Mackenzie Mountains

According to their oral history, the Dene were once locked into a bitter and bloody struggle with a neighboring tribe known as the Naha.

The Naha made their homes in the foothills of what are now known as the Mackenzie Mountains, while the Dene dwelled on the valley floors below.

This made the Dene particularly susceptible to Naha's lightning-fast raiding techniques, while their own uphill counter-attacks proved bloody and futile affairs.

If the Dene wished to live in peace, they had to strike back at the Naha with such viciousness that they would be forever driven from their mountain homes.

Having firmly established a reputation as being a perilous place to explore, visits to the Nahanni National Park dropped off following the initial gold rush.

Over time, it became an obscure wilderness that few people cared or dared to visit, and by the 1940s, the legends of Nahanni were in danger of being forgotten.

But by 1946, Canadian mining companies had begun to cast a greedy eye over the relatively untouched Mackenzie Mountains, a portion of which are a protected area of the park.

One company tasked a Calgary-based mining expert named Frank M. W. Henderson with surveying several potential mining sites.

According to their oral history, the Dene were once locked into a bitter and bloody struggle with a neighboring tribe known as the Naha.

The Naha made their homes in the foothills of what are now known as the Mackenzie Mountains, while the Dene dwelled on the valley floors below.

This made the Dene particularly susceptible to Naha's lightning-fast raiding techniques, while their own uphill counter-attacks proved bloody and futile affairs.

If the Dene wished to live in peace, they had to strike back at the Naha with such viciousness that they would be forever driven from their mountain homes.

Having firmly established a reputation as being a perilous place to explore, visits to the Nahanni National Park dropped off following the initial gold rush.

Over time, it became an obscure wilderness that few people cared or dared to visit, and by the 1940s, the legends of Nahanni were in danger of being forgotten.

But by 1946, Canadian mining companies had begun to cast a greedy eye over the relatively untouched Mackenzie Mountains, a portion of which are a protected area of the park.

One company tasked a Calgary-based mining expert named Frank M. W. Henderson with surveying several potential mining sites.

Since then, he spent something like 200 days a year in hunting camps, not on set, in camp.

He's filmed in the Mackenzie Mountains of NWT, in the whitetail woods he grew up in, and almost everywhere in between.

His work has already been featured on places like the Outdoor Channel, Sportsman's Channel, NBC Sports, Pursuit, Amazon Prime.

He runs Crooked Canyon Productions out of Bend, Oregon.

That's amazing.

Yeah.

Between the NWT Mackenzie Mountains and your deer stand at growing up in Wisconsin, which one's taught you more in life?

Oh, NWT I think for sure.

According to their oral history, the Dene were once locked into a bitter and bloody struggle with a neighboring tribe known as the Naha.

The Naha made their homes in the foothills of what are now known as the Mackenzie Mountains, while the Dene dwelled on the valley floors below.

This made the Dene particularly susceptible to Naha's lightning-fast raiding techniques, while their own uphill counter-attacks proved bloody and futile affairs.

If the Dene wished to live in peace, they had to strike back at the Naha with such viciousness that they would be forever driven from their mountain homes.

Having firmly established a reputation as being a perilous place to explore, visits to the Nahanni National Park dropped off following the initial gold rush.

Over time, it became an obscure wilderness that few people cared or dared to visit, and by the 1940s, the legends of Nahanni were in danger of being forgotten.

But by 1946, Canadian mining companies had begun to cast a greedy eye over the relatively untouched Mackenzie Mountains, a portion of which are a protected area of the park.

One company tasked a Calgary-based mining expert named Frank M. W. Henderson with surveying several potential mining sites.

And then, you know, th- these are things out of your control.

Mother Nature, you know, has, you know, 50 days of minus 40, or 48 days of minus 50 I think they said up in the Mackenzie Mountains, and it's like, it's, a lot of sheep died.

And so-

Yeah.

How did the river get here? Look at the canyon walls rising on either side of you.

Look at the mountains beyond them, the Mackenzie Range, the Ragged Range, peaks that rise to 2,000 meters and more, jagged and unclimbed and largely unnamed.

Now consider the river at your feet, flowing calmly through a canyon that cuts clean through those mountains, as if someone had taken a saw to the range and sliced a corridor from one side to the other.

The obvious assumption is that the mountains were here first and the river found a way through, a gap, a fault line, a weakness in the rock that the water exploited.