We slide into Deadmen Valley, the silt from ancient glaciers hissing against our rafts. For days now, we have been slinking between the skyscraper cliffs of the South Nahanni canyons, when suddenly the river lolls into fat braids and the Mackenzie Mountains sprawl open. The Tlogotsho Plateau wavers in the distance, a luminous blue, almost lifting off, but the slabbed clouds seem to weigh everything down.
The three rafts snug into the cobble beach of a vast alluvial fan spread by Prairie Creek. To the Dene, this place is known as Dahtaehtth'I, which can be translated as “wide-open plain along the bend in the river.” With practised moves, we pitch our small village of bright tents and tarps as the first big drops darken the stones. We have been travelling for nine days now – three guides, plus three brothers from across the continent, their father and their teenage sons, a mother and her son from Vancouver, another mother and son duo from Saskatchewan, and a gallivanting couple from Toronto – and already this riff-raff crew can accomplish the urgent tasks almost without speaking.
On our first night, after a 240-kilometre Twin Otter flight over the mountain ranges, the tents looked a bit mangled. And everyone seemed stiff in their new gear. But Andre, a doctor from Victoria, had already popped out his trumpet and scatted a tune over the riffles of the Sluice Box rapids. And Linda, a fine-boned woman who bobbed like a chickadee as she was setting up her tent, confided that she had brought her son, Scott, with her because her husband had died six months before and they wanted to remember him here, a place he had always dreamed of paddling.
Guiding on this river has become something of a yearly migration for me. Each spring for the past 10 years, feeling grubbed out by a winter of deadlines and e-mails and hunching at a desk, I have hoped that the river will return the suppleness I've forgotten.
Nahanni National Park protects a remote tract of land, recently expanded to encompass almost the entire South Nahanni watershed. It is a vast ecosystem, home to more than 600 grizzly bears, a species that has been decimated elsewhere by human presence. This subarctic park also protects the world's most unique karstland, a terrain of water-eaten caves and sinkholes and underground rivers feeding in to the valley. And the Nahanni River is a swift, veering ride through deep canyons that were not glaciated in the last ice age.
On our first night, Marcel, a Parks Canada warden and a Dene person whose family grew up in this territory, invited us to feed the fire. So we each sprinkled a small gift of tobacco into the flames with gratitude, with prayers for the journey. And in the morning, we fed the river.
Day 10, I wake to the sound of rain on the tent. A good excuse for a little more sleep. We decide to lay over in Deadmen Valley rather than spend a wet day in the boats. The crew heads out to fish and hike up into the Prairie Creek canyon – if they can ford the creek that is swelling with the rain. My ankle's injured, so I stay back.
All day the plateau hovers close, like a breath on my neck.
For centuries, maybe millennia, this valley has been a gathering place. And the Dene still fish and hunt here. The Dall sheep come down at dusk because they know the sustenance of salt licked from the stones. The silvery dryas plants shimmer over the flats. The raindrops bead on the summer's last fireweed plumes.
Out of sight, but just upstream, the Prairie Creek mine sits within the park. Its old tailings ponds and plans for new development within the watershed are an ever-present threat in this seismically active area.
This place is both sacred and a resource, protected and used. We are here, after all, with jet fuel and nylon and aluminum. We drag our civilization with us. As pristine as it feels, the glaciers are retreating here, too. There is no place untouched by our carbon footprint. Who can understand the vast ways we are changing this world and the shape of its flowing?
