You either love the North or you dont.
I love the North and always have.
Since I was young Ive been magnetized by it, compass-like.
An aeril view of Wildbread Bay, part of Thaidene Nene Park.Pat Kane
My inner needle points to where the roads end and then beyond.
Ivepaddled solofrom my home, on the Leech Lake Reservation inMinnesota, 250 miles north to Rainy Lake.
And I once spent an entire winter in northwestern Ontarios boreal forest trapping beavers and pine marten.
From left: Trout, beans and potatoes cooked over an open fire near Wildbread Bay; Ron Desjarlais preparing lunch, including trout and bannock.Pat Kane
It is shockingly remote.
Getting there is hard.
Being there is a different kind of hard.
Frontier Lodge, Thaidene Nëné’s primary accommodation.Pat Kane
And this is where the fact that you either love the North or dont comes into play.
The farther north I traveled the smaller and more patchy the trees became.
It is shockingly remote.
From left: Red Cliff Island, in Canada’s Thaidene Nëné National Park Reserve, rises hundreds of feet from Great Slave Lake; fishing guide Ron Desjarlais near Red Cliff Island.Pat Kane
The population of the Northwest Territories is around 43,000, and half of those people live in Yellowknife.
You wouldnt think a city 250 miles from the Arctic Circle would be diverse.
And it felt good.
Labrador tea leaves gathered on a small island in the lake.Pat Kane
Time starts to fall away the farther north you get.
Its planes have tires to land on dirt runways and floats and skis to land on lakes.
This is another thing I love about the North.
Seagulls scavenge for fish scraps near Łutsël K’é.Pat Kane
Both males and females have horns.
Their range is closely and exclusively circumpolar: they are unique to the Arctic.)
You wouldnt think a city 250 miles from the Arctic Circle would be diverse.
From left: Moose-hide beaded moccasins on display in the Łutsël K’é Dene First Nation’s office; a musk ox on the shore of Moose Bay, near Yellowknife.Pat Kane
And it felt good.
We chatted with the Ni Hatne Dene Guardians, the group that had hunted the animal.
They function as supercharged park rangers, but their mandate is much broader than that.
Trout in Great Slave Lake.Pat Kane
We definitely wanted some.
I felt this keenly as we headed out via skiff across the mouth of the Stark River.
Frontier was built in the 1960s and purchased by the utsel Ke Dene First Nation in 2020.
A caribou-bone hat band on display in the Łutsël K’é Dene First Nation’s office.Pat Kane
There is no pool.
There is no game room.
There is spotty cell service.
The Wi-Fi is bad.
There is, however, excellent trout fishing.
I sight-cast rock piles.
I jigged 100 feet down.
I trolled enormous spoons behind the boat.
So many fish it isnt really accurate to call it fishing.
On Great Slave it should just be called catching.
Thaidene Nene is a huge place.
There is no headlining attraction no geyser or mountain or waterfall around which the park is arranged.
Its not a gentle landscape, not an intimate one.
Nor did the land.
I felt small and vulnerable and at its mercy, and desperate to be let in.
We stumbled upon a musk ox eating willow leaves on the shoreline.
It didnt seem to care all that much about me either.
Except for a few work-related interludes, he has spent most of his life at utsel Ke.
He was uncommonly solicitous about the health of the fish: Oh, that ones bleeding.
I dont think hell make it.
But he got banged up.
I dont know if Ron was right about that.
I kind of think Ron wanted to eat the fish, and who can blame him?
If I could have, I would have pitched a tent out there.
There are almost limitless places to camp.
The land is fairly open, and much of the granite is flat.
(Breezes on Great Slave Lake are good.
Wind, on the other hand, can be terrifying.)
The park was created, to a large degree, because of Indigenous power.
The park was created, to a large degree, because ofIndigenous power.
When I brought up mining to Ron, he shrugged.
Wed be right back where weve been.
Thaidene Nene is one of the few places on earth that can offer this.
Frontier Lodge has its own pleasures.
A snug cabin and comfortable mattress were luxuries I definitely didnt object to.
Neither was the happy hour.
Each morning, the guides would take guests out in twos to different parts of the lake.
At noon the guide would cook a shore lunch, a uniquely Canadian fishing-lodge tradition.
In fast water, the fish hit hard on nearly any shiny thing.
I didnt do this, but I should have.
On my second day, Ron, Pat, and I set off to see more of the park.
(While the park is officially open year-round, planes with tourists arrive mainly in the summer.)
We, however, headed out into dead calm.
It was impossible to ignore the simple fact that, were the boat to flip, wed be dead.
We passed Fortress Island and dropped into the Gap, a small narrows with towering bluffs on either side.
We immediately began catching fish.
As my stay wound to an end, we fished less and did more sightseeing.
People seemed to come and go a lot.
Every fly-in spot in a reserve is a hub for even smaller, scattered settlements.
Thaidene Nene is one of the few places on earth that can offer this.
Easily the best meal at the end of a week of great food.
When the plane took me out the next day it was rainy and the bugs were bad.
Time in the North cant be bought with such small change.
Back south to where the hand of man is heavier and more visible.
Until the next time.
