Mad Trapper Pub steeped in history
Remembering the heyday of Inuvik's beloved bar
Kaila Jefferd-Moore
Northern News Services
Thursday, August 25, 2016
INUVIK
The Mad Trapper Pub is almost as old as the town of Inuvik itself.
The Mad Trapper Pub was advertised in March as "an icon almost as old as itself" when it was up for sale by current owner, Rick Adams. - Kaila Jefferd-Moore/NNSL photo
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The bar is located in a building that carries with it a history as exciting and almost as vague as the infamous Mad Trapper of Rat River it is named after. The keys to The Mad Trapper Pub have passed through multiple hands since it opened in the early-'70s.
The past hangs in the air, encompassing the scratched and worn wooden architecture, smelling of spilled beer, settled dust and a sigh from decades of memories created in the bar.
George Clarke built and opened the original Mad Trapper Pub in a building that stood in the now-empty lot beside the current bar's location on Mackenzie Road. It was a quiet little lounge sitting on top of the Bank of Montreal and underneath the Raven's Nest restaurant.
"The bank used to call and tell us to turn the jukebox down," said Maidie-Ann Turner, a barmaid at the Mad Trapper in the '70s. "It was all a memorable story."
Walls adorned in $1 Canadian bills with signatures and dates from wall to wall, with only a jukebox and about 30 seats, it was the place to go in Inuvik for a 50-cent beer or 75-cent highball.
"If you didn't get into the bar before 9 o'clock on a Friday you didn't get a seat," said Maidie-Ann. She used to stack a tray of beer bottles, with glasses on top in one hand and a case of beer in the other. "That's how busy it was."
In the mid-'70s Clarke bought the building next door and moved The Mad Trapper Pub and Raven's Nest restaurant over. The Arctic Inn was also moved to the top level of the building.
"Of all the businesses I owned, The Mad Trapper Pub I took the most pride in. I really appreciated the people and the community," said Barry Gordichuk, who bought the bar from Clarke in about 1976. "The people of the North are very special, very unique. My wife Barbara and I have a soft spot in our heart for them. We felt a part of the community."
Gordichuk brought in popular rock and roll bands from the Los Angeles, Vegas, Seattle, Portland circuit. Gordichuk said he would fly up bands for two months at a time and house them and his staff in the old Arctic Inn quarters. He never ran it as a hotel.
"It was very, very unique to have that calibre of entertainment all the way up in Inuvik," said Gordichuk. "The bar was full just about every night. Thursday, Friday, Saturday it was full by 8 o'clock."
"It used to be standing room only," said Brian Turner, who helped build the bar when it switched locations. "They used to stuff people in there, hundreds of people."
There are still remnants of the old days of the pub today. The main bar counter is the original, built during the move in the '70s. The deep carvings gouged into the heavy wooden tables are from years of use and drinking from that decade. Subsequent generations of Inuvik party-goers still sit around them and share a cold one while listening to Welder's Daughter, the live band that flies up and plays six nights a week throughout the summer.
Gordichuk preserved the tradition of signed $1 bills and in order to keep the health inspector happy he had an artist stick them to 4 feet by 5 feet boards and cover them in shellac to hang on the walls.
"It really just mushroomed. At any given time there was a few thousand hanging on those walls," he said.
One board of the old bills still hangs in the current Mad Trapper, an insight into the past. During the years it's hung on the wall in the entrance-way of the bar, the bills have been written over by the pub's frequent visitors.
Gordichuk sold the bar to Brian Cuff in the mid-'80s, who owned it for a short period of time before selling it to Walter and Hildegard Willkomm in the late-'80s. After a few years the Hotel Group, which also owned the Mackenzie Hotel and the Finto, bought the bar. Adams bought the bar years later and had it up for sale for $1.65 million in March after a public outcry ensued from an application to open on Sundays. The listing is no longer posted on the Coldwell-Banker website and Adams didn't respond to he Drum's repeated requests for comment.
"It's not like here now where nobody's in the bar," said Maidie-Ann.
The bar isn't quite as it once was. The tables are empty until a crowd draws in late at night. The dance floor, scuffed from years of heavy stomping, is now quiet compared to the live music pulsing through the bar until 2 a.m. But it's still the place to go for a night out in Inuvik.
