It was a brilliant, mid-week afternoon, and Humphries was strolling through the dump. About a dozen other people were out rummaging through the day’s pickings.

Some of the city’s safety changes were evident. The dirt paths into the dumping areas have been widened to accommodate traffic. New signs direct visitors through the piles. The improvements are a step back to what it used to look like, remarked Humphries, who has become a kind of curator for the place, thanks in part to his Yellowknifer column “Tales from the Dump.”

But Humphries is more interested in economics than politics or history. “Your standard of living improves when you can find things at the dump,” he said, raising his voice to cut through the screaming of seagulls overhead. “If you find a toaster out here, you’re not going to go buy a toaster. But you are going to spend that money on something else. When I was building a cabin, half the cabin came from the dump—windows, doors, hinges. We found one of the early chainsaws out here, one of the first ones made. That was kind of neat,” he said.

In a recent column, Humphries estimated the dump puts something like half a million dollars into the local economy. “Shopping”—as scavenging is sometimes called in the local argot—also contributes to the culture of the community.

Yellowknife isn’t the frontier mining town it was before 1967, when it became the capital of the Northwest Territories. It’s a modern city, a centre of government, constitutional politics, diamond mining, gem cutting, and transportation into Canada’s arctic. Growth has tamed much of the frontier character, but not the desire to embrace the mythology of frontier life.

As Yellowknife has become more ordinary, the effort to seize on quirky traditions has become more pronounced. The dump is now an occasional tourist attraction. A couple of local filmmakers based a cable-access TV show among the heaps, a program that mixed the charms of Antiques Roadshow with demolition derby. One show featured the fishing columnist for the newspaper casting lines into the greasy piles.

Individual expression reaches its zenith, perhaps, with people like Craig Yeo, who’s decorated most of his home with findings from the dump. A kind of Martha Stewart for trash, Yeo has fashioned a headboard for his bed from abandoned goalie pads. He built a privacy screen from metal bunk beds once used at the local jail. He even hangs stuff on his walls, notably a hand-made diorama of the Last Supper that includes a chorus line of feral Barbies.

Yeo’s aesthethic manifesto is simple enough. “I figured I’d rather have garbage than buy garbage… Even if it’s crap—ugly crap!—it’s still better than the crap that everybody else in the world has got, that doesn’t last and that you have to pay through the nose for.”

The current truce between the public and the city council may not last forever. Yellowknife’s other funky traditions—notably the tumbledown shacks of Old Town and the houseboats on Yellowknife Bay—have from time to time fallen under the gaze of the city’s safety mavens. Projections suggest Yellowknife has a number of boom years ahead. As it grows, conflicts between the needs of the new and the desires of the old will rise again.