Arctic giant.

3 Great Bear Lake is called Sahtu in the Slavey language. At 31,153 [km.sup.2] it is the largest lake completely within Canada. Lake Superior and Huron are bigger, but are only partly in Canada. Great Bear Lake is located on the Arctic Circle the North west Territories.

The lake is fed by numerous rivers but has a single outflow to the north--the Great Bear River, which is a tributary of the Mackenzie River.

The lake is ice-covered from late November through to July.

During the brief summer, anglers are attracted from many parts of the world to test their skills against the lake trout. But, the cost of such an adventure is high: upwards of $6,000 for a week, plus airfare, and is only open to a few hundred people a year.

There is no commercial fishing on the lake. The world record for a lake trout caught using a rod and line was taken from Great Bear Lake. The monster weighed 32.7 kilos and was landed in 1991 by a gentleman appropriately named Lloyd Bull. A slightly larger trout was caught in 1.995 but released back into the lake.

Aside from changes in the average size of lake trout (they are getting smaller), Great Bear Lake has remained largely unaffected by human activity. Great Bear Lake is likely the largest lake in the world to exist in a pristine condition.

The region around the lake has abundant wildlife. Residents from Fort Franklin, on the southwest side of the lake, trap many animals for the fur market.

A BLEAK CHAPTER

The Dene people have lived beside Great Bear Lake, which they call Sahtu, for thousands of years. Their traditional lives were disrupted in 1930 when prospector Gilbert A. LaBine found pitchblende on the lake's eastern shore. Pitchblende is the ore that yields radium and uranium.

Dene men, referred to as "coolies"--an insulting term for Native labourers--were hired to carry the radioactive material in cloth bags. In 1931, the federal government issued a warning about serious health hazards from exposure to even small amounts of radioactive ores. The ore-carriers were not told of these concerns.

(During World War II (1939-45), the race was on to produce an atomic bomb, The United States wanted hundreds of tonnes of uranium; a lot of it came from Great Bear Lake. Through the reprocessing of uranium, plutonium, beryllium, and other substances went into the atomic bombs dropped on Hiroshima and Nagasaki, Japan in 1945.)

The Dene who helped extract the ore were kept in the dark about the dangers they had been exposed to. By the late 1990s, half the men had died of cancer. The people are also concerned about the presence of millions of tonnes of radioactive waste in the Great Bear Lake environment, which, as they say, "we regard as our source of food and spiritual nourishment."

As Chief Raymond Tutcho put it in 1998: "We the Dene have been subjected to over 60 years of horrible injustice because of apparent national interests, Our people have paid for this with our lives and the health of our community, lands, and waters. We have set out a 'Plan for Essential Response and Necessary Redress.' It is a constructive and minimum response to the ongoing impacts of uranium mining on the Dene people and lands."

FACT FILE

The oldest known rock in the world, Acosta gnesis, is found east of Great Bear Lake. It is about four billion years old, just 500 million years younger than the estimated age of Earth. It is possible that this rock was formed when the very earliest life was appearing on Earth, and perhaps on Mars. Conditions on Earth and Mars are thought to have been similar at this time.