Ten Colorado Rivers plus a 300 metre-wide channel equals boxcar-sized waves and 30-foot-deep whirlpools at pelican Rapid. Paddler: Jordie McKenzie.
The I
Slave Paddling the Northern Jewel
by Shawn Grono photos by Ryan Creary
n Canada’s Northwest Territories, arctic winds blow in temperatures below –40 much of the year. But as the seasons change, the sun’s heat awakens a sleeping giant. The Slave River roars to life and flows with ten times the volume of the Colorado and four times that of the Fraser. Three thousand five hundred cubic metres of water per second travel from the prairies to the Arctic Ocean. As the river crosses the Alberta-NWT border, it plummets off the Canadian Shield’s red granite shelf, some of the oldest and hardest rock on the planet. It passes through a sieve of islands sculpted by water and time to produce hundreds of good, bad and ugly river features. The result is one of the world’s most awe- inspiring labyrinths of whitewater—a series of rapids 30 kilometres long—a 60-square-kilome- tre big-water playground lit 24 hours a day by the arctic summer sun. Extended hot days on the river are combined with never-ending golden sunsets, no McDonald's for hundreds of miles, no cell phone towers, no distractions of globalization, and, until recently, no other kayakers in the eddy waiting for their turn on the wave.
E River
very summer or two for nearly a decade, I have made the 16-hour drive
from Edmonton to the “end of the road” town of Fort Smith to kayak the Slave.When I first started coming here,you could paddle for two weeks and not see another paddler. Now,there are a few locals and maybe 50 to 75 visiting paddlers a year. This may not seem like much, but it’s a major increase for a river north of 60,a testament to the grow- ing attention the Slave is getting in the whitewater kayaking world in the past cou- ple of years. A few years ago, kayakers
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