Slide 7 is a view of Nahanni village looking down the Nahanni and on down the Liard. [Aerial view]
Slide 9 is Dick Turner's place again, across the South Nahanni River.
Slide 16. That's a little pothole lake. I might have even stood up on the canopy of the Cat to take a check around at the country. You can see that canyon wall over there. It's white. [Part of Al Wright's and Ernie Birkbeck's journey to deliver two Cat bulldozers to the Norvan Exploration camp at the Prairie Creek lead-silver deposit.]
...you can see what the trail looks like. You can see that it's a muskeg surface and travelling on muskeg in July, it can be a little soft. Slide 18 is basically the same thing. Any little place where there is water running at all, regardless of how little, there's no permafrost. Generally speaking, with that moss, it only thaws about a foot deep and you can travel on the permafrost. We had to push the treesout of the way to get our sloop through. [Part of Al Wright's and Ernie Birkbeck's journey to deliver two Cat bulldozers to the Norvan Exploration camp at the Prairie Creek lead-silver deposit.]
Slide 22 is the sloop on the end of a winch line. [Part of Al Wright's and Ernie Birkbeck's journey to deliver two Cat bulldozers to the Norvan Exploration camp at the Prairie Creek lead-silver deposit.]
Slide 32 is also out of order. That is the wicker basket canoe that the German fellows [Bill Lietz and Erhard Fischer] built.[From slide housing] A willow and canvas canoe - Nahanni Butte.
Slide 33. We're onto the east branch of the Ram River. The helicopter has arrived and we have a way to look the country over. The mining engineer decided that the way that we had planned was just too far to go. So, according to him, if we went over this one range we would be down into the Prairie Creek. The thing to do is to find a way to cross that bunch of summits, some of which were better than 6,000 feet high. Those Nahanni mountains is pretty rugged. They are relatively new mountains, so it's all canyons and washes. The washes you can travel on but sometimes the canyons are a little bit much. We went across to where this mining engineer asked us to go. The helicopter came in the next day and took me up to take a look around to see what the country looked like. We got up right up to the summit and behold, there was a fresh slide and the smaller of the rocks were about the size of an ordinary house. It dropped down into the head of the canyon. So, I would have to go down over the slide, over rocks that I couldn't even begin to move with the Cat of the size we had. We would need a ton of powder [dynamite] and a month in order t to get down into this canyon. And, if we got down in there, I don't know what we would have gotten into because we didn't look any further. When I saw that slide I said that there was no way we can go there. This is a shot from in the helicopter or possibly… We did land there and take a. walk around. That' s the slide. [Part of Al Wright's and Ernie Birkbeck's journey to deliver two Cat bulldozers to the Norvan Exploration camp at the Prairie Creek lead-silver deposit.]
Slide 39 is looking up that gravel wash. [Part of Al Wright's and Ernie Birkbeck's journey to deliver two Cat bulldozers to the Norvan Exploration camp at the Prairie Creek lead-silver deposit.]
[Slide 42] Now there was when I was on one of my scouting forays. I went up and looked around up on top, to see what means we would have to use to get over that. I had walked up to the summit and was looking back down at the valley, that we had come up. You can see our trail down there...Now, just to get things figured out for size here. Some places we travelled in the creek, and some places, like I said before, there's little canyons that you cannot get up so we had to go up on the slope of the hill. Right at the bottom of the picture there's one place that you can see that we went up fairly high. It doesn't look high up from where the picture is taken, but it must be very close to 100 feet above the creek bottom. You can see that they're not miniature mountains by any means. [Part of Al Wright's and Ernie Birkbeck's journey to deliver two Cat bulldozers to the Norvan Exploration camp at the Prairie Creek lead-silver deposit.]
Slide 49 is the pretty well to the lower end of the canyon. [Part of Al Wright's and Ernie Birkbeck's journey to deliver two Cat bulldozers to the Norvan Exploration camp at the Prairie Creek lead-silver deposit.]
Slide 59 and 60. This is Ken Stockall's airplane. [Part of Al Wright's and Ernie Birkbeck's journey to deliver two Cat bulldozers to the Norvan Exploration camp at the Prairie Creek lead-silver deposit.]
Slide 63 is looking down towards Prairie Creek. You can see a little glacial ice there [Part of Al Wright's and Ernie Birkbeck's journey to deliver two Cat bulldozers to the Norvan Exploration camp at the Prairie Creek lead-silver deposit.]
Slide 75 is the unique little log Catholic Church in Nahanni Butte. The bush sure had grown [up]around it since then.
Slide 80. Now we're all the way back down to Nahanni Butte. That orange boat is one of those government boats. The gray boat with the cabin on it, is a boat that Gus had. I don't remember him ever using it to any great extent but he did have it, with an inboard, gas engine in it. The one with a load on it, tied alongside of Gus' was the one that we took to The Hotsprings.
Slide 85 is looking up the Nahanni from that same point where we camped overnight. It took us about 40 hours of pounding to get up. [throught the Splits]
Slide 88 is the Outpost Hills or the Yohin Ridge. Now if we had tried to get Cats up there, I'm certain sure that we never would have gotten past that point. There was a rock slide there with monstrous rocks in it. It would be next to impossible to get by without using powder [dynamite].
Slide 97. Just down around that point would be the mouth of the First Canyon. It was just up two or three miles into the canyon and looking back down the River.
Slide 103...It's just below George's Riffle. It's not Stark's Rock...You come around a point and that rock is sitting there. There's no problem getting around it, like there is around Starke's Rock. It's about halfway through the canyon, I suppose.
Slide 105 is looking up toward Funeral [Headless] Creek, in Deadman Valley.
Slide 5 is John Brucker's spread [at Nahanni Butte] from the air.
Slide 6 is the school and the residence. The big building is the school. [Aerial view]
Slide 10 is the original school. It seems like they dressed it up quite a bit. It looks different.
Slide 23 is just a creek that we had to cross. There was a slide there, so I took a picture of it. There was bigger timber down into the creek. [Part of Al Wright's and Ernie Birkbeck's journey to deliver two Cat bulldozers to the Norvan Exploration camp at the Prairie Creek lead-silver deposit.]
Slide 26 is the kind of going it was down in that canyon. It was just lots of winch line. [Moving the cat ahead while paying out cable from the winch, then reeling the cable in until the sloop was up to the Cat, only to repeat the process. This is necessary because in rough terrain the sloop drawbar may get hung up or jammed in rocks. Also, if there is poor footing for the Cat it will not be able to move both itself and pull the weight of the sloop.] [Part of Al Wright's and Ernie Birkbeck's journey to deliver two Cat bulldozers to the Norvan Exploration camp at the Prairie Creek lead-silver deposit.]
Slide 29. Now here we got into this… I'm sure that's a sink. It had creeks coming in from all over but I couldn't see where there was any outlet. For all that I could tell, it was just simply that, a sink. [Sinkholes are typical of karst terrains.] [Part of Al Wright's and Ernie Birkbeck's journey to deliver two Cat bulldozers to the Norvan Exploration camp at the Prairie Creek lead-silver deposit.]