Day 29 (June 12). Lesser Slave Lake and Peace River

From: Athabasca, AB

To: Peace River, AB

Miles today: 248

Total miles: 6815

It was chilly when I pulled out this morning, around 50 degrees, but the sky was clear and blue.  I rode AB 2 northwest for about a hundred miles to the town of Slave Lake, which is on Lesser Slave Lake.  (I will get to Great Slave Lake in a couple of days.) On a break at Lake Lawrence (I swear I didn’t know that when I pulled off), I came across this familiar sign amongst the Aspens. “If a bear mauls you, you will be fined!”  (I do agree with the approach; I just find it amusing at a certain level.)

Bear warning sign

The town of Slave Lake was quite a bit bigger than I expected – about 7000 people.  It borders the Lesser Slave Lake Provincial Park, and it was there I went to see this body of water.   It was really striking when I came over the rise and saw it. Waves!

Lesser Slave Lake

The blue skies disappeared pretty fast, and rain was clearly on the way.  I stopped for a quick lunch at the town of High Prairie (this name, like “Greenland,” is a bit misleading – this is not prairie any more), then bundled up and headed for the town of Peace River another hundred miles up the road.  It rained most of the way, a cold steady rain but no lightening.  I broke out my cold weather gloves, but even so, I want to sing the praises of whoever invented heated motorcycle grips.

The town of Peace River is, as one might expect, along the river of the same name.  The entrance to the area is fairly dramatic, because the land all around is flat and then there is this enormous river valley carved a thousand feet down into it.  The town is at the bottom of the river valley. It looks like it is surrounded by hills, but these are all artifacts of the river. This is another town of about 7000 people, with a Chinese restaurant (where I ate dinner) owned by real Chinese. 

Main Street in the town of Peace River, looking toward the river

There are lots of other groups here as well, including those calling themselves “First Nations.”  This is a generic term for all indigenous peoples other than Inuit (the term “Eskimo” is considered pejorative) and  Metis (a group descended from an early mixing of aboriginal and European/African peoples who now mostly marry only each other and live in fairly well-defined regions).  The term “First Nations” can be thought of as synonymous with “Indians,” except the former was self-selected and not as irritating.

One of the most important First Nations groups in this area are the Dunne-za, apparently a subset of the Dene that I will be seeing lots more of on this trip.  The Dunne-za / Dene speak one of the Athapaskan family of languages, and were sometimes referred to by their Cree (Algonquian – speaking) rivals as Slaves (no relation to our use of this word, but it is the source of the Lesser and Great lakes of these names).  These two groups came into conflict when the Crees got guns from fur traders in the late 1600s and pushed the Dunne-za west.  Later these groups, each supported by a different British fur trading company, fought each other repeatedly and bitterly.  After smallpox hit the Cree hard, the two groups settled on the big river through these parts as the permanent boundary between their regions of hunting and influence, so they called it the Peace River (that is the English translation, of course). 

The Peace River itself, from the levee at the edge of town

Today I saw logging trucks on the roads for the first time in quite a while.  I also saw my first oil fields, as I am now on the edge of the famous oil sands of Alberta.