Mike Bryant
Northern News Services

Yellowknife (Sep 12/01) - For the most part, and likely few would disagree, it has been a wet, miserable summer in Yellowknife.

From June's early promise, which ranked the 16th warmest and ninth driest out of 60 years of recorded weather information, it seemed to all pretty much collapse after that.

Most of July kept weekend campers cursing and local horticulturalists staring at their gardens with vain contempt. August was not much better.

"Last couple of years, the gardening's been awful," laments Yellowknife Garden Centre owner Jerry Vanderbil. "It's either too hot or too cold."

"Now my lilies are finally looking wonderful, but it's going to freeze any day, and it's been so wet, you can't enjoy your garden."

With summers so brief in the North, one would wonder what tourists must have thought this year -- as if cold weather wasn't already a firmly entrenched stereotype for Northern living.

"We've had a few complaints," says Deleigh Rausch, operations manager at the Northern Frontier Visitor's Centre.

"When it's raining, it's hard to go out on the (Frame Lake) walking trail, but there are other things to do."

Rausch says many tourists made good use of the Northern Heritage Centre this summer, or went souvenir shopping and watched the movies the visitor's centre provides.

Whether such indoor activities offer tourists a true Northern experience is perhaps debatable, but at least, according to Rausch, the tourism industry wasn't a complete bust this summer.

"The one thing they complain about is the road (Highway 3)," says Rausch. "The rain made it even harder to drive on."

Ironically, while this July proved to be the 11th wettest on record, it was also the 10th warmest. This past August, as far as temperature is concerned, was slightly above average at a mean of 14.2 degrees celsius, but it also earned the distinction of being the third dullest.

"While the rest of the country was in drought, you were fighting off mosquitoes," jokes Environment Canada's meteorologist for the North, Yvonne Bilan-Wallace, who is based out of Edmonton.

Indeed, much of southern Canada has been plagued by dust bowl-like conditions this summer.

"There's been a band that went through southern Ontario that's been extremely dry," says Roy Bonnett, vice president of the Ontario Federation of Agriculture.

"There's been some patches with good rain. We've had whole counties that have been dry, and then at one farmhouse the rain clouds open up. In general though, it's been dry."

According to Ted O'Brien, an agro-climate specialist with Prairie Farm Rehabilitation, other than eastern Manitoba, western Canada has had it particular tough this year.

"Victoria has been rationing water," says O'Brien. "If you went to the Empress Hotel right now, you would notice the grass is brown."

O'Brien added that this year's drought situation in the west has forced many farmers to harvest weeks earlier than normal.

"Much of the Prairies have been looking at record lows (in precipitation)," says O'Brien. "With dry weather, the harvest advances rapidly. Most of the harvest happened weeks ago."

Bilan-Wallace has a theory for the North's excessive wetness and the south's dryness. Essentially, the life-giving rain clouds that usually form over the west coast and then proceed to drift eastward were not in their normal positions this summer.

"Basically, what I think happened was that the jet stream was carried further North this summer," says Bilan-Wallace. "And when it did start raining in the North, they stayed around for a very long time. These were very slow moving lows."

Yellowknife did experience some heat waves this summer, particularly the first and last weeks of August respectively, including a very welcome stretch of nice weather coinciding with the Labour Day long-weekend. Yet, when it rained, it rained, and it rained.

"This August was the eighth wettest on record," says Bilan-Wallace.

Despite Yellowknife's wet summer, Bilan-Wallace says she didn't find anything particularly unusual about it. If we want to find records, we had best look to our territorial neighbours in the east.

"In comparison, Iqaluit started off quite cold, then it went to the fifth warmest July on record," says Bilan-Wallace. "They couldn't decide whether to be wet or dry this year."

Compared with our summer-long season of wet and rain, broken up by the occasional warm spell, Iqaluit residents were feeling the extreme end of all conditions.

"June was their second wettest, July their third driest, and August again was their second wettest," says Bilan-Wallace.