Athabasca River

I think I'd also retain the electricity because we've got so much good water here.

We've got the Athabasca River, Happy Creek.

I've got running water up my backyard, so I'm not hurting.

And then snowpack and...

This community's overcome many challenges over the years, including a devastating forest fire a decade ago, and it has always emerged stronger.

Carved out of the wilderness at the meetings of the Athabasca, Clearwater, and Hangingstone Rivers, this region holds the fourth-largest oil reserve in the world.

There's more than three and a half million barrels of oil that leave here every day to markets around the world, bringing home more than $40 billion to the Canadian economy every year.

There are literally hundreds of, hundreds of thousands of people who wake up and go to work every day because of what Fort McMurray has built.

As they reached the southern shore, the jumble of rocks and hills and stunted trees of the barren north was left behind, and the travelers entered a fine level country over which wandered great herds of buffalo and moose.

For about 40 miles, they ascended the course of the Athabasca River, finding themselves among splendid woods with tall pines and poplars such as Hearne had never seen.

From the Athabasca, they struck eastward, plunging into so dense a forest that at times the axes had to be used to clear the way.

For two months, January and February of 1772, they made their way through the northern forest.

I'm not a climate person.

I'm really a journalist and a citizen who saw Fort McMurray burning, was terrified and horrified by it, and wanted to understand, how could this happen in May, which is, you know, just this side of winter in, in, uh, Alberta, when there were still frozen lakes and car-sized blocks of ice on the Athabasca River? How could you have, uh, you know, temperatures in the 30 degree Celsius and flames 100 meters tall sweeping over one of the most able, well-equipped cities in North America and driving every citizen out of there in an afternoon, you know? And they were masters of their universe right up until May 3rd, and suddenly it was all they could do to get out of there with their cat, and that is a message to all of us.

And so, you know, my journey over the past decade has just been trying to understand that.

And basically, you know, we are living in a world that is growing steadily warmer, and we have continued burning fossil fuels unabated for about 250 years.

Um,

you know, I, I did the, uh, bear two, two, two, um, the one that was, you know, uh, in during the fires, she hung her down with her, with her cubs or whatever and survived the wildfires around the Athabasca river.

Um, they had GPS tracking, so they were able to, to follow her.

saw her so she was there her and her cubs were running around the golf course but didn't get to see them but um oh really so two

It's a meta type of meta quartzite rock whose origin, there's two mountains, Mount Robeson and Mount Edith Cavell that have that same type of rock.

Now this Okotoks is part of what's known as the Foothills Erratics Train because it reaches for 500 miles from the mouth of the Athabasca River down into Montana.

Okotoks is the biggest one of the, there's thousands of them, but Okotoks is the biggest, most impressive one.

But the really bizarre thing about this, and when you're standing there looking at this massive boulder and thinking about the forces that could move it, appreciate the fact that its origin was on the western side of the continental divide.

Well, yes, it could be.

You'll see on the map here, Mount Edith Cavell is the type of metachorsite rock that forms the erratics train, okay? So the pathway out from here is up the Athabasca River, through here.

So those rocks would have been conveyed up through this here.

Once it gets out onto the Alberta prairie here, it runs right up against a wall of ice, which is the westernmost wall of the Laurentide, the giant Laurentide ice sheet.

Hey, are we going to go fishing in the river today too? I don't know.

What do you think? We might be able to convince Casey to come down and try to catch a grayling or two out of the Athabasca.

Yeah.

Oh wow, look at this view.