That there is a Trout Rock Lodge at all (its northern pike fishing is beyond excellent) has much to do with an empty chair in a Yellowknife bar. In 1986, Wesstrom, then a Swedish merchant mariner, left home for a yearlong hunting and fishing trip. There was one place he especially yearned to go, and that was Great Slave Lake. As a kid, Wesstrom, obsessed with Jack London stories, had read about this symbolic destination of the Far North. "I told myself that I would go there one day," Wesstrom recalls. In the summer of 1987, he drove the 900 miles from Edmonton to Yellowknife. "I walked into a bar and there was a table with three native girls and four chairs." He laughs. "I figured, 'What the hell,' and sat down. I met my wife my first night in Yellowknife."

His wife, Doreen Drygeese, is Yellowknives Dene, and the great-granddaughter of a venerated chief. Without the Aboriginal connection, Wesstrom figures he never would have received a territorial permit for his 1,000 square miles of hunting and fishing lands. Even so, it took him two years to gain permission from tribal elders.