Create your own Northern souvenir

“When guests hold their glass in their hands, you just see their faces light up,” says Matthew Grogono, his own face lighting up at the memories. 

Since 1994, Grogono’s Old Town Glassworks has delighted visitors with a creative workshop steeped in ingenuity, storytelling, and long before it was fashionable, upcycling. The retired, energetic engineer built his colourful studio as a protest against waste — most notably, the bottles and bicycles that ended up in Yellowknife’s landfill.

“The mayor told me that we’re a mining town, so we make it, break it, and throw it away,” explains Grogono. Surely there had to be a better way, like experimenting with trashed bicycle wheels to create a geodesic dome for repair equipment, or turning glass wine, beer and water bottles into a unique Yellowknife souvenir.

Grogono hosts daily workshops at his studio, and explains how he MacGyvered ingenious solutions to the challenge of water recycling, heating, glass cutting, sanding, and stencilling. Enthusiastic and resourceful, he’s the guy you want to be around if the zombies attack. Grogono is also full of great stories, like the Yellowknife beauty queen who briefly became the most wanted woman in Canada, and how he came to win an expensive glass-blaster machine.

Years of experimenting with machine parts have resulted in a fully sustainable operation, inviting you to make your own unique glassware imprinted with iconic images of the north. I sandblast a wolf howling at the northern lights on a green vessel, completed with a stencil of “I made this at Old Town Glassworks” on the bottom. It’s one of the more memorable souvenirs I’ve picked up on my journeys across Canada, and certainly among the most useful.

Old Town Glassworks is a hands-on, family-friendly experience with a positive message about reusing, recycling, reducing, and relearning. Glassware workshops operate five days a week and run approximately two hours.

Having been hunted for furs and meat over millennia, animals of the North are understandably shy and naturally wary of humans. All to say: you might see northern wildlife — I saw a healthy fox run across the street in Old Town — but you might not, and you certainly won’t get close if you do.

“No animal’s life was taken for the purpose of our displays,” explains master taxidermist Greg Robertson at his Nature’s North Wildlife Gallery. Robertson is a talented artist with a very unusual canvas, one that is both morbid and completely fascinating. You’ll see his work on arrival at Yellowknife’s airport, where a large polar bear chases a seal beneath the ice. It’s a taste of what to expect at his taxidermy gallery, featuring a who’s who of iconic Canadian wildlife.

The animals appear as if they’re frozen in life, arranged and displayed with natural movement: a bear chasing honey, lynx kittens in play, beavers constructing a dam, a wolverine chewing a bone, a pack of wolves, a skunk spritzing an overzealous coyote. Some animals were trapped by First Nations as part of their fur and meat quotas, others were donated by wildlife departments or found as roadkill. It’s all presented as respectfully as possible, allowing the animals to live on for compelling educational and storytelling purposes.

The gallery took seven years to complete, and the exhibits involve a complicated process of tanning furs, plastering mannequins, and building wooden frames and prosthetics. Glass eyes, sourced from a taxidermy supplier, are astonishingly realistic. 

Robertson shows me how the animals are literally put together, a glimpse behind the curtain into the creative world of taxidermy. It’s probably the closest you’ll ever get to these iconic northern creatures, and while everyone involved would prefer to see them alive in their natural habitats, their legacy lives in educating young and old about the importance of their conservation.