North America’s deepest lake still wears a contested name
Great Slave Lake is North America’s deepest at 614 metres, the Northwest Territories’ second-largest after Great Bear, and the world’s tenth by area. Gold on its North Arm birthed Yellowknife; a fallen Soviet reactor later dusted its shores with nuclear debris.
The lake stretches 469 kilometres. Its English name comes from Cree labels for the Dene Slavey people on its southern shore, and many now want it changed as Indigenous place names return across the territory. Archaeology traces occupation from the Northern Plano tradition about 8,000 years ago, soon after the ice retreated, through the Shield Archaic. Fur traders reached it from Hudson Bay in the mid-1700s; gold in the 1930s created Yellowknife, and a highway rounded the western side in 1960.
The Hay, Slave, Lockhart, and Taltson rivers feed it, and the Mackenzie drains it. The western shore is forested while the eastern shore and North Arm look like tundra. The main western bowl covers 18,500 square kilometres with a mean depth of about 32 metres, but the island-filled East Arm, split by the Pethei Peninsula into McLeod and Christie bays, holds the extreme depths and lies within the proposed Thaidene Nene park reserve.
Nutrients carried by the Slave River, with little pollution or invasive species, make it rich in fish for its latitude: lake whitefish, lake trout, inconnu, and northern pike. South of the lake, in Wood Buffalo National Park, a remnant flock of whooping cranes was found nesting in 1954.
In winter the 6.5-kilometre Dettah ice road links Yellowknife with a small First Nations fishing community. On 24 January 1978 the Soviet satellite Kosmos 954 scattered radioactive debris from its reactor near the lake. Houseboaters starred in the series Ice Lake Rebels, and two seasons of the survival show Alone were filmed on the East Arm, about 110 kilometres south of the tree line.
Source: Great Slave Lake
