Homestead
Northwest Territories
This is not a farm nor a lodge, but if you are looking at experiencing true Bush Life and the old, but now rare, Canadian wilderness lifestyle, along with some of the traditional ways of its First People, this would be the place to be.
We live very remote in this vast Boreal Forest of the barely populated Northwest Territories (the closest road is 180 km away and our closest neighbours are the isolated community of Lutsel K'e; so the ways of moving about out here are still the natural pathways of this Land and its waters...)
About ten years ago, I , Oliver , started building a cabin out here , 80 km away from the small isolated First Nation Dene village of Lutsel K'e where i had been living and learning for ten years by then, cause i wanted to be even deeper in the Bush and make a home from scratch and from the local materials.
So i started building this first little log cabin for my good friends from Lutsel K'e and started living out here.
I was trying to raise a dog team and needed fish to feed them and i while i was busy building so i was always fishing and would naturally dry whatever fish was extra into traditional "dryfish" (once a staple of the diet of this Land s First People the Dene Suline (Chippewyan)).
On my next trip to town (Lutsel K'e) or later on to the city of Yellowknife (180km away) i would arrive with a pile of dryfish that people would be eager to buy at a friendly price...
And this how i naturally started fishing commercially...
So today , we still make a "living" by fishing and making dryfish, both as a trading item that we can sell to then buy things from town that we don t get or make here, but also of course , and before anything else , as a staple food for ourselves and however many dogs we have...
So we fish everyday , and we use whatever is available locally as much as possible , whether it be for building (logs and wood), or hunting for meat , working on hides and furs, collecting materials for making baskets, picking berries and wild plants for food, and of course recently (since the arrival here of Devon from Nova Scotia), making a beautiful organic garden for growing some other foods !!
So here is a bit about Devon...:
Hi, I'm Devon, & I've been living off-grid, off & on, throughout my adult life. I've been living as an agriculturalist for the last 20 years, mainly in homesteading, organic market gardening, & fruit growing. I have experience with agriculture both on a small scale (family production, roadside, small CSAs) & larger scale (supplying wineries, farmers markets, restaraunts). My dream has always been to be as self-sufficient as possible, so when I met Olivier & learned about his camp, & way of life... combining our skills became the natural next step. And the beauty of this place truly captured my heart.
We have established a subsistence food garden, & we preserve the harvest using traditional methods of root cellaring, canning, fermenting, & drying (no freezers or fridges out here). So far, we have created extensive hügelkultur style raised beds & planters, using largely local materials & renewable resources to build our soils, with as few "bought" inputs as possible. Our fishing practices also feed our soils, as we make our own bloodmeal, & fish is an important part of our soil fertility program. There is a small greenhouse, of wood and up-cycled materials. We are expanding our gardens, as well as the semi-managed “food forest” & berry production every year. I will be continuing to explore: permaculture design, regenerative agriculture, hügelkultur, deep mulching methods, growing with lunar cycles, creating fish fertilizer, forest gardening, & other "semi-managed" landscapes. I'm an avid wildcrafter, so there will be opportunity in that area as well. As a certified RT200+ yoga teacher, there will be opportunities for those interested in regular movement practice.
So there u go for now : I started hosting wwoofers since the spring of 2017, as a way to get a hand out here but also a way to connect and share with like minded people, and i m happy to say that i have met some of my very best friends that way!!
Being so remote , we take people in for a minimum of three months, while the longer the stay the better for us .
You would have your own log cabin (actually slighty bigger than ours) and we would of course feed you very well, with mainly food from this land.
You would be expected to help process the fish (about 3 hours per day most of everyday), and for the rest it would be up to your liking to take part in all the other activities: gardening and establishing this garden, canoeing, hunting, playing with a little lazer sailboat, digging and building a root cellar and an ice house, and if we still have time tanning hides (probably later in the season though) and potentially and hopefully building a small wooden sailing and rowing boat if we find the time and if my boatbuider friend comes this summer (might be next summer)...
And also, the other major task you would be expected to cover is to keep the place and take care of it while we re away if that was to happen (although mostly one of us would stay behind), which is then basically housesitting...
So please free to get in touch if you’re interested so we can talk a little deeper about it .
Hope to be in touch soon.
Devon and Oliver , from Five Snares Bay on Great Slave Lake.
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Host type
Production farm
Oliver
Member since 2017
Languages spoken:
English, French
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Response rate: 100%
Response time: typically within 3 days
Northwest Territories
Yellowknife
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