Canadian lake is worth treasuring
Thousands of years ago, every lake was like Great Bear Lake. So pure you could lower a cup into the water and drink it. So beautiful that people composed love songs to it. So mysterious that many believed it was alive. Today, of the 10 largest lakes in the world, it is the last one that remains essentially primeval.
Great Bear Lake straddles the Arctic Circle in the remote Northwest Territories of Canada. At more than 12,000 square miles, the lake is the eighth-largest in the world and it is deeper than Lake Superior. It is covered in ice and snow most of the year, and surrounding it are untouched boreal forest and tundra, rivers and mountains.
I had spent an hour in Deline, the only human settlement on the lake’s shores, in 2014, as a U.S. diplomat in Canada. It was July and the lake was ice-free and seemed endless.
This past November, I returned to learn more about what makes this area so distinct.
The isolated community of 503 people is mostly Sahtuto’ine, or “the Bear Lake People.” They are determined to keep the lake pristine.
Their efforts paid off in 2016. In March, the Great Bear Lake watershed was declared a UNESCO Biosphere Reserve. Called the Tsa Tue Biosphere Reserve, it is the largest in North America, and the first in the world to be led by an indigenous community.
For such a tiny community, Deline has more tourist infrastructure than I expected, including a small handicrafts store in the hotel and an ambition to welcome the growing number of tourists. I reached it by airplane.
I met community members, attended a Roman Catholic church, watched a sledding party, and experienced the beauty of the lake as northern lights appeared like a hallucination across the star-filled sky.
Great Bear Lake is “the last great lake of its size and quality on the planet,” said David Livingstone, now retired after working on environmental issues for the Canadian government. “It’s like the Mona Lisa — a world treasure.”
Livingstone helped Deline apply for the UNESCO designation.
To the Sahtuto’ine, Great Bear Lake is “not just a body of water; it’s fundamental to their culture,” he said. “The folks in Deline consider the lake to be a living thing.”
Morris Neyelle, a member of the community’s new governing council, explained that people in Deline believe a prophecy from an elder who died in 1940. He said that in the future, scores of people from the south would come to Great Bear Lake because it would be one of the few places left with fresh water to drink and fish to eat. Simply put: It would be a last refuge for humanity.
I walked the main street and tried to imagine hundreds of thousands of people there. It was hard to do.
The night sky was overcast, and the temperature had dipped to minus-10 degrees. Specks of ice from the freezing-up of Great Bear Lake filled the air. They caused outdoor lights to reflect up, creating optical illusions called light pillars that stretched to the sky.