But the residents do not feel the isolation. With air travel so easy, no one is stuck anywhere these days, Chief Linklater says. I feel grounded here. This is my home. The community, four streets wide, stretches out next to its airstrip.
All buildings stand on crutches above the permafrost.
Log-cabin homes are, in many instances, in various stages of disrepair, often with clapboard rooms pushed on. Caribou antlers are everywhere, tacked up over doorways, piled up in yards. But that gives the wrong impression. Meanwhile, a well-stocked grocery store sells a wide variety of merchandise at prices set exorbitantly high to pay the transportation costs. Somehow people afford a cost of living about 30 per cent higher than southern communities in Canada.