Is it a house? Is it a boat? It’s a boathouse!

I drove on the Great Slave Lake to a strange view: colourful houses, some no bigger than a garden shack, scattered in the bay opposite the Old Town.

My first thought was that it must feel pretty neat to own a tiny island and build a house on it. In the summer you canoe to work and in the winter you can drive up to your house on your private ice road!

But as I approached the houses to snap a few pictures, I realized that these houses are not built on tiny islands – they are houseboats, floating on all manner of pontoons. Only then did it hit me that these must be the famous Yellowknife houseboats everybody has been telling me from day one.

I did some research and it turns out the houseboats are, perhaps, the most photographed landmarks (watermarks???) in Yellowknife. There are hundreds of blogs about the houseboats and some great pictures. Check them out.

Here’s a picture of one of the houseboats in the summer. As the watermark at the bottom of the photograph says, I pulled this picture from the Life in the Knife blog.