Nahanni, Northwest Territories
Canada’s Unheralded Answer to Yellowstone and Grand Canyon

After you’ve spent years armchair traveling, debriefing sojourner friends and watching Globe Trekker episodes, you begin to think the earth has few surprises left. All the superlative landscapes, artifacts and creatures have been discovered, described, and logged in to your mental picture of the world. There are no new Florences or Grand Canyons.

Then the world smacks your complacency right into the next county – literally.

I was visiting a favorite online site the other day, one devoted to high-rise buildings. The forum is an international one, with many participants from China, a country that’s now undergoing a massive skyscraper construction boom. Sometimes one of the Chinese contributors will throw in a few landscape pictures to acquaint his western counterparts with the physical beauty of his vast homeland.

On this visit I saw that a Canadian contributor had responded to a beautiful set of Chinese photos by linking to a remote, virtually unknown national park in Canada’s Northwest Territories. Nahanni National Park, located about 900 miles (1,450 kilometers) north of the U.S. border in the middle of Canada’s great northern wilderness, is a place I’d never heard of. Curious, I clicked on his link to see the “Canadian rebuttal.” View Photos

After looking at only a few photos, I realized how serendipitous my visit to that skyscraper site had been: Nahanni was awesomely and stupendously gorgeous, and I had stumbled across one of the great visual surprises of my life. Any of Nahanni’s highlights, taken alone, would qualify this 1,840-square-mile (4,765 square kilometers) wilderness as a national park:

• Nahanni boasts mountains that easily rival the Canadian Rockies and the Grand Tetons in drama and beauty. One range, The Unclimables, has peaks of breathtaking beauty.

• Ninety-two-meter (300 feet) Virginia Falls, almost twice the height of Niagara Falls, is easily the highest and most dramatic cataract in all of northwestern Canada. The falls is split into two by a tower of resistant rock that forces the South Nahanni River to surge around it before leaping. (Painted Canyon, just below Virginia Falls, is reminiscent of the Grand Canyon of the Yellowstone in color, though wider.)

• Curiously, despite its far north location, the park never underwent glaciation during the Ice Age. As a result, the Nahanni is an old “antecedent river” that predates even the park’s mountains – they arose around it rather than the river cutting down through already upthrust peaks. Visitors are fascinated by the river’s resultant meanders, finding it hard to believe that such an “old” looking flow can exist in such a vertical and relatively new landscape.

• Nahanni’s four great canyons, simply named First Canyon, Second Canyon, Third Canyon and Fourth Canyon, are deep defiles that many visitors have called “Canada’s Grand Canyons.” Oddly enough, Fourth Canyon is the first canyon visitors access as they boat down the South Nahanni River past Virginia Falls. First Canyon, the furthest on a river journey, has limestone walls towering 1,400 meters (4,600 feet) – a height that rivals Grand Canyon.

• The park is home to North America’s top-tier wildlife in abundance: grizzly bears, moose, Dall sheep, wolves and bison. Because of Nahanni’s remoteness, the park’s animals have had little contact with humans, making them indifferent at best and dangerous at worst since they have no fear of people.

Like most of the other great national parks of Canada’s north and Alaska, Nahanni is a place you walk, fly or boat into. Most visitors fly from Edmonton, Alberta, to Yellowknife, Northwest territories, on to Fort Simpson, and then take a hop west to any of several touch-down points. There is a lodge in the park that provides very comfortable accommodations and food. Because of its high latitude, the park has a very short visitor season: June 15 through September 15. 

– Patrick Totty