HAY RIVER - There are two schools of thought on the iconic "Northwest Territories - 60th Parallel" highway sign on the NWT/Alberta border.

It is either best left untouched, or just begging to be signed.

The "Northwest Territories - 60th Parallel" sign at the NWT/Alberta border is a magnet for people symbolically signing in to the North. - Paul Bickford/NNSL photo illustration Matt Charest, left, and Dustin Beck, two summer workers with the territorial government, paint part of the "Northwest Territories - 60th Parallel" sign and ready it for a Plexiglas covering. - Paul Bickford/NNSL photo

Some people - visitors to the North and the occasional NWT resident - can't resist writing their names on the sign, while the territorial government would like them to stop.

The names are not typical graffiti, since they are not initials or nicknames. Instead, they are full names often accompanied by hometowns and even telephone numbers.

For some people, signing their names seems to be proclamations that they made it to a special corner of the world.

People like Clara Wabano of Ontario, who wrote her name on the sign in August of last year.

"It was an 'I was here,' sort of thing," she explained when contacted recently.

Wabano said she had never been to the NWT before, and that it was an exciting experience.

Marc Schmitz, the parks co-ordinator for the South Slave with the Department of Industry, Tourism and Investment, believes the signatures deface the sign.

"We like to keep our stuff looking nice for the people coming through," he said.

The department has to repaint the sign once or twice a year because so many people sign it, he said.

"It's kind of a pain," he said.

"We've got more important things to do."

Last week, something new was tried to cut down on the number of signatures. One section of the sign - a white polar bear on a blue circular background - was taken to Hay River, repainted and covered with Plexiglas.

Schmitz said that will hopefully deter people from signing it. "We're going to give it a try and see what happens."

The rest of the large white sign was also repainted in late May.

"There are already a couple of scribbles on it," Schmitz noted.

The parks co-ordinator recognizes some travellers like to leave their mark behind in places they have visited, but he noted there is a better way to do it at the border.

"There is a guest book at the visitor's centre that they can sign," he said, adding there is also someone there to welcome a traveller in person.

Dick McKinney, a visitor from B.C.'s Okanagan Valley, wishes fellow travellers would leave the sign alone.

"I think they should leave it nice and clean so everyone can enjoy it," he said.

McKinney wonders what they are trying to do by signing the sign, perhaps bragging to the world that they made it from somewhere far away.

"I don't care if someone is from South America," he said.

Instead of defacing the sign, he believes people should treat it as part of the Northern wilderness.

"Come up and enjoy it, and leave it in a better condition than how you found it," said the retiree from Enderby, B.C.

McKinney also thinks, if people want to register their names, they should sign the guest book.

McKinney and his wife, Delores, are on their second trip to the NWT.

Like most other travellers, they stopped and took their pictures by the sign the first time they passed it.

"It was meaningful," McKinney said of crossing the 60th parallel.

Wabano said she also took pictures in front of the sign when she travelled to the NWT last summer.

She and four friends - all residents of the isolated Eabametoong First Nation reserve north of Thunder Bay - were visiting Yellowknife.

She put her name on the sign in the hope that some other traveller might recognize it.

Her name remained on the sign from last August to the recent repainting.

When told her name was no longer on the sign, Wabano sounded genuinely disappointed.

"That's too bad," she said.