PWAC Victoria Writer's Corner: A Reading Room Selection by Lyn Hancock

The Reading Room

Flying to the Falls

by Lyn Hancock © 1992/1996

Excerpt from a photo-essay book looking for a publisher. Earlier versions appeared in The Globe and Mail, July 2, 1994 and in Nahanni Notes, a travel promotion newspaper based in Fort Simpson, NWT.

The world west of Fort Simpson has more varied and spectacular landforms than anywhere else in North America. You can appreciate their complexity best from the air.

Three times a week Ptarmigan Air flies a scheduled route between Fort Simpson and Whitehorse over the vast uninhabited "no man's land" of the Mackenzie Mountains but for an intimate customized look at this compelling scenery, take a day trip by float plane or helicopter to Nahanni National Park and the Ram Canyons.

Fort Liard and Lindberg Landing on the Liard Highway have float plane service but your most convenient starting point is Fort Simpson where both fixed wing and helicopter flights are available. Take your pick but the most economical way is sharing a twin otter charter with a dozen or so other people. A typical day trip includes two hours at Virginia Falls and an hour at Little Doctor Lake.

If weather causes an alteration in the itinerary, the pilot sometimes substitutes a surprise, perhaps a drop-in at some beautifully hand-crafted log house in the bush, perhaps an abandoned mine site. Remaining flexible and taking advantage of sudden opportunities is part of the charm of adventure travel in the Northwest Territories.

Let's Go

Our plane takes off from Fort Simpson's float plane dock opposite Albert Faille's cabin. It is a sweltering hot day in July and most people are in shorts though we have been told that weather changes rapidly in the mountains so we carry jackets--and mosquito repellent, just in case.

Once aloft and looking down, we see clearly that Fort Simpson lies on an island where the Liard and the Mackenzie Rivers meet. From this wide-angle view, the mighty Mackenzie lives up to its description. The Dene call it Dehcho, Great River. Here at Fort Simpson it cuts a mile-wide swathe across a vast subarctic muskeg plain, coiling westward then northward for a thousand miles. It is Canada's largest and longest river. In the Americas, the Mackenzie is surpassed only by the Amazon and the Missouri-Mississippi.

"Plenty of puddles," comments one of the passengers, amazed by the mosaic of shiny little lakes, each reflecting the sky--and our plane--as we pass overhead. "Are those squiggles man-made?" asks another as we clear the winding Martin River.

Down below, the land is a giant jigsaw puzzle of contrasting shapes and patterns. Ironically, nature makes the soft swirls and squiggles of ponds and streams, humans make the seismic lines that cut across them, running ramrod straight to the horizon.

Twenty minutes later, we pass Sibbeston and Tsetso Lakes, named after local Dene families, and then follow the wriggling Little Sibbeston River into Little Doctor Lake.

Little Doctor Lake

The change in terrain as we leave the flat country and enter the first wall of mountains is dramatic. Nobody can forget the sudden impact of seeing Little Doctor Lake for the first time. Some 25,000 years ago, an immense ice sheet punched a hole through the formidable Nahanni Range leaving a stupendous split called the Gap which is now filled with the waters of the lake.

We sweep through the Gap and the mountains part like a curtain as if enticing us onto a stage for even more drama ahead. Grey, crenellated cliffs rise several thousand feet on each side of our plane. Suddenly, the pilot turns, banks along one of the walls and flies back to give us another view. Finally, he swoops in to land with a splash on a sandy beach.

Old-time residents, trappers and prospectors, Gus and Mary Kraus lived here when their cabin at the hotsprings on the South Nahanni River became part of Nahanni National Park. Gus says that Little Doctor Lake was named after Taka, a Dene shaman or medicine man who was quite short. Taka also means "moving water" and as Gus says "there's always a breeze coming through the Gap."

Gus has passed away but Mary now lives in a shiny new cabin at the Stanley Isaiah Senior Citizens' Home in Fort Simpson. However, you can stay in their old home at Little Doctor Lake which is run as a do-it-yourself naturalists' lodge. Serenity is assured as guests have the lake to themselves--to swim and fish, to photograph wildflowers or pick berries, to hike game and trapping trails, to watch sandpipers scurry along the shore or to look for Dall sheep on the mountains. Or perhaps, like Gus, to sit at the window and dream of Nahanni gold.

We stop long enough to catch a pickerel and chat to the family staying at the lodge, then the pilot beckons us to the plane.

Little Doctor Lake's dramatic cleavage through the Nahanni Range is just the gateway to even more spectacular landforms beyond. Within minutes we have crested the ramparts of the Nahanni Range and dropped into the Ram River Valley. We are heading west over the chocolate coils of the Tetcela River which twists and turns and wraps around itself to form billabongs at almost every bend. Beside it, the more sedate Ram River squeezes out of the Mackenzie Mountains past another incredible landform, the Ram Plateau.

Ram Plateau

The Ram Plateau is a flat-topped tableland rearing four thousand feet from the floor of the valley but the word "plateau" can't convey its complicated topography of contorted canyons, rock towers, honeycombed caves, sinkholes, cenotes, rock bridges, poljes and vertical-walled karst streets.

Karst is a type of landscape whose limestone features have been dissolved by water. It's the kind of landscape you'd expect in the dry southwest United States, not the subarctic north. Some geologists say this karst or limestone topography is the finest in America, perhaps the world. It was able to develop because this area was free of ice for perhaps 300,000 years.

Scientists explain that the folding of the mountains caused cracks and chasms in the limestone through which water percolated making sinkholes several thousand yards long. These coalesced along the fracture line until the vertical-walled solution corridors formed karst streets or corridors--flat-topped, U-shaped canyons that zigzag in all directions. And riding like battleships down the middle of these canyons are other flat-topped columns of rock, all starkly grey except for a green tablecloth of low stunted trees and an occasional meadow. It's as if a giant knife had scooped out the whole honeycombed landscape from a grey rock slab cake hundreds of yards deep and thousands of yards long, pleated its sides in grey and iced it green on top.

Some of these landforms were discovered as recently as 1972. Professor Derek Ford of the Geography Department at McMaster University in Hamilton, Ontario found three poljes in the Ram Plateau, the only ones in Canada. A polje (Slav for field) is a flat lush grassy meadow which can be transformed into a lake if water flows into it faster than it can drain away. It is really a giant sinkhole or cenote with a flat floor that originated from water working on a fracture in the limestone rock.

Very few people have flown into the phenomenal world of the Ram Plateau. And those who have are ecstatic.

"I'm in no shape for hiking," said one rather portly resident of Fort Simpson, "but I found walking extremely easy. You can go for many miles along the flat ridge tops. If I can do it anyone can do it."

"I felt like a kid in a toy shop discovering all sorts of new toys," said another who camped in the Ram for a week.

Climbers are also spellbound when they descend into the Ram's many underground caves such as the Raven's Pit and the Igloo Cave and see their unusual ice sculptures.

One unusual visitor flew a piano into the Ram and sat amid its inspiring scenery to make a video he called Nahanni Magic.

Suddenly, the pilot calls over the loudspeaker system. "The Splits of the South Nahanni River to the left." We scramble in our seats and then, "Dall sheep running across the ridge on the right."

The Nahanni can wait. Excitedly, we all crane to the windows and look straight into a grey vertical wall of rock. No longer are we looking down at the landscape, we are right in the middle of it, our wing tips surely scraping the edge of the gorge.

First one side then the other, our pilot banks to give all passengers an equal chance of watching a small band of sheep graze a grassy meadow at the top. The Ram Plateau is named for the sheep and goats that are abundant in these high places. Passengers also see from the plane caribou, wolves and moose. Heli-hiking packages from Little Doctor Lake are presently being considered to give an even more intimate look at the natural wonders of the Ram Plateau.

So close are we to the scenery that it sometimes seems as if we are sneaking over the ridge tops in a hydrofoil, not a twin otter. We cruise across a cream-lichened meadow, then suddenly take off over the rim into an empty abyss. This is "Wow!" country and to be even closer in the transparent bubble of a helicopter would be heaven. Heaven! That's where we are.

"The South Nahanni in fifteen minutes," calls the pilot as we swing south.

Out of respect for the hundreds of paddlers who come from around the world each summer to seek pure wilderness, pilots taking day trippers into Nahanni National Park do not fly along the river but over the canyons and tributary rivers to each side.

To some people, the world above is just as breathtaking as the world below.

"Prairie Creek and Cadillac mine ahead," calls the pilot.

Cadillac

We have left the flat-topped canyons behind and are now squeezing between a corridor of pyramidal mountain peaks. Prairie Creek wiggles like a little brown worm at the base of the Funeral Range, an apt name for this jumble of jagged saw-toothed ridges. No place to land if one crashed.

Incredibly, roads have been slashed in this rugged terrain, exploration roads zigging and zagging in parallel lines across precipitous mountain faces to claw out the copper, silver, lead and zinc that have been found here in commercial quantities.

There were grandiose plans to take the ore out by Hercules transport plane or by an all-weather road to Fort Nelson or Fort Simpson. An airstrip was flattened from the tortuous gravel bed of Prairie Creek and pilots performed acrobatic manoeuvres to use it. Rain can come quickly in these high mountains and when the river flooded, the air strip disappeared and cut off the mine's vital supply line.

Nevertheless, a mine, a mill and a trailer camp for eighty people was established in the constricted little valley of Prairie Creek and a winter ice road was built to link the settlement with the Liard Highway 160 kilometres away. A humorist painted a sign on the log shack at the airstrip which reads "Cadillac International Airport."

But the high hopes of the sixties crashed in the seventies with low prices for the ore and incredible transportation costs to get the ore to market. Cadillac closed. Recently, it was reopened by San Andreas Resources who are continuing exploration to increase the mine's viability.

Tungsten

There's another temporarily abandoned minesite in Nahanni-Ram country. Like Cadillac, it is at the head of a wiggling little river hemmed in between precipitous mountains. Tungsten lies in the Flat River valley between the Selwyn Mountains of the Yukon and the Ragged Range of the Mackenzie Mountains in the Northwest Territories.

Once it was one of the richest mines in the world and Canada's only tungsten producer. Open-pit mining began here in the early 1960s with the discovery of scheelite in the Flat River area. Scheelite is an ore of tungsten, an oxide used for hardening steel and making white gold.

Five hundred people used to live in the town of Tungsten but the market collapsed and in 1988 the mine closed and the people left. One family remains to caretake the place till the economy improves. They enjoy the isolation, the magnificent scenery and the hotsprings nearby all to themselves.

In summer and fall hunters in four wheel drive trucks manage to get in from the Yukon side by the Nahanni Range Road but there is no road on the Northwest Territories side. From the South Nahanni River you can paddle in to the Flat like many of the prospectors did but hefty portages and boulder scrambling in the narrowing creek will probably discourage you long before Tungsten is reached.

The Ragged Range

The best way is to fly. Some think the Ragged Range which guards Tungsten on one side and the headwaters of the South Nahanni on the other is more spectacular than mountains in Switzerland.

As one flyer who knows these places intimately explains, "The mountains of the Ragged Range are closer together and have more jagged peaks than the Swiss Alps. We have a million Matterhorns here. People come from all over the world to climb the Cirque of the Unclimbables. And two of the most beautiful spots in North America are Glacier Lake and Hole-in-the-Wall Lake. A person could spend every summer of a lifetime exploring the landscapes of Nahanni-Ram country and never see ten percent of them."

Rabbitkettle Hotsprings

For a paddler this is often where a journey down the South Nahanni River begins. Here in the Ragged Range at the edge of the Rabbitkettle River is Rabbitkettle Hotsprings, three springs and two immense terraced tufa mounds which are the largest and most spectacular of their kind in Canada.

Tufa is a cream-and-gold-coloured soft rock substance created by the precipitation of calcium and magnesium from thermal spring water. Warm water wells up through a deep orifice in the mound and spills out over the edge to form a series of intricate terraces and little dams. One of these mounds is 47 feet high and 250 feet wide at its base.

Due to the fragility of the colourful tufa mounds, visitors must register with the park warden stationed at Rabbitkettle Lake and take a guided 3-5 hour hike with him to Rabbitkettle Hotsprings.

To Virginia Falls

"We can't get into Cadillac--the weather isn't good over there," says our pilot, "so we'll continue on to the Falls."

From the air, the South Nahanni River is a shiny ribbon winding in and out of sight at the bottom of deep constantly curving canyons. We are far above the river but the pilot points out its most famous features--the meandering Splits, First Canyon, Deadmen or as the locals call it, Deadman's Valley, Second Canyon, Pulpit Rock, The Gate of the Nahanni, Third Canyon, the entrance to the Flat River, Hell's Gate . . .

We look over our neighbour's shoulder or press our faces to the windows to catch glimpses of them. They are familiar names that seem old friends. But it is Virginia Falls that most of us are anticipating.

The pilot maintains the suspense by counting down the minutes as we descend. "The falls in fifteen minutes, in ten minutes, in . . ."

The Falls at Last

And then "One minute!" We drop altitude and clear the top of Five Mile Canyon. Called Painted Box Canyon because of its colourful rock walls, it is a fitting overture to the climactic Virginia Falls, the most famous landmark in Nahanni National Park.

We all know that Virginia Falls is twice the height of Niagara Falls. The Slavey knew it as Na ili Cho or Big Water Falling Down. But its appeal is not in comparative height statistics but its wilderness setting beneath Sunblood Mountain and the way the South Nahanni River is split in two by an impressive limestone pinnacle at the Sluice Box Rapids.

The river above Virginia Falls is deceptively calm, more like a lake. Suddenly, the river rounds a bend, momentum builds, and it becomes a wave-ripped sea. The water surges through a chute, slams around both sides of a towering spruce-capped steeple and plunges 300 feet in a double cataract.

Most people's pictures of foaming water, spray and river-wide rainbows are taken on the bouldered beach below the falls. But to get to this vantage point you must first land behind the falls by plane and walk down the portage trail or paddle there from any number of drop-off points on the river above. Motor boats are no longer allowed to push upriver as earlier explorers did.

A twin otter load of visitors from Yellowknife is on the dock waiting for pickup as we land. Among them is a woman in a wheelchair. She has been rolled along the boardwalk leading down the portage trail for part of the way. Because Parks Canada is constantly upgrading facilities at Virginia Falls--boardwalks over the muskeg, viewpoints, toilets, shelters--people of all ages and physical conditions can get to see at least part of Nahanni National Park.

Some in our group are quite elderly. There are two boardwalk routes at the top end of the trail leading down to the falls. They take the easier one designed for those carrying canoes and rafts. Others intent on getting to the bottom fast take a short cut down a steep bank alongside the river and join the boardwalk further on.

Even the elderly can enjoy panoramic views of the churning waters above the falls from several vantage points at the head of the trail. One determined couple from Australia carrying packsacks, cameras and a tripod trek through the mud to lean over the brink. They have a clear view of the river as it races over slippery shelves of spray-shrouded rock, splits around The Stack then plummets into the boiling pot. It is a behind-the-scenes look at Virginia Falls but a conversation piece forever.

Not just for the waterfall which is the centrepiece of Nahanni National Park but for the garden of flowers along the way. At each side of the trail are exquisite lady slipper orchids, Indian pipes, mountain avens, yellow cinquefoil, white bunchberry and the usual colourful bouncy mat of moss and lichen, dwarf willows, mushrooms and many varieties of berries.

Nahanni National Park Reserve

Nahanni National Park Reserve (called a Reserve till native land claims are settled) is often called Canada's Yosemite for its outstanding natural features that include impressive mountains, wild mountain rivers, waterfalls, deep winding canyons, hotsprings, extensive cave systems, karst features which escaped glaciation, mineral licks, and various rock formations such as Pulpit Rock and the Sand Blowouts.

Its central feature is the South Nahanni River which originates outside the park in the icefields of the Selwyn Mountains just east of the Yukon-Northwest Territories border, flows 325 miles southeast through the Mackenzie Mountains and empties into the Liard River which flows on to the Mackenzie River and then the Arctic Ocean.

The South Nahanni has the honour of being a Canadian Heritage River and a World Heritage Site. This means that its scenery is world class, part of the heritage of mankind, on a par with the Galapagos Islands in Ecuador and the Pyramids in Egypt.

The Ram canyons are also world class but they have not been formally designated--yet. Visitors to Nahanni-Ram country who explore them now are the new pioneers as those who came before explored the Nahanni canyons. The difference now is that travellers don't have to kill and skin moose, clean and scrape and tan hides to make moosehide boats or heft hundreds of pounds of gear around rapids and over waterfalls; they don't have to laboriously build log cabins if trapped in the wilderness by winter ice.

Modern adventurers have it easy by taking sightseeing trips by plane or helicopter.

It is time to leave Virginia Falls. We assemble back at the dock to board the twin otter and sign the guest book. Some of us chat to the campers in the nearby campground as they prepare to portage and continue their canoe or raft trips downriver. The plane from Yellowknife takes off first with its passengers including the happy lady in a wheelchair.

We have one more surprise before we get home to Fort Simpson. Back over the Ram our pilot drops altitude. Lower and lower we go till once again we are hugged by those incredible grey canyon walls. The pleated rock blurs by on each side. Lower still. At least one of us feels the thrill of fear. Surely, we are going to land. But we are not in a helicopter. How can we land at the bottom of this narrow corridor of rock?

With consummate skill learned through long years of experience in this canyon country, the pilot skims the rocky streambed of the Ram River Canyon, we hold our breaths in awe. For a moment we feel anchored in space. Then with an accelerated surge of power he pulls us up and out of the canyon.

The rest of the way back to Fort Simpson is anticlimactic.

Lyn Hancock
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Last updated: September 17, 1996 http://www.islandnet.com/pwacvic/hancoc02.html