Category: Nááts’ihch’oh

I’ve been out of town in the field for most of the summer (48 days over 2 months), so I’ve been falling behind on blog posts.

Back in July, I was out at Divide Lake, which is a pretty nice spot.

Here’s a montage of the Resource Conservation team doing vegetation monitoring at Divide Lake:

The weather was a bit iffy…

But fortunately there’s an old hunting outfitter cabin on the site (the only infrastructure in the whole park).

The previous occupant of the cabin was not happy about us moving in though.

I got out into the park for my first trip of the season: bird monitoring at Margaret Lake and Broken Skull Lake (our two most forested lakes). I am not a bird expert – there are a lot of birds out there, and a lot of them look and sound basically the same. So what we do is we put out audio recorders to take 10 minutes of recordings every half hour. Then we send the tapes off to an actual bird expert to tell us what birds we’ve got.

We also went to scope out some old ruins near the lakes. There are some old wooden platforms near Margaret Lake, probably from some past mineral exploration. Near Broken Skull Lake, there are the remains of an old cabin, built by a guy named Chris Larkin who flew into the lake in 1979, overwintered, and then paddled out down the Broken Skull River the following spring. He wrote a book about it called A Far Cry.

Some of the rivers in the park got featured on the Northwest Territories tourism page. #2 & #5 are in the park (and have staff members in the photos), and #3 starts in the park, flows into #4, and then flows to Tulita.