Yellowknife (Canada) - It's minus 31 deg C outside and the windows of my Toyota 4x4 are covered in a thick layer of frost. The cold, a regular feature of life in Yellowknife, Canada, is just too much for the jeep's overwhelmed heaters.

My only view of the outside world comes from a clear patch of windscreen about the size of a medium pizza, the frost chiselled away using a pen cap.

The opening, though, is enough to weave through the snow-capped roads of Yellowknife, a frontier town of 19,000 a couple of hundred kilometres south of the Arctic Circle. It is early March and the remote outpost is still in the grip of a long, cold, dark winter that began almost six months ago.

Suddenly, the asphalt road that I'm driving on comes to an end and the jeeps slips, almost seamlessly, onto an avenue of ice. In three months, this will be the surface of Great Slave Lake, for centuries a way station for explorers venturing into the rugged Canadian north in search of everything from furs to diamonds.

For now, though, it is a short cut that connects Yellowknife's modern new quarter with its quaint Old Town, a collection of wood cabins, fish restaurants and fur shops that hark back to the area's gold-mining boom of the 1930s and 1940s.

The snow has been worn away from several sections of the road, laying bare the light-blue ice and its deep, somewhat disconcerting cracks.

WILD WILD WEST: Lakes, pine forests and animals such as the bison can be found in the North-west Territories.

In a couple of minutes, I come upon the unquestioned highlight of March in Yellowknife: a 30m-long castle - complete with parapet, chapel and concert hall - forged from snow. A 2m-tall ice dragon guards the entrance, staring out over a vast field of white that stretches to the horizon.

Out front is a man with a bushy, grey beard that makes him look like an 18th-century courier de bois, the French explorers who ventured deep into the Canadian bush to trade in furs.

But he speaks in a faux British accent. "Welcome to my domain, kind sir," he says.

His name is Tony Folio and he lives in a floating house - now wedged into the ice - not far away. Every March, he becomes the Snow King and lords over a mini-empire that springs to life on the ice just outside Yellowknife.

For more than a decade, he has been building snow castles which have played host to everything from rock concerts to couples looking to spend a night under the stars, only to bulldoze them come the end of March.

The quirky, ephemeral festival has become one of the biggest draws in Yellowknife, the capital of a quasi-province called the North-west Territories. The region stretches from the 60th parallel - the arbitrary division between the Far North and the Really Far North - all the way to the Arctic Ocean.

About twice the size of Thailand, it is home to just 42,000 people, many of them descendants of the first people to cross into North America from present-day Russia.

It's a spectacular land of pine forests, rolling tundra, Northern Lights and animals, such as the bison, that have long become extinct in the south.

For more than 300 years, this harsh land has lured fur traders, prospectors and explorers hoping to tame their own small plot.

Today, the gold that drew thousands to Yellowknife in the first half of the 20th century is almost gone, but the resource bonanza continues. The North-west Territories is home to an incredible wealth of oil, natural gas and diamonds.

The capital has benefited much from the most recent resource rush. Multi-million-dollar homes are popping up on the rocky shores of Great Slave Lake. In summer, the streets are flecked with British sports cars and apartment rents rival those in Vancouver and Toronto.

Amid the frenetic development, though, vestiges of the past remain. At the centre of Yellowknife's Old Town is a collection of bright-coloured, ramshackle cabins known as the Woodyard. They are home to a collection of hearty, latter-day hippies many of whom brave temperatures that routinely drop to minus 35 deg C with only wood-fired stoves and no running water.

Not far away is the Wildcat Cafe, a log-cabin restaurant that dates back to the late 1930s. It was once the domain of gold miners and daring bush pilots. Today, it is one of the best places in town to sample local delicacies like musk-ox, bison and arctic char. Nearby is Bullock's Bistro, a throw-back restaurant renowned across Canada for its world-class fish and surly waitresses.

"Here you go," says one as she drops a simmering plate of bass on my table. "Get your own beer from the fridge."

When it comes to northern quirks, though, nothing beats the iconic Gold Range Bar. For almost six decades, miners, pilots, natives and politicians have come here to gamble, drink and fight. Long reputed to be one of the sleaziest bars in the Canadian West, it has calmed down in recent years. But the night my friends and I visit, that frontier spirit is in full blossom.

A country band is blasting out Lynyrd Skynyrd and most of the crowd are well into their "cups", local jargon for proper drunk.

We sit at a table which has a carpeted top - soaked with beer, by the way - and order a couple of Canada's finest from a waitress with dark circles under her eyes and a haircut that hasn't been popular since the 1980s.

The band soldiers on, pumping out classics from Heart to Shania Twain, and couples take to the dance floor, showing off their best drunken two-steps.

Back outside, the temperature has probably dropped another five degrees. Standing on Yellowknife's main street and waiting in vain for a taxi, my eyelashes begin to freeze together and my nose takes on a purple tinge.

Then I look up and see the Northern Lights cascading across the sky, and suddenly the cold doesn't seem so bad. The brilliant bands of green, produced by atomic collisions in the upper atmosphere, seem like they are falling out of the sky - and onto my head. I stand there mesmerised, alongside an old drunk who had been thrown out of the Gold Range a while earlier.

It is an otherworldly experience, much like the rest of life in Canada's far north.

It takes about four connections and 24 hours to get from Singapore to Yellowknife. Airfare will be around $2,500 per head and a decent hotel will cost about $200 a night.