My route:

Rankin Inlet...
It was windy with a splattering of rain in Rankin Inlet:
the Rankin airport:
Yellowknife...
Moving on to Yellowknife, it was nice to be south of the treeline again. With a population of around 20,000, Yellowknife sits on the north shore of Great Slave Lake and is the capital city of the Northwest Territory. Besides the government activity, the city's growth is fed by local diamond mines, including De Beer's new Snap Lake Diamond Mine. Yellowknife was warm - humid even, in the 20s.
Here are some pics from around the city:

... and, of course, no visit to Yellowknife would be complete without taking in some of the historic landmarks, like the Wildcat Cafe:
Cambridge Bay...
The hamlet of Cambridge Bay sits on the last leg of the fabled Northwest Passage - Franklin never quite made it that far; his ship ended it's journey in the ice pack surrounding nearby King William Island and from there he and his crew struck out on their final ill-fated attempt to save themselves by traveling overland.
There was a low ceiling of clouds over Cambridge Bay when our plane landed - they send up balloons and time how long it takes for them to disappear from sight to determine the height of the cloud cover and whether or not it's safe to land. Rain and cold wind greeted me in Cambay (as the locals as the locals sometimes refer to it)... and, of course, the local mosquito committee.
The hamlet is situated well above the arctic circle and even in the end of July there was only maybe an hour or two of darkness/twilight - as was confirmed to me when I woke up at 4:30am the first night with the sun beating down through the bedroom window at me.
My hosts graciously allowed me the use of an ATV while I was there and it was great fun to go tooling around the town and countryside. The ATV is even more prevalent as everyday transportation than in Iqaluit; I'd guess that the auto to ATV ratio is about 1:1.
There is a stark beauty to the place with its vast expanses of barren tundra where the pure colours of sky, water, soil and rock are unchallenged by distraction.
Here is a picture of the town:
When I first arrived, ice still clung to the shoreline of the bay; a couple of days later it had disappeared.
This is a docking station for float planes:
We got a chance to take a ride out the southern coast of Victoria Island where we saw the strait leading into the last leg of the Northwest Passage, Coronation Gulf. Local inhabitants build cabins out here where they come on weekends to escape the hustle and bustle of the hamlet:
On our way back to town from Mount Pelly, we noticed a couple of Muskox very close to the hamlet. My host didn't want to bring her truck over a small bailey bridge, so when we got back to town, I jumped on the ATV and headed out to see if I could get a picture of them. I saw them again from the road near town, but when I got down close to that area, I couldn't see them from the road... so, I guessed that they might be over a hill, and I parked the ATV and climbed up and over. Sure enough, there were two of them on the other side of a flat area with a marsh on the far side, just in front of the Muskox:
This radar station was part of the Defense Early Warning ("DEW") Line that the Americans set up during the cold war. It is now part of the North Warning System.