Fort McMurray is not a pretty northern town, and that is not the point. It is the service city for the Athabasca oil sands, a place where global energy, boreal forest, river geography, Indigenous history, boom-and-bust economics, and wildfire memory all meet in the same streets.
The city clears the World66 bar because it explains something few places explain in person. The Oil Sands Discovery Centre and the giant mining machines north of town make the scale of the industry visible, while the Snye and the Clearwater-Athabasca river setting remind you that Fort McMurray is also a northern river community.
Do not come expecting a conventional sightseeing town. Come if you are already in northern Alberta, curious about the oil sands, or using the city as a base for Wood Buffalo country. One spare day here is enough to understand why Fort McMurray matters.