Yellowknife to Inuvik: distance, driving time and fuel cost
It is about 1,279 km from Yellowknife, Northwest Territories to Inuvik, Northwest Territories, which is roughly 12 hr 37 min of driving. Everything here is an estimate.
Both ends of this route are in Northwest Territories, so it stays within one province and one set of road rules the whole way. At about 12 hr 37 min behind the wheel this is at the edge of a single day. Split over two stages it is a straightforward trip; attempted in one push it is not.
The average of about 101 km/h used here already allows for slower going at each end of the trip, but not for weather, roadworks or a stop. Distances are shown in kilometres first because that is how they are signed in Canada, with miles alongside for anyone working from a US map. Every figure is an estimated road distance rather than a routed one — the method is the same one used across the site.
Both ends keep the same clock, so you arrive on the local time you set off with and nothing needs adjusting on the way. Fuel is quoted here in US dollars per US gallon for consistency with the rest of the site; Canadian pumps price per litre and rates differ by province, so convert before treating the figure as a budget rather than a comparison.
Reading these figures in metric, and where they come from
The 1,279 km here is a road estimate, not a routed distance. Straight across the map the two places are about 1,103 km apart, so the roads add roughly 16% on top of the line. That penalty is what makes a straight-line measurement useless for planning fuel: it is the tarmac that decides the distance, and the tarmac goes where the terrain and the settlements allow.
The fuel figure needs converting before it means anything at a Canadian pump. About 31.3 US gallons is roughly 118 litres, and Canadian prices are quoted per litre and vary by province and by tax. Multiply that litre count by whatever the pump says rather than converting the dollar total, which folds in a US price assumption you probably do not want. The consumption behind it is a US fleet average, published with everything else under fuel cost assumptions.
One limitation worth stating plainly: the place dataset behind this site covers Canada far more thinly than the United States, which is why there is no list of towns along the way on this page and why only a small set of Canadian routes exists at all. The reasoning behind that set is on the Canadian routes index. For anything on the US side, the calculator answers any pair of the sixteen thousand American places in the dataset, with the towns on the corridor included.
Estimated road distance
1,279km
795 miles
- Drive time
- 12 hr 37 min
- Average speed
- 63 mph
- Fuel cost
- $99
- Fuel used
- 31.3 gal
Driving or flying?
Driving
- Distance
- 795 mi
- Time behind the wheel
- 12 hr 37 min
- Fuel cost
- $99
- CO₂
- 278 kg
Flying
- Distance in the air
- 685 mi
- Time in the air
- 1 hr 22 min
- Door to door
- 3 hr 52 min
- CO₂ per passenger
- 164 kg
Flying saves roughly 8 hr 45 min door to door on this route, even after security, boarding and getting to and from the airports. Driving emits about 1.7× more CO₂ than flying it, counting one passenger in the car. Door-to-door flying time assumes 2 hours 30 minutes of airport and ground overhead.
Questions about these numbers
How far is Inuvik from Yellowknife?
How long is the drive?
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Is this driving distance or straight-line distance?
Other Canadian routes
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