Mounties play hockey in the birthplace of hockey: Deline, N.W.T.

Two Mounties in red serge played a game of shinny last week on a lake that is renowned as the birthplace of hockey.

Does it get any more Canadian than that?

"It was a spur of the moment kind of thing," said Const. Neal Machek, originally of Kelowna, B.C.

Both Mounties are posted to Deline, N.W.T., a community of about 550 people on the shores of Great Bear Lake.

Machek says he and Const. Jason Ellefsen, originally from Saint John, N.B.,were on their way home from a Remembrance Day ceremony at the local school when they noticed the ice on a channel off the big lake appeared to be firm enough for skating.

"There were skidoo tracks and even moose tracks on it," Machek said. "So we took our high brown boots off and threw our skates on and grabbed our hockey gloves and sticks."

Machek's wife Shelagh took a video and posted it to YouTube.

Deline was once known as Fort Franklin, named when the doomed explorer wintered at a Hudson's Bay post in the winter of 1825.

A note in Sir John Franklin's diary about his men playing games of hockey on the ice is believed to be the first recorded mention of the game in North America. It came 18 years before a British army officer, in Kingston, Ont., recorded that he learned to skate and play hockey.

In 2006, N.W.T. MLAs passed a unanimous motion recognizing the community, 538 kilometres north of Yellowknife, as the rightful claimant to being the birthplace of hockey.

That played into the Mountie's desire to get out on the ice in full regalia, but so did the nice weather and fresh, smooth ice.

"I just wanted to get out there and do it, for whatever reason I don't know," Machek told The Huffington Post. "Just something fun to do."