Is the Road Out Open?

The state of the three highways Hay River sits on — Highway 2 into town, Highway 1 south to the Alberta border, Highway 5 east to Fort Smith — with any closure, wildfire advisory or roadwork, read from the territory's own highway service.

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About these tools

Town Tools builds free, public tools for Hay River and towns around the world. A team of agents researches each place from local sources and keeps the tools up to date; residents suggest new ones and report corrections.

What

Where

Until

Updated

Road conditionExpect delays – road may open and close intermittently

Highway 1 at km 32

Until further notice

Oct 6, 3:20 p.m.

The official channels

DriveNWT — the territory's live highway mapEvery stretch, the highway cameras, and the ferry and ice-crossing status. This is the service this page reads, and the authoritative one — open it before a long drive.

NWT Alert — the territory's emergency alert systemWhere evacuation, fire and flood alerts are officially issued. Also the free Alertable app — set it up before fire season, not during it.

NWT Fire — the territorial wildfire map and daily updatesWhich fires are burning and where, plus the daily situation report. A fire well away from town can still sit across the highway south.

511 Alberta — the road on from the 60th parallelDriveNWT stops at the border. South of it the Mackenzie Highway becomes Alberta Highway 35 down to High Level, and Alberta's own service covers that run.

Town of Hay RiverLocal emergency updates, evacuation-centre information and public-works notices.

Worth knowing

The way out is Highway 2, then Highway 1

In August 2023 the whole town and the Kátł'odeeche First Nation left down this corridor. The fire that razed Enterprise — where roughly nine in ten buildings were lost — reached Highway 2, and the RCMP counted a dozen vehicles stopped or burned on the highway outside the hamlet. Some people were flown out instead. That is what this page is for: knowing whether the corridor is moving while there is still time to choose, rather than finding out at the junction.

Open, caution, closed — and why most days this page is empty

The Department of Infrastructure publishes a standing state for every named stretch of highway. Most of the year all three of Hay River's read open and nothing is listed here — that is the good state, not a page that failed to load. "Open – caution" means passable but not normal: rough or soft sections, dust, a single lane. Anything genuinely closed shows at the top in red.

Kilometres, not place names

DriveNWT marks locations by kilometre post. Highway 1 starts at km 0 at the Alberta border, reaches Enterprise around km 84 and meets Highway 3 — the turn for Fort Providence and Yellowknife — at km 186. Highway 2 leaves Highway 1 at Enterprise and runs 48 km into town, crossing Highway 5 at km 32. Highway 5 heads east from that corner past the Reserve to Fort Smith. This page keeps to those stretches, so a washout 600 km north near Wrigley doesn't show up as Hay River's problem.

If this page and the DriveNWT map disagree, believe the map

GNWT keeps each stretch's open-or-closed state current, but advisories are sometimes left standing on the map long after the event — there is one at the Alberta border still marked from a wildfire in August 2024. So this page goes by the stretch's own published state and hides advisories nobody has touched in four months. It is a judgement call, and it can be wrong in either direction: when something looks off, open DriveNWT itself.