Richard Gleeson
Northern News Services

Yellowknife (Apr 19/02) - Old Town Hill is alive with the sound, not of music, but of trucks and cars bottoming out on chipseal and gravel.

The hill that rolls and writhes from downtown to Old Town is a puzzle that the best engineering minds in the city have yet to solve.

Each summer road crews attempt to pacify it with offerings of gravel and salves of warm asphalt. Without fail, the next spring it is back at it, snapping water mains and axels, sinking into itself to create puddles deep enough to fish in.

It is a vengeful hill.

A cab driver who has been working in Yellowknife for the last 17 years said though the hill is still bad, it is not as bad as it once were.

The driver, who did not want to give his name, said the city needs to work harder to smooth the ride between the two areas of town.

The unenviable responsibility for maintaining the hill falls to the city's public works department. Director Greg Kehoe said water flowing through the hill and ice lenses within the hill produce the persistent stomach-heaving contours on the hill.

Kehoe pointed delicately to a contributing factor -- that dreaded beaver who plugged up a creek draining Niven Lake last fall. The beaver's dam was destroyed, but the oily-furred critter was never found.

"We're looking at whether the water level in Niven Lake may have contributed to some of the groundwater flowing under Franklin Hill," Kehoe said.

He quickly added: "The policy over here at public works is we are a fan of the beaver -- don't say we're going to fix the road by killing the beaver."

It's only the headline-writers that make those kinds of connections, Greg.

Kehoe was recalling a rash of phone calls the department received when talk turned to the legalities of trapping within city limits and the going price of pelts.

Though no date is set for it, the city one day plans to drill holes into the hill to figure out exactly what makes it such an ornery surface.

Over the next three or four years the city will continue an Old Town road reconstruction project that will end at the bottom of the hill.