SOMBA K'E/YELLOWKNIFE
Last year was very good for many of the NWT's territorial parks. The 18 attractions that offer campgrounds saw the number of campers reach its highest total since 2003.

The number of campers in the NWT reached its highest level in over a decade in 2016. Park managers encourage Yellowknifers to head just a bit further afield to free up space in more central parks like Fred Henne Territorial Park, and check out some of the territory's more far-flung wonders ­ like the waterfall, above, in Sambaa Deh Falls Park in the Deh Cho. - NNSL file photo

During the 2016 camping season, 29,158 people camped out overnight in NWT parks - a 2.73-per-cent increase from the year before, beating the previous record of 29,602 overnight visitors in 2003.

"I believe that we have a world-class park system," said Andras Lukacs, research and planning manager for the Department of Industry, Tourism and Investment.

He attributes the rise to infrastructure investment and marketing. And also luck.

"There were no major road closures or fires that affected our parks system," he said. "In previous years, sometimes we had to shut down parks or because of the fire issues our visitation numbers suffered a little bit."

The stats don't include day trippers.

Fred Henne Territorial Park was the most popular, with 9,776 visitors in 2016. Parks operations manager Tara Tompkins isn't surprised Fred Henne did so well.

"Wherever there's a higher population, the parks close to there are going to have more visitors," she said. "Yellowknife is a key destination for tourists to come to the North."

The upswing is in line with a general rise in tourism numbers over 2016. The Department of Industry, Tourism and Investment (ITI) found the number of tourists arriving to view the aurora rose 48 per cent in 2015-16, with total visitors to the NWT rising 11 per cent. Unlike the aurora tourism market however, which relied on overseas tourists, especially from Asia, most of the visitors to territorial parks are Canadian. In its latest statistics, ITI found that 46.37 per cent of visitors to NWT parks came from Canada, while another 40 per cent came from across the NWT. Tompkins and Lukacs say most out-of-province tourists come from B.C., Alberta and Ontario, with overseas visitors coming from Germany and Austria. The downside to more people visiting the parks, however, is more people visiting the parks.

"We had a bottleneck in North Slave because of locals camping here a lot," said Lukacs, adding Yellowknife campers might want to avoid the rush by visiting regional territorial parks.

Parks further away from population centres saw their attendance drop as much as 26.98 per cent in 2016.

For the fourth year, the NWT parks system will be launching an online camp-spot booking tool in April. The department is also looking at extending the parks season.

Blackstone Park, in the Deh Cho, saw its visitor rate rise by 49.48 per cent, the highest surge across all the parks. In 2016, Blackstone extended its season by a full month, closing on Oct. 15 when most other parks in the NWT closed on Sept. 15.

Tompkins said they are looking to keep a couple of the other parks open longer this year, as well as potentially introducing winter activities in the future.

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