By Tristin Hopper

Somewhere in Northern Alberta last week, a rogue backhoe operator ploughed through a fiber optic cable. It’s only a few inches wide – no bigger than the outlet pipes under your kitchen sink. Yet this unassuming cable is the Yukon’s sole ground-based connection to the web. Once cut, Northwestel’s network reverts to a backup grid of 1990s-era microwave towers. Cell phone networks crash, the internet grinds to a snail’s pace and long distance calls become a crap-shoot.

By Lauren McKeon

This week, new Indian and Northern Affairs Minister John Duncan read out the federal government’s official apology for the forced relocation of 19 Inuit families in the 1950s. These 87 Inuit, who later became known as the High Arctic exiles, were taken from their homes in Inukjuak, on the northeast shore of Hudson Bay, and displaced thousands of miles north to empty expanses of land – now Resolute Bay and Grise Fiord.

By Tristin Hopper

Every Whitehorse woman knows them. They’re the men that pelt them with obscenities at them as they walk to work. They’re the men that pull over beside a teenage girl and ask her “how she could be so cute.” Some call them gawkers, some call them dirtbags - and they’re seemingly everywhere, forever crowding the street corners and bars of Downtown Whitehorse.

By Tim Querengesser

If I were rich -- and I mean oil-tycoon rich -- I would try many ridiculously indulgent things. One of them would be to follow the midnight sun for a year. There's something about life in constant sunlight that warms my soul. Stretching days in ways they refuse to be stretched at other times of the year makes me feel triumphant, like I've discovered the secret to overcoming time. Of course, that feeling has disappeared with the August return of proper darkness here in Yellowknife, at 62.25 degrees north. Now, I wish I were rich enough to fly further north (vacation in Alert?) for another month of one a.m. sunlight.

By Tristin Hopper

For almost four years, each day in Todd Hardy’s life could have been his last.

By Tim Querengesser

My favourite bit of cocktail party trivia about working at Up Here comes from our readership. A lot of our readers -- the majority in fact -- live in the south. When I drop this tidbit, I'm challenged to explain why it's so. In a nut, the reason is that former Northerners turned southerners, people who've visited here and fallen in love with the place, as well as the families of people who've decided to move here, all like to keep in touch with the North. Up Here is this diaspora-like community's periodical.

By the editors

Admit it: You love Up Here for its stunning photos more than its award- winning writing. We're fine with that. In fact, we like to celebrate it -- and our 10th reader photo contest is proof. We know you, our readers, have captured the North with your camera. Here's your chance to show everyone else your skills behind the lens.

By Aaron Spitzer

It’s been about 25 years since I read a comic book, but this past week I’ve been poring over Skookum’s North, by Whitehorse’s Doug Urquhart. The book came out back in 1994 and was the first collection of Urquhart’s Paws comic strips, which depict the misadventures of Skookum the sled dog and his master, the bush-savvy trapper Marten Fisher.

By Tristin Hopper

Prospectors flooded in from the gold fields. Volkswagen-loads of government workers drove in from Whitehorse and planeloads of guitar-toting musicians buzzed into Dawson’s gravel airport. The Dawson City Music Festival had begun.

By Lauren McKeon

This is the way we heard it from a friend of a friend: If you go to Hay River, and take a left way out near the outer edges, you’ll reach the place VWs go to die, giving their parts up for other, still putt-putting busses. If your bus can make it without becoming its own tin tombstone, their graveyard is yours to pillage.