Greg Sweney

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fieldandstream-editor — Thu, 01 May 2008 20:00:00 -0400

Framed between northern Saskatchewan's Fond du Lac River to the east and the enormous Peace and Athabasca Rivers to the west, Lake Athabasca has a mythic hold on the boreal region. It's some 260 miles long and averages 40 miles across. In places, it plummets to nearly 400 feet deep, and most of the lake bottom is sheathed with reefs and shoals that provide perfect lake trout habitat. In 1961, gillnetters pulled a 102-pound laker out of the water. Thirty-pound fish are common.

On Golosky's first trip to Athabasca, in fact, his 10-year-old grandson landed a 36-pound laker. That's all it took to hook Golosky, who in 20 years had turned a one-man welding operation into a massive 3,500-employee northern Alberta conglomerate. He bought a lease on gorgeous, cliff-sided Stewart Island and sent a Bombardier snowcat and seven pickup trucks to plow a 350-mile-long ice road to what is now Indian Head Camp. These days, anglers in the early-fall spawning period can land mind-boggling numbers of big lakers. On our second day on the water, Stewart and Reid boated 40 fish, 13 over 20 pounds, and one pushing 30.

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fieldandstream-editor — Thu, 01 May 2008 20:00:00 -0400

This one comes up from the black-green depths like an anchor, sees the boat, then sounds. On its second run I check it with as much side pressure as I can muster, turn the fish, and bring it to the boat. Golosky leans over with the landing cradle, and I slide the trout in.

At 28 pounds, this fat-bellied prespawner is a trophy by many lake standards, but it's only slightly larger than the average autumn fish on Athabasca. Still, Golosky frets, anxious to extricate the fish from the cradle and get it back into the water. He has poured a small fortune into a lodge sited in remote country, and he shepherds the lake's fish with a mother's care. Indian Head Camp maintains a barbless-hooks policy and a two-fish limit, more restrictive than territorial law. After a few photographs, I lift the giant overboard, washing its gills with water. It thrashes from my hands.

Instead of a round of high fives, we quietly watch the surface where the fish disappeared. Golosky breaks the silence.

"These fish grow maybe a pound a year," he says, his lilting voice rising at the end of each phrase. "That's a 30-year-old fish, eh? Here long before I got to this lake."

He doesn't say what we know he is thinking: And here, he hopes, long after he is gone.

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fieldandstream-editor — Thu, 01 May 2008 20:00:00 -0400

Despite this, there are still tens of millions more open, wild acres ripe for development, and it appears that some factions in Canada's federal government are happy to throw open the doors to extraction industries. According to the Natural Resources Defense Council, officials in Ottawa recently announced a goal of cutting the average regulatory review period for natural resources projects by half, and introduced regulations that would allow the tar-sands industry to triple greenhouse gas pollution by 2020.

We wrestle with the conflicts one night after long hours of chasing boreal ducks. "The world is crying for oil," Wesstrom laments, over a dinner of musk ox steaks. There is no disagreement. But with the loss of the boreal, I think, many of us will be crying for the wild.

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fieldandstream-editor — Thu, 01 May 2008 20:00:00 -0400

Canada's Aboriginal peoples are major players in the future of the boreal. More than 600 First Nations, Inuit, and Metis communities are scattered across the region, and vast swaths of the landscape are in Aboriginal hands. Most of the tribes are taking part in some of the finest conservation thinking on the planet. Under the Northwest Territories' Protected Areas Strategy, tribes, communities, and organizations are working with federal and territorial governments to preserve special natural and cultural areas. For example, Northwest Territories officials last fall announced the creation of 25.5 million acres of national park and wildlife protection areas, including plans for a possible 8.3-million-acre park on the East Arm of Great Slave Lake.

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fieldandstream-editor — Thu, 01 May 2008 20:00:00 -0400

That there is a Trout Rock Lodge at all (its northern pike fishing is beyond excellent) has much to do with an empty chair in a Yellowknife bar. In 1986, Wesstrom, then a Swedish merchant mariner, left home for a yearlong hunting and fishing trip. There was one place he especially yearned to go, and that was Great Slave Lake. As a kid, Wesstrom, obsessed with Jack London stories, had read about this symbolic destination of the Far North. "I told myself that I would go there one day," Wesstrom recalls. In the summer of 1987, he drove the 900 miles from Edmonton to Yellowknife. "I walked into a bar and there was a table with three native girls and four chairs." He laughs. "I figured, 'What the hell,' and sat down. I met my wife my first night in Yellowknife."

His wife, Doreen Drygeese, is Yellowknives Dene, and the great-granddaughter of a venerated chief. Without the Aboriginal connection, Wesstrom figures he never would have received a territorial permit for his 1,000 square miles of hunting and fishing lands. Even so, it took him two years to gain permission from tribal elders.

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fieldandstream-editor — Thu, 01 May 2008 20:00:00 -0400

At our current spot, a spindly spruce tree sprouts, like a bonsai, from a giant 1-acre boulder littered with vole and muskrat skulls. We are not the only hunters here. Nor are we the most efficient; I glance down at my collection of empty shotgun hulls. Suddenly, a large duck careens over the decoys, wing tips so close to the water that it leaves behind a trail of concentric rings. It's a whitewing scoter, an outsize sea duck prized by local Aboriginal tribes and a classic component of a boreal forest shore lunch.

Stewart, Reid, and I are on our feet, guns blazing. The bird flies through a storm of steel shot, the water exploding behind it. Stewart hollers - "That's our lunch!" - as the bird pours it on, unscathed. I watch it go, white wing patches flashing, until it disappears into the horizon. Going and gone - gone perhaps to Washington's Skagit marshes, or to Virginia's Chesapeake Bay. I watch it go and think: There are more - millions more - where that duck came from. That's the promise of Canada's boreal forest. For now.

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fieldandstream-editor — Thu, 01 May 2008 20:00:00 -0400

For the moment, however, it appears that I am doing my part for conservation, at least as it pertains to ducks. From Yellowknife, the capital of the Northwest Territories, Ragnar Wesstrom motored our small group through a maze of rocky channels to Trout Rock Lodge, a cluster of small log structures on a pinnacle in the North Arm of Great Slave Lake. We loaded an aluminum skiff with decoys tethered to 5-pound rocks, and threaded another labyrinth of channels and bays along the North Arm's shore. Hunting Great Slave Lake in the early season is a matter of parries and thrusts, hunting for a couple of hours here and there as we ferret out the birds' movements. Diving ducks such as scaup are typically active all day, so we hop from sloughs to ledges to island points where we hunker down in blinds made of stacked boulders.

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fieldandstream-editor — Thu, 01 May 2008 20:00:00 -0400

The Mackenzie is hardly the only region in peril. On the banks of the Athabasca River, huge dams hold back miles-square reservoirs of toxic mine tailings. More are on the way. Proposed hydroelectric projects in Saskatchewan, Ontario, and Quebec will flood millions of acres of wilderness. And timber harvest continues to eat up the woods. According to the International Boreal Conservation Campaign, nearly a third of the standing forests in Canada's boreal region have been allocated for commercial harvest.

A sobering reality counters the seemingly endless nature of the boreal region: In just one generation, much of a place long taken for granted by sportsmen will be latticed with roads and pipelines, pocked with gas wells, lesioned with open pit mines, timbered heavily, and fouled with massive plumes of smoke from scores of industrial sites.

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fieldandstream-editor — Thu, 01 May 2008 20:00:00 -0400

He should know. As director of conservation planning for the western field office of Ducks Unlimited, Reid sees more ducks in a season than many hunters will see in a lifetime. My other hunting companion is no newcomer to waterfowl, either. Gary Stewart is a biologist and consultant to the Pew Environment Group, working to build awareness about the future of Canada's vast northern forests. As it turns out, our expedition is no mere buddy trip. Stewart and Reid are trying to convince me that average American sportsmen - bass and trout anglers socking away spare change for a trophy pike trip, deer hunters with caribou dreams - are a critical factor in the future of North America's greatest remaining wilderness. Their strategy: to take me duck hunting on Great Slave Lake and, in a few days, lake trout fishing on Lake Athabasca, and then let me judge for myself if this is a place worth protecting.

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fieldandstream-editor — Thu, 01 May 2008 20:00:00 -0400

With the wind behind them, diving ducks, sea ducks, and puddlers bank around the rocky corner with blistering speed. I bring the gun up just in time to lose their gray-black forms against a shady granite wall 50 yards across the channel, then pick them up again when sunlight flashes on white wing patches. We unleash ringing volleys, but few birds fall. Instead, whoops and hollers of admiration echo against the cliffs, the water, and the endless sky.

"Have you ever seen ducks fly so fast?" Fritz Reid yells, shaking his head. "Those birds were doing 50 miles per hour, easy."