PROVINCIAL PARKS

As Wintoniw helps him refuel for the return flight, I wander around the beach near our landing site. Fresh tracks along the shoreline show where a wolf has padded by. Among the lichen a few dozen metres inland lies a pile of moose scat. An osprey passes overhead. A small plover skitters down the shore. After the plane has taken off again, the only sound is a light breeze, the only evidence of human beings our footprints in the sand.

PEOPLE HAVE BEEN LEAVING footprints in the area and using its resources for at least 7,000 years. Archaeologists say that the Northern Plano were the earliest, followed by the Shield Archaic, the Taltheilei and their descendants, the Dene. Today there are Dene reserves near Fond du Lac, Sask., at the eastern edge of the lake, and Fort Chipewyan, Alta., at the far southwest. Hunters and fishermen from these communities still travel through the region.

“A lot of artifacts in the dunes could be either buried or exposed because of the wind,” says Bryan Gordon, an archaeologist at the Canadian Museum of Civilization who has studied the long history of human presence in the area. “It’s the luck of the draw. Many of the sites are in sand blowouts. Who knows what’s beneath the surface?” On one research trip, he and a graduate student had their camp ransacked by a black bear who succeeded in opening — and consuming — an entire bottle of sherry.

The dunes dominate a landscape still being moulded by wind. It took shape when the glaciers fell back after the last Ice Age, exposing an underlying sandstone formation. Lake Athabasca’s water level is lower now, and the area it covers is smaller than it was than a few thousand years ago. The emerging ridges and sandhills were quickly colonized by plants.

For them, sand is a mixed blessing. It gives their roots more room to grow than does the scanty, rockbound soil of the subarctic forest. But the sand is mobile, at the wind’s mercy, and when it shifts, roots get exposed. Within a few years, a healthy tree can turn into an aerial sculpture ready to tumble. Many plants that thrive here can regenerate their roots from underground stems, allowing them to survive burial by sand.

The flora of Lake Athabasca has evolved with amazing speed. Other regions of Canada that are rich in endemic plants are larger: the Queen Charlotte Islands in British Columbia, the unglaciated areas of central Yukon, and Quebec’s Lower St. Lawrence. Because of their limited range, nearly all the Athabasca endemics now appear on the watchlist of the Committee on the Status of Endangered Wildlife in Canada. The rarest of them — a plant whose dense spray of stems spreads out from a single taproot — has the wonderful name “impoverished pinweed.”

Yet as Wintoniw and I hike over the dunes and past the delicate gravel pavements, we see that many of the endemics are common and easy to find. The stem and leaves of Athabasca thrift are beautifully adapted to retaining moisture; the thin, flexible stem of sand stitchwort enables the plant to bend easily and resist the force of windblown gravel.

Although the July sun is hot, the sand feels cool beneath our feet. I carry my sandals most of the way. Wandering the dunes, I become a connoisseur of sand: its textures, its colours, its moisture levels. Wintoniw and I say little as we walk. But over the breakfasts and dinners he prepares on a small propane burner, we talk at length.

He grew up in a devoutly Christian family in rural Manitoba, and has never lost his faith. To me the endemic plants offer vibrant proof of natural selection. Wintoniw draws a different conclusion: “The value for me is in seeing just how incredible nature is. The trees survive here, windblown, sandblasted, in the most difficult conditions. It lets me know how wonderful and amazing God is.”