouldn’t come out of his pocket and perhaps the territorial government should reimburse him for it. Bureacracy prevailed, Red threw his hands up and wished them good luck, and shortly thereafter was the large flood that required the moving of thew entire town…so the legend goes anyways…
As you watched the ice breakup of the river, it was quite a sight to see when it would momentarily come to stop. You knew the water underneath hadn’t paused, but the Rivers’s surface, completely covered in jumbled piles of ice floes grinding against each other with incredible force would pause. The lake wasn’t taking any more ice and the movement on the river stopped. You could literally watch the water level at the edge slowly start rising, until it would build up enough force to push through again and it would resume its flow into the lake, the water level slowly dropping back down.
The flooding that comes with the ice jams is so quick, the potential for disaster is always there for a couple weeks. There is all manner of sensors in the river now, and you can see live internet feeds of the water levels and webcam views of the ice at several points up the river so everyone can keep a close eye on it. I’d fly a couple flights during breakup with the ENR guys and the local fire chief and occasionally some folks from the university in Edmonton who came up to study the problem. We’d fly up and down the river so they could assess the breakup, the ice health and flow rates at different spots.
Our trailer was perched atop a small mound of gravel on the middle of our property, raising it about a half metre above ground level on old towns alluvial island. The ground level in Old Town only sat about a metre above the water levels of the river during breakup. Thus, if it spilled its bank due to an ice jam, the water would reach our place in pretty short order, maybe an hour or two. Being a trailer, it wasn’t “ attached “ to the ground, it sat upon cribbed wooden blocks, that occasionally needed re-levelling as the ground slowly moved underneath it. If the rising water were to get to those cribbing blocks, we’d float off them in short order. No more house.
If the fire department thought there was a danger of the ice jamming, they’d preemptively evacuate old town since you simply wouldn’t have time to flee if it jammed up in the middle of the night. Old town having a single road in and out, running alongside the angry river and its ice, made it even more precarious.
We never did get evacuated in the years we lived there, but it was pretty close a few times, with evacuation watches in effect you had to be ready to leave in short order, bags packed by the door or in the car. They’d drive the fire trucks and RCMP cars up and down the roads with the evacuation orders over the PA. Lots of folks would ignore them until they’d go door to door. Even then, I know a few people that said they wouldn’t leave, even if ordered.
When we finally moved way from Hay River it took another 3 years to actually sell our property. Long story short, we had a tenant in there when we first moved, while we put it up for sale. We didn’t get any bites and the tenant expressed an interest in buying it from us if we’d work with him on the sale and terms as he didn’t really have the means at the time. After a year of him living in the trailer, it was in pretty rough shape. He was a great guy and very well respected in the community, but he was very “ northern “ and some of things that he did in that trailer made me scared for its ability to even be sale-able. I remember once coming up to visit and popping by to see how it was fairing. Pretty sure there was an entire boat motor being overhauled in the kitchen sink. Those three years of waiting for him to gather enough resources to buy it, while we watched the river rise and fall every spring and knowing the decline of its condition under his stewardship, were pretty nerve wracking for us. Our meager investment always seemed to be hanging by a thread out of our control. Eventually he did buy it and our northern real estate adventure came to an end. In hindsight, we left a trail of distressed properties and nose diving real estate markets in our wake like the trail of a slug in our journey through the north.
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