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SOMBA K'E/YELLOWKNIFE - When Marc Casaway made a trip out to his cabin on Highway 3 Wednesday morning, he noticed something a little out of the ordinary.

Yellow tape and a garbage bag was wrapped around a tree at the mouth of the trail leading to his cabin in the woods about 10 km northwest of Yellowknife.

Marc Casaway stands at the spot where his summer cabin once stood just off of Highway 3 outside of Yellowknife Wednesday afternoon. - Katherine Roth/NNSL photo

After making his way into the bush, he found more yellow tape cordoning off the area where his cabin once stood.

Overnight, it had been burned to the ground.

"Needless to say, I was shocked," said Casaway.

"I was just bringing some blankets out here because I was going to move into the cabin permanently."

He built the cabin two years ago, and has spent his summers there since its completion. But this year he had planned to move out to the one-room "getaway" for good.

Casaway found the padlock for the door a few feet from where the entrance once stood, giving him reason to believe that it was arson.

"I really have no idea why anyone would want to do this, whether it was politically or domestically motivated - I do not know."

The Yellowknife fire hall received the call about the blaze around 2 a.m. When they arrived, nobody was around and the structure was completely engulfed in flames, said Darcy Hernblad, deputy fire chief of operations.

It took 14 firefighters and three response vehicles nearly two hours to extinguish the blaze.

"In these cases, the fire is always considered suspicious," he said. "There is no power out there, so what could have started the fire?"

Without his cabin, Casaway said he will be forced to live with friends in Yellowknife, since he does not have a place of his own in the city. Many of his personal items, including clothes, a guitar and furniture, were also lost in the fire.

"It's really a despicable action for someone to come out here with the intent of doing this," he said. "Now here I am, literally at ground zero."

As a beneficiary to the signatories of Treaty 8, he said the cabin was his way of exercising his treaty rights. If he chooses to rebuild, he will try to get a plot of land in an area that is less accessible to the public.

"If I can find a way to build a new cabin, it will probably have to be somewhere a little more hidden so this doesn't happen again."

Casaway said he didn't know the value on the damage to his property.