La Loche

More to the north you're gonna have bears.

Like I-- You go like Fort McMurray to La Loche and stuff like that, like in the Boreal Forest, like Sil- Sylvan Lake where from Alberta, northern parts of Alberta, that's where I could see grizzlies coming in.

But-

Hmm

But the geography is massive.

And, uh, we had to go do a search and rescue, uh, event, not search for a person, but it was actually a, like a public relations event in La Loche.

And, uh, from my house, it was an eight and a half hour drive or so.

And we were not even halfway north through the province.

And as he stretches his weary limbs on the hut floor or the pine bush, he laughs and jests over the misfortunes, fatigues, and fears which but a short hour before were heart-sickening enough.

It was with feelings such as this that I beheld the lights of Riviera La Loche station on the night of the 22nd of February.

For through an afternoon of intense cold and blinding drift we had struggled in vain to keep the track across Buffalo Lake.

The guide had vanished in the drift, and it was only through the exertions of my companion after hours of toil that we were able to regain the track and reach, late on Saturday evening, the warm shelter of the little post.

A small, clean room, a bright fire, a good supper, an entire 24 hours of sleep and rest in prospect.

Is it any wonder that with such surroundings the hut of Riviera La Loche seemed a palace? And now each succeeding day carried us further into the great wilderness of the north, over lakes whose dim shores loomed through the driving snow, and the ragged pines tossed wildly in the wind, through march and muskeg and tangled wood and all the long monotony of dreary savagery which lies on that dim ridge, from whose sides the waters roll east to the Bay of Hudson, north to the frozen ocean.

We reached the Methie Portage and turned northwest through a long region of worthless forest.

Now and again a wood caribou crossed the track, a marten showed upon a frozen lake, but no other sign of life was visible.