Through the great Canadian Wilderness [antikvár]

A Land of Woods and Water The heart of Canada is an untamed wilderness: a frontier-land of frozen plains, silent forests, tranquil lakes and multitudinous rivers, all fashioned on a huge scale. Canada is the world's second-largest country, surpassed only by the gigantic Russian Federation. Just one of its ten provinces (the Northwest Territories) covers an area ten times greater than the whole of the British Isles. Yet this vast country is populated by fewer than 30 million people, of whom the great majority—over 80 per cent—live in cities in a narrow strip of fertile land adjacent to the USA. To the north of this strip lie over three million square miles of territory wholly unsuitable for agriculture and therefore among the most sparsely populated on Earth. This is the heart of Canada: a wilderness of primordial woodland, patterned by a mosaic of rivers and lakes which contain nearly ten per cent of the world's fresh surface water. The further north one goes the more desolate this wilderness becomes, until in the Canadian Arctic it degenerates into a wasteland where the subsoil is permanently frozen and winter temperatures can drop to -60 °F. The sheer immensity and diversity of this beautiful but intransigent land can seem quite overwhelming, and newcomers to Canada invariably wonder just how so many contrasting environments came to coexist. The answers lie all around them in the landscape itself. The Dividing Mountains The Rocky Mountains, or Rockies as they are familiarly called, form a huge chain, extending from northern British Columbia all the way down to Mexico, nearly 3,000 miles to the south. And they divide Canada into two quite separate zones. To their west, in British Columbia, lie hills, valleys, rushing streams and, in a narrow coastal region bordering the Pacific Ocean,