Exploring the Firth River, Northern Yukon

​Over the next few months, I will be taking you down the spectacular Firth River which flows through the northern Yukon to the Arctic Ocean. It is a wonderful river that few ever see, so this is your chance to see it through my eyes (and camera) as I saw it this last summer in 2024.  Who knows?  Once you have read about it, you may want to raft it yourself some day. We will start our journey with the Mackenzie delta.
It is hard to imagine 25,000 lakes in one place, but that is said to be the number of lakes in the Mackenzie delta in Canada’s Northwest Territories. We flew over the delta on our way to the Frith River to begin our river rafting trip, and although I did not try to count them, I can personally attest that there are a great many lakes in the Mackenzie delta. Sinuous river channels threaded their way between the lakes and brought the water of the mighty Mackenzie, which drains one fifth of Canada, to the Arctic Ocean.
It was a remarkable sight, but even though it is 210 Km long and 80 Km wide, the Mackenzie delta is small when compared for example to the largest river delta in the world, that of the Ganges-Brahmaputra Rivers in India and Bangladesh. To be fair, though, the Mackenzie has had less than 30,000 years to do its work, since before that the area was covered by several kilometres of ice. The age of the Ganges River is measured in the tens of millions of years.
At its western edge, the Mackenzie delta ended abruptly as the land rose to form the Richardson Mountains. Then we flew on for some time over the Yukon highlands until our plane finally landed beside the Frith River. We set up camp and looked forward to the next day when we would be heading down the river.