20 Interesting Facts About Yellowknife

Facts About Yellowknife

Facts About Yellowknife

  • Yellowknife is the capital, only city, and the largest community in the Northwest Territories, Canada.
  • Yellowknife is called the Diamond Capital of North America.
  • Yellowknife is on the northern shore of Great Slave Lake, about 400 km south of the Arctic Circle, on the west side of Yellowknife Bay near the outlet of the Yellowknife River.
  • The Estimated Population of Yellowknife 19,569.
  • Yellowknife and its surrounding water bodies were named after a local Dene tribe at one time known as the “Copper Indians” or “Yellowknife Indians”, today incorporated as the Yellowknives Dene First Nation, who traded tools made from copper deposits near the Arctic Coast.
  • Due to its latitude, Yellowknife sees a wide range of time between day and night over the course of the year. In June, they see about twenty hours of daylight, while in December they will only see about five hours.
  • The Yellowknife settlement is considered to have been founded in 1934.
  • Thirty-five per cent of the population is under 25 years of age.
  • Yellowknife was named the capital of the Northwest Territories in 1967
  • The lowest temperature ever recorded in Yellowknife was −51.2 °C on 31 January 1947, and the highest was 32.5 °C on 16 July 1989.
  • The city hosts a number of events, including the Frostbite 45 ski, the Diavik 150 Canadian Championship Dog Derby, and the SnowKing Winter Festival.
  • As the largest city in the Northwest Territories, Yellowknife is the hub for mining, industry, transportation, communications, education, health, tourism, commerce, and government activity in the territory.
  • In 1978 the Soviet nuclear-powered satellite Kosmos 954 crashed to Earth near Yellowknife.
  • Of the eleven official languages of the Northwest Territories, five are spoken in significant numbers in Yellowknife: Dene Suline, Dogrib, South and North Slavey, English, and French.
  • Yellowknife is 3,062 kilometres away from the North Pole.
  • Yellowknife is twinned with Reno, Nevada, United States; Fairbanks, Alaska, United States & Yakutsk, Sakha Republic, Russia.
  • Yellowknife has a gold mining heritage. In the 1930’s mine tunnels burrowed beneath the city streets.
  • Yellowknife Transit is the public transportation agency in the city and is the only transit system in the Northwest Territories.
  • On 10 August 2012, NASA announced that the section of Mars where the Curiosity of the Mars Science Laboratory mission landed would be renamed Yellowknife, in recognition of the city of Yellowknife. Yellowknife is usually where scientists start geological mapping expeditions when researching the oldest known rocks in North America.
  • In the Dogrib language, the city is known as Sǫ̀mbak’è, “where the money is”.
Facts About Yellowknife
Facts About Yellowknife