The landscape surrounding Fort Chipewyan resembles an inland sea. To the south flows the Athabasca River, to the west the Peace. The Slave River meanders north to Great Slave Lake and into the Mackenzie River. Lake Athabasca stretches well into Saskatchewan. So when John and Alice Rigney invited me to visit Alice's ancestral homestead, an hour into the Peace-Athabasca Delta from “Fort Chip,” I knew that I'd be travelling by motorboat.
What I didn't know was that the pair planned to hunt. A squeamish city dweller used to my steaks in neat Styrofoam packages, I was taken aback when John, boarding the eight-metre vessel with a rifle, asked, “Do you mind if we shoot a moose?”I shouldn't have been surprised. Fort Chipewyan, in northeastern Alberta, remains home to aboriginal people for whom hunting and freezing meat for year-round consumption remains a way of life.
In summer, Fort Chipewyan is a short flight north on Air Mikisew from Fort McMurray, via Edmonton or Calgary. Nine months of the year, there's no road access into this watery landscape. It's true northern Alberta, and while it may lack the comforts and glamour of southern nature reserves from the Waterton Lakes to Banff and Jasper, it makes up for it with its genuine lifestyle and untouched beauty. It has truth and grit — in spades.
Most of the 1,400 locals in what is Alberta's oldest community — and was once the West's most important fur-trading post — are Mikisew Cree and Chipewyan Dene. They cherish their isolation, and are developing tourism accordingly. “The community does not want to be a Banff or a Jasper,” says Edmonton-based consultant Dale Monaghan, who is employed by the Mikisew First Nation to develop tourism.
This centennial year in Alberta, the Fort Chipewyan Tourism Strategy, along with Air Mikisew, is offering centennial package trips that include immersion in the region's fur-trading history, remote lake fishing and a wellness experience for women.
“We're keeping the numbers low so the community isn't affected,” Monaghan said. “It's expensive to get to, but it's not your typical place.”
Over a moose-stew lunch at the town's museum last fall to honour six young canoeists who had padded 1,300 kilometres down the Athabasca River from its source in the Rockies to Fort Chip, Mikisew Cree band administrator Margaret Whiteknife spoke of the area's attraction: “It's raw nature out there — it's the real thing that hasn't been exploited. The beauty of it all: the rock, the orange granite. You see bears at the side of the road or foxes, coyotes, or wolves. I consider myself fortunate to live here.”
So did Canada's early fur-traders. In the late 1700s, half of the country's furs came out of this delta. Explorers such as Alexander MacKenzie, John Franklin, David Thompson and Simon Fraser passed this way, or settled in for a season or two.
Today, Americans fly in to fish remote lakes; Europeans and Japanese arrive for the pristine wilderness and untrammeled aboriginal lifestyle. Skilled boaters venture into the watery, labyrinthine Wood Buffalo National Park; others fly in small aircraft over its 45,000-square-kilometre vastness in search of free-roaming wood bison. Some visitors come simply for a taste of what is arguably the least touristy, and most laid-back, region remaining in Canada.
I'd fallen for northern Alberta on a road trip to Lesser Slave Lake, 250 kilometres from Edmonton, a few years back. With its strong native culture and recreational opportunities, such as kayaking on what seemed like an inner sea, the north had a special appeal. So at the invitation of Monaghan, I hopped on an Air Mikisew jet from Edmonton to Fort McMurray, and then on and over the Athabasca basin into Fort Chip. My visit of just a few days was customized, one of the best ways to visit the region.
