Day 32 (June 15). Great Slave Lake and around Fort Providence

From: Hay River, NWT

To: Fort Providence, NWT

Miles today: 215

Total miles: 7501

The town of Hay River is a few miles upstream of the Great Slave Lake, which is the tenth biggest lake in the world, but only the second biggest in the Northwest Territories (after Great Bear Lake, to the north).  It is also the end of the railway lines from southern Canada, so it serves as a staging area for getting resources to all of the smaller communities further north, especially in winter.  When the Great Slave Lake freezes, you can drive trucks over it. Hay River has probably been featured in the TV show “Ice Road Truckers”; I will have to watch for it when I get back.

I drove the five miles or so from the town to the Great Slave Lake itself.  It has a sandy beach, covered with driftwood.  Beautiful.  Unfortunately, no ice floes; I probably missed them by a week or two.  Nonetheless, my blog’s name remains.  This lake is the remnant of another glacial lake called Lake McConnell, not as big as Lake Agassiz but still pretty big.

Left: The Great Slave Lake in NWT, near Hay River.  Right: My boots in the lake. 

From the lake, I retraced my route back through Hay River and then Enterprise, and then turned west on NWT 1.  After a hundred miles or so the road forks, and I took the right fork (NWT 3) north to the town of Fort Providence, another 20 or 30 miles beyond.  This was necessary because there is gasoline at Fort Providence, and none on the other fork until the town of Fort Simpson, another 180 miles beyond the fork.  I will head to Fort Simpson tomorrow, but not without gas.

The Hay River flows into the Great Slave Lake, from the south.  The mighty Mackenzie River flows out of this same lake, to the west.  Most Americans are unfamiliar with the Mackenzie River, but counting its tributaries it is the second-longest river in North America, after the Missouri-Mississippi.  There are no major cities along it, and it empties into the frigid Arctic Ocean, which probably accounts for why it is not better known. 

Still it is a huge river, and in order to get to Fort Providence I would have to cross it.  Until recently, this would have been done with a ferry, but since 2012 it is now crossed by the impressive Deh Cho Bridge. (Deh Cho is the Dene name for the Mackenzie River; it roughly translates as “big river,” like Rio Grande.) Not only is it visually attractive, it was built under arduous conditions, and to survive things like large chunks of ice running into its piers during the ice breakup season.  It provides an all-weather route not only to Fort Providence, which is quite small, but also Yellowknife, which is the capitol of the Northwest Provinces and on the north side of the Great Slave Lake. 

The impressive Deh Cho Bridge over the Mackenzie River

Fort Providence seems more like an outpost to me than a town, but people live there and it is located on one of the places where the Mackenzie River “braids” into multiple smaller routes.  The view from the only hotel in town, the Snowshoe Inn, overlooks the river. 

Location of Fort Simpson on the Upper Mackenzie River, with Great Slave Lake

It being a short day, I decided to take a side trip and continue up NWT 3 toward Yellowknife. This was still several hundred miles away, but just going 35 miles or so gave me the chance to actually enter the great geological feature called the Canadian Shield that I had been skirting for a thousand miles or more. I’ll have more to say about this later. \

The Canadian Shield, being essentially bare bedrock scrubbed clear by glaciers, is dotted with thousands, perhaps millions of small ponds because the rain water has no place to go.  I pulled off NWT 3 onto a dirt side “road” to see one of these lakes close up, but ran into the scene below: what appears to me to be a genuine indigenous housing arrangement.  I took the picture then turned the cycle around so as not to further disturb anyone.

On the edge of the Canadian Shield, about 35 miles north of Fort Providence.

On the way back I stopped at a formal “turnout” where I could see another small lake.  This one seemed to have a small mobile home parked at the end of a short dirt trail leading to the pond.  I made enough noise in trying to photograph the pond to disturb the person staying there, a guy from Quebec named Ghert.  He was searching for morels, a type of mushroom that is very valuable and only grows in forests the year after they have experienced a fire.  I had noticed the burned areas driving out; this is a common event, but of course had been fairly traumatic for the locals last year.  He showed me his finds thus far, which were impressive; he was kind enough to give me a small one as a souvenir.  He is a morel hunter by profession; normally he hunts in his home province of Quebec, but there had not been very many fires there last year. So here he is, like me, visiting the Northwest Territories for the first time.

Morel hunter and his quarry

One final note: the motorcycle trip I took in 1980, from San Francisco to Houston, covered about 7500 miles in five weeks.  I am approximately at that stage now on this trip.