Nahanni National Park Reserve

Nahanni National Park Reserve tickets and tours: which one to book

Nahanni lies in the Mackenzie mountains, in the south-western corner of the Northwest Territories of Canada, against the border of the Yukon, some five hundred kilometres west of Yellowknife, and it protects the South Nahanni, one of the great wilderness rivers of the world. No road reaches it, fewer than a thousand people visit it in a year, and it can be experienced in two ways. The first is a flightseeing day trip by floatplane, which is how most visitors see it: aircraft leave from the village of Fort Simpson, on the Mackenzie river, which is reached by scheduled flights from Yellowknife or by a long drive up the Mackenzie Highway from Alberta, and also from Nahanni Butte, from Muncho Lake on the Alaska Highway in British Columbia, and from Watson Lake in the Yukon; they fly over the canyons, land on the river just above Virginia Falls, where passengers walk for an hour or two on a boardwalk and trail to viewpoints above and below the falls, and often land a second time on Glacier Lake or Little Doctor Lake before returning, the whole taking four to eight hours.

The second, the real thing, is to travel down the river by canoe or raft. Most parties are flown in to Virginia Falls and paddle from there to the settlement of Nahanni Butte, where the river joins the Liard, a little over two hundred kilometres, in seven to ten days; longer trips of two to three weeks begin far upstream, at the Moose Ponds or at Rabbitkettle Lake. Below the falls the river is fast and powerful, with stretches of large standing waves and some rapids, within the ability of experienced canoeists and of anyone on a guided raft trip, and a handful of licensed outfitters run such trips each summer. All visitors must register with the park office in Fort Simpson, reserve their dates, since the number of parties at the falls is limited, and pay a backcountry fee.

Visiting Nahanni National Park Reserve: what you will see

Nahanni was set aside as a national park reserve in 1976, in order to forestall a hydroelectric dam proposed for Virginia Falls, after a canoe journey down the river by the prime minister, Pierre Trudeau, in 1970; in 1978 it was one of the first four natural sites in the world, and the first of all in the chronological list, to be inscribed as World Heritage, and in 2009, in agreement with the Dehcho First Nations, it was enlarged sixfold to about 30,000 square kilometres, taking in most of the river's watershed, with the Naats'ihch'oh reserve added upstream in 2014. The word reserve indicates that the land claims of the Dene are not yet settled, and the park is managed jointly with them; their name for it is Naha Dehe, and their ancestors, and a mysterious mountain people called the Naha, who raided the lowlands and then vanished, have used it for thousands of years. The river is older than the mountains through which it flows. It had already established its meandering course across a plain when the ranges began to rise, and it kept to that course, sawing downwards as the land came up, so that it now winds in great loops through four canyons, numbered from the bottom, with vertical walls of limestone and dolomite up to twelve hundred metres high, the deepest river canyons in Canada. Because this part of the north escaped the last glaciation, the landforms have been developing undisturbed for an immensely long time, and the park contains features found nowhere else in the country at such a latitude: a labyrinth karst of caves, sinkholes and rock towers, with more than two hundred caves, in some of which lie the frozen carcasses of Dall sheep that wandered in thousands of years ago;

the Rabbitkettle tufa mounds, terraced domes of calcium carbonate up to twenty-seven metres high, built by warm mineral springs over ten thousand years, the largest in Canada, which may be visited only barefoot and with a park guide; hot springs at Kraus and elsewhere; sand blowouts; and, above the upper river, the Cirque of the Unclimbables, a ring of sheer granite spires, named by the mountaineers who first saw it in 1955, which draws rock climbers from all over the world. At Virginia Falls, called Nailicho in Dene, the whole river, some two hundred metres wide, plunges ninety-six metres, nearly twice the height of Niagara, in a thundering double cataract divided by a tall spire of rock, in a setting of spruce forest and mountain without a building in sight. The park is the home of grizzly and black bears, woodland caribou, moose, Dall sheep, mountain goats, wolves, trumpeter swans and peregrines. It is also a land of legend. In 1908 the headless skeletons of two brothers named McLeod, prospectors who had gone up the river in search of gold, were found on its bank, and other deaths and disappearances followed, which gave rise to the names that mark the map, Deadmen Valley, Headless Creek, the Funeral Range, the Broken Skull river, and to tales of a tropical valley of hot springs and of hostile head-hunters, which the newspapers of the 1940s embroidered with enthusiasm.

Nahanni National Park Reserve: best time to go, seasons and hours

The season is short, from about mid-June to early September. In June the river is high, cold and fast with snowmelt, and the days never darken; July and the first half of August are the warmest and most settled weeks, 15 to 25 degrees by day, and the most popular, with mosquitoes and blackflies at their worst in early July; from mid-August the nights grow cold, the aspens and the tundra begin to turn, the insects disappear and the first northern lights are seen, and by mid-September snow can fall.

Heavy rain in the mountains can raise the river by metres within a day at any time, and wind and low cloud often delay the floatplanes, so that spare days should be allowed at both ends. This is remote country, with no telephone coverage, where help may be days away; parties must be self-sufficient, carry a satellite communicator, store food against bears, and have whitewater experience or a guide. Allow a day for a flight, ten days to three weeks for the river.