HAY RIVER - Lucie Benoit has been the manager of Hay River Territorial Park for the past 28 years, and still loves the job.

Lucie Benoit manages Hay River Territorial Park, which includes a scenic beach. - Paul Bickford/NNSL photo

"This park is my life," she said. "I enjoy every minute of it. Every spring time when it's nice, I just cannot wait to be here."

Benoit, 53, said the main thing she enjoys about the work is the people she meets from all over the world, and listening to their different stories.

"They think that up here it's so wild," she noted. "You take people from Japan or Germany that come here and they say, 'Oh my God, the Northwest Territories is so huge and there's no people.' That's what they like about it."

The visitors remember her hospitality, including one visitor from Germany who later sent her a piece of the Berlin Wall mounted on wood.

Many visitors come from an assortment of European countries, the United States and all over Canada.

Many campers are also from Hay River itself, Benoit said. "They come here all the time. They just love it."

Hay River Territorial Park consists of a beach, 35 campsites and a 21-site area for recreational vehicles that opened last year.

Benoit and another worker check visitors in and out of the park, and make sure the park is clean and ready to greet travellers.

Her work includes walking the beach several times a day.

"It has to be done in the morning and in the afternoon, and, when I go for my walk at night, I also bring a little bag and clean up the beach because there's always garbage," she said.

Benoit said the beach is one of her favourite parts of the park.

"I like the beach," she said. "I go down there in the morning and see the seagull island full of seagulls. Sometimes there are two eagles sitting at the end."

Benoit said, when she started working at the park in 1983, it was just a small 21-site campground owned by the Town of Hay River and was not really being managed. In fact, she said it was kind of a party place.

"There weren't too many tourists then," she recalled.

She started working for the Lions Club, which obtained a town contract to manage the area.

In became a territorial park in 1987.

Eagle 88 Enterprises Ltd., a contracting company owned by Benoit and other members of her family, has the contract to operate the park for the Department of Industry, Tourism and Investment.

When not living and working at the park from May 15 to Sept. 15 each year, Benoit works at the Eagle 88 office, where she is the company treasurer.

Benoit and her husband, Ray, moved west from their home province of New Brunswick, and after a short time in Alberta moved to the NWT.

"I thought, 'Oh well, we're going to go up North, stay there for six months, get rich and go home,'" she recalled. "It didn't happen that way. I got here, got married, got pregnant and that was the end of it, and I would not trade this place for anything in the world."

She worked for a few months as a cook's helper in Fort Providence before she and her husband moved to Hay River and she became park manager that summer.

"For me, it was a little bit hard, because I didn't know very much English when I moved here, but I learned fast," she recalled.

Benoit still goes back to New Brunswick every year to visit her parents. "I go there for a couple of weeks and it's time for me to come home."

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