Nathan VanderKlippe
Northern News Services

Yellowknife (Feb 01/02) - Move over Yellowknife. High Level, Alta. is grabbing for its own share of the aurora borealis tourist market.

And they're contemplating a distinctly Yellowknife-ish tool to get it: an ice castle.

The idea is being tossed around by the Yellowknife Chamber of Commerce as a way to breathe life into a winter tourist market that is currently fairly dry. Earlier this winter, a tour company from Fort McMurray brought a number of Japanese tourists to the Alberta town, which has a population of 3,000 and is located 200 kilometres south of the NWT border. The tourists were enchanted by the northern lights show.

An idea was soon born: with Yellowknife's ice castle gone, why not replicate the wintery fortress in High Level? A frame for the structure could be built on land beside the Mackenzie Museum, and then filled with water to make ice in winter.

"It would be a real visual piece as you're going by so people would talk about it," said High Level and District Chamber of Commerce President Helen Dyck. "It would put High Level on the map to have something that extraordinary. In the wintertime we'd have the ice palace and in summer we would have lakes and other things around here."

Discussion of the ice castle is still in the ideas stage, but if it goes ahead, it would be built this fall. The plans aren't creating much of a stir in Yellowknife.

"I don't think our guys up here would be too worried about that," said Yellowknife Chamber of Commerce president Dave McPherson, who added that it would take High Level a long time to develop the infrastructure to properly accommodate Japanese tourists.