Yellowknife (Aug 25/03) - Deleigh Rausch has sent many people off in the right direction during more than two years at the Northern Frontier Regional Visitors Centre.

Greeting and helping with their vacation plans is now second nature for the longtime Yellowknifer.

Yklife: How did you get into your job?

Deleigh Rausch: I started out in the reception area welcoming the visitors and doing the paperwork and filing and then our operations assistant left so I moved into her position. I've been operations manager for two years.

I take care of staff at the front counter and oversee what their jobs are. I take care of the gift store, welcome visitors, do the database for all the walk-in visitors. I basically take care of the centre, keep it neat and tidy, I work on some of the displays. My background is in architecture and interior design so a bit of the displays I'm able to work on and help out with.

Yklife: What do you try to portray within the visitors centre?

DR: Mainly just what's available in the North Slave region to see, as in the wildlife, some of the minerals and rocks. We have a lot of videos here for people to see about the diamond mines and the gold mines.

We have canoe routes for up the Ingraham Trail.

We're working on trying to get more information from our little communities, which surround Yellowknife and which are part of our North Slave region so we can get them on our events listing on our website.

Yklife: Approximately how many visitors do you get per season?

DR: Last year, over the whole year, it was about 17,500 visitors. It was down a little from the year before but there were lots of reasons as to why that was happening. Mainly a lot of them (visitors) are in the summer months. June, July and August are our prime months. We get a lot of Japanese visitors from the Aurora companies in town, so in winter we keep busy, too. There's lots of things to do. We're only closed four days in the whole year so we're busy all the time.

Yklife: When visitors arrive at the desk, what questions are most commonly asked and what do they expect ?

DR: The basic things of what they can see in Yellowknife. They always ask where they can see cultural activities and they all want to go fishing. A lot want to see the gold mines and diamond mines. They're high on their lists of "can we go and do tours of them?"

Yklife: What aspects of your job do you find most enjoyable?

DR: Working with the visitors. Everybody is on vacation, usually, so they're happy and they're enjoyable to visit with. They have time to visit so they'd like you to have the time to visit, too. You have to be willing to ask different questions and visit with them. I also enjoy the database and working with stats to show how many visitors we have and what kind of packages we mail out to all across the world, mainly to the United States and Canada. I take pride in trying to keep all my paperwork together.

Yklife: Do you ever get visitors who are totally unprepared for the surroundings, where they imagine one thing and but encounter something totally different?

DR: Definitely, we get lots of people who come and they didn't realize they had so many highrises. They didn't realize we had so much walkaround. They expect to be able to go biking and hiking wherever they like, so once they get here, they find it's very different - that there aren't a lot of trails to go on and if you do go hiking off into the bush, you have to be really prepared to have all the proper equipment. We have people like that - who are here for a vacation and never dreamt Yellowknife was a city. We have other people who come up here looking for jobs and they want us to help them find places to live. They expect things to be cheaper than they are so some have a few difficulties trying to find places to live.

Yklife: Do you get a lot of repeat visitors?

DR: We get a few, but we haven't had a whole bunch that I've heard of. We do get the ones that may have been here for conferences who've really liked it, so they went home and brought their wives or husbands back. During the winter we sent our package to someone in the States and they brought their package up and said "see - you sent a package and now we're here," so it's very nice to be able to say that yes, our packages we do mail out are working well and bringing visitors to Yellowknife.

Yklife: Any special challenges or difficulties in your job?

DR: Not so much difficulties, but we do have to talk to our visitors. The visitors have lots to talk about in the last 50 km of road. You just tell them what a great adventure it was and that they'll be able to tell their family and friends about it when they get back. So there are a few visitors you talk around and enjoy but as far difficulties, I'd have to say (it would be) our signage for outside on the highways and the location of how to get into the centre itself that is difficult. Visitors always comment on that.

Yklife: How do you go about organizing your displays and what do you try to portray in them?

DR: A few we have just done. We had some help from Arslanian Cutting Works. They helped by giving us a few of their display items, so we brought them back and put little tags on them. I designed the display and put it up. Other people have donated different stuffed animals, wall hangings and pictures, so it just depends on what we get donated to the centre and what is given for the displays. A few we have purchased a few of the birch and spruce root baskets through funding to the centre.

Yklife: What else about your job do you enjoy?

DR: It's a lot of fun working in this building. It's a wide open space-type building and you get a good feeling in the winter, even when it's dark out.

It's a very nice space to work in.