The skies are noticeably busier over Yellowknife, NWT, what with four—yes, four—airlines rolling out daily service into this northern capital. Started in May 2009, WestJet joined Canadian North, First Air and Air Canada Jazz on the tarmac at YZF, launching seasonal service from Edmonton, AB to Yellowknife and taking the company’s first foray North of Sixty. The result? Unprecedented competition that is making Canada’s wild, relatively inaccessible Northwest Territories easier and more affordable to visit than ever.

Airplanes are to northerners what subways are to New Yorkers: part of the local culture. But four airlines and 400,000 passengers a year didn’t really catch my attention until I learned that the population of Yellowknife is barely 20,000. It’s the busiest airport in northern Canada—heck, one of the busiest in the country—and that doesn’t begin to count all the bush planes.

Dozens of Otters and Cessnas take off from the float base on Great Slave Lake (the world’s 10th largest lake) to service towns, lodges, mines and camps across the Northwest Territories, known for its primo fishing, hunting, diamonds and aurora borealis sightings. As I stood on Pilots’ Monument looking out over Yellowknife Bay, three minutes didn’t pass without some kind of aircraft buzzing by.

And where were all these planes going? I flew to a remote fishing lodge in search of ancient and feisty northern pike, and I dropped in at a nature retreat for a little R&R. On the list for my next visit: a flight-seeing tour of spectacular Virginia Falls, part of a now expanded Nahanni National Park Reserve.
 
www.spectacularnwt.com/