May 2016; 

It’s time for my semi-annual trip to the north, leaving the spring beauty of Vancouver Island to fly to Yellowknife in Northwest Territories of Canada.  What does a piano technician do in Yellowknife, you may ask?  Well, you’d be suprised how many pianos there are in these northern communities…the residents surround themselves with music and arts as one way to pass the long winters.  I’ve been travelling to Yellowknife to tune and repair pianos for close to 16 years now, and there’s always a bit more adventure waiting for me up there.

This year, I had to go service a piano that was in a houseboat out on the lake.  Normally, access to the house-boat is pretty straight forward…the residents canoe there in the summer, and drive their vehicles across the very thick ice in the winter.  But in May, it’s a bit more of a challenge.  The ice is rotting from below, and although one can still walk on it, it can be very dangerous because it can break up at any instant.  So the means of getting there for these spring weeks involves strapping on a life jacket, holding onto the side of a canoe and then carefully shuffling across the ice, hoping it won’t break up and I won’t fall through! 

After that…servicing the piano seems easy!  For more about my Yellowknife piano servicing trips, see my story called “Tuning North of 60 degrees Lattitude” on my website.