Modes of Transport
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Excerpts from Reflections from Across the River: A History of the Area North of Athabasca, published by the Northern Heights Historical Society in 1994
Often the question asked when exploring history is: “How did first peoples, first fur traders or first settler folk get here?” When one looks at a map of the Calling Lake region, the lake’s central location in the big bend of the Athabasca River suggests that, no matter the transportation mode, this river played a part as either a route to, or a barrier to, travel to Calling Lake.
Until the railroad stretched north to Fort McMurray/Waterways, the Athabasca River served as the major travel artery from the Rocky Mountains at Jasper through Athabasca to Fort Chipewyan and beyond. First Nations would have paddled the river by canoe in summer, switching to snowshoes and dog teams in winter; fur traders followed in larger canoes, later scows and finally river steamers.
Further map reading suggests correctly that the Calling and Pelican rivers provided access from the east, while a variety of smaller water connections provided access to the west. Heading north, Rock Island, Sandy and Wabasca lakes and the Wabasca River could be used, although with considerable portaging. Although these waterways were not prime canoeing routes, their valleys offered natural corridors for walking, and later for horse and cart trails. Early First Nations traveled to Calling lake largely in small parties with minimal gear, commonly in the winter for hunting and trapping, using snowshoes, toboggans and dog teams.
Access to Calling lake from the south was aided by the addition of river crossings at the town of Athabasca: a ferry in 1906 and a bridge in 1952. Even so, for decades settlers traveled along rutted and often muddy trails. Their creaking carts, pulled by horses, mules and even a few moose, were eventually joined by motorized vehicles, some homemade. Later, airplanes entered the scene, the better to access remote communities and faraway markets, and a small airstrip developed.
Understanding the evolving modes of transportation into Calling Lake is intertwined with understanding the waves of Beaver, Cree, Métis and other first peoples who passed through or made this place home, as well as the fur traders, missionaries and settlers who followed. How and why people traveled also reflects the economies that provided livelihoods in each era, from hunter-gathering societies through the fur trade, early agriculture, lumbering, commercial fishing and mink farming. All played a role in the choice of transportation routes and travel modes made by the people living here.
By Mark Lund, author of Mark’s Guide for Alberta Paddlers
Waterways
In earlier eras, waterways served as highways for transportation and commerce. After all, getting anywhere by land meant traveling meandering, often muddy trails on foot or by horse. Calling Lake’s proximity to other rivers and lakes opened routes for people to come, initially to hunt, fish and trap – and later to live. Indigenous peoples often used waterways to follow the seasonal cycles of the animals and plants that met their daily needs. Fur traders, settlers, missionaries and lawmakers also used waterways to make their way here from all directions.
Being linked to the Athabasca River via the Calling River gave this community access to a major trade route. Waterways also helped attract people from the Lac la Biche region, who would use the Lac la Biche River to reach the Athabasca River, then cross the river and follow the Calling River upstream. There are also tales of people traveling down the Athabasca River by scow to the mouth of the Calling River, then walking overland to Calling Lake. Travelers from the Slave Lake area took the Slave River to Mirror Landing (now called Smith), then followed creeks and small lakes to Orloff Lake and continued south to Calling Lake. Those coming or going from Wabasca and other points north welcomed the opportunity to stop for food and rest at Rock Island Lake, which also connects to Calling Lake by a liquid umbilical cord. Although much of today’s commerce comes by paved roads and air routes, waterways remain key to Calling Lake’s heritage as a hub with vital connections to communities near and far in all directions.
There’s some evidence that Calling Lake may have gone by other names in earlier days. It shows up on this 1885 map as “Quill Lake” and in the map below as “Quito Lake.” We have also seen it called “Echo Lake” and “Talking Lake.” For more about the lake and its names, click on Historic maps of Calling Lake.
Roads and trails
“Our wagons were stuck in the mud, and the muskeg was bottomless. We built bridges, cut roads and put up corduroys. Some of our cattle drowned in the streams. So to cheer us up, we stopped for two days and decided to make some firewater. No mistake, it really was firewater. Our throats were in flames and brought tears to our eyes. One week later, we finally reached our destination, Calling Lake.”
– Nick Tanasiuk, describing his initial journey from Athabasca in 1920
Several homesteaders have been engaged in the self-imposed task of clearing a roadway for the freighters hauling fish from Calling Lake. This will mean a saving of three miles and is situated north of Thorn’s Store. The new road is also being made with the idea of obviating the big hill close to Shank’s stopping place, which is encountered on the old route. The boys deserve the benefit they will undoubtedly receive as soon as the bulk of fish traffic is diverted to the new roadway.”
– Northern News, January 8, 1915
“People who had to travel the long distance between Athabasca and Calling Lake with horses required two days to make a one-way trip. Many welcomed the stopover at Max and Mary Shwaga’s farm, about half way, for a time the last farmhouse along the road. After James McIntosh of Calling Lake purchased a truck, he often left it at the Shwaga arm and drove the rest of the way home with a team of horses. Some residents traveled to the Shwagas with a team and then caught a ride to Athabasca and back in the truck, returning to Calling Lake the next day.”
– Reflections from Across the River, p. 431
Rock Island Lake, about 35 kilometres north of Calling Lake, is not shown on early maps, probably because it had just one main river, and that connects only to Calling Lake. Yet it became a key community for travellers needing food and lodging between Calling Lake and Wabasca. Hosts there included the Tanasiuk family, who are honoured at Rock Island Lake Campground for the role they played in the area’s development.
Mail carrier Jakie Gislason did not let anything bar his way, according to his story in Reflections from Across the River. When flies swarmed, he smeared a mix of pine tar, creolin, creosote and grease (often bear) on his horses. When the road became impassable, he’d unhitch his wagon, put the mail on the pack horse and ride to Calling Lake. Later his conveyances included cars, trucks and a Ford truck. For some time in the 1940s, he also took mail once a month to Pelican Portage, 10-day round trip by boat or kayak in summer, by pack and saddle horse in winter, often three ponies hitched tandem to a toboggan.
Descriptions in Reflections from Across the River of the ways fish were transported from Calling Lake to market illustrate how transport evolved in early settler times. In and around the 1920s: “Some fishermen delivered to Athabasca by team on the first winter trail, known as ‘fish camp trail.’ It went west of Calling Lake to the Athabasca River, and down the river to Athabasca.” By 1932: “A train of horse teams hauled the fish to Athabasca, making a round trip in four days. To speed delivery to distant markets, Arthur Brown of Colinton, AB used Reo trucks, meeting teams from Calling Lake at Kirkpatrick’s Stopping Place.” By then, fish buyer James McIntosh had an airplane that could make the round trip to Athabasca and back in an hour with 700 pounds of fish.
Milestones in the upgrade of roads connecting Calling Lake with other communities include the following:
- 1906 – The first ferry begins crossing the Athabasca River near the Athabasca settlement. In winter, travel switches to an ice road.
- 1917 – A crew led by Oscar Crawford completes a road between Athabasca and Calling Lake through a low area called Deep Creek.
- 1919 – A road from Athabasca to Calling Lake is surveyed.
- 1920 – Crews led by Oscar Crawford vastly improve the road, although it still uses corduroyed logs when crossing muskeg at low points and is hard going in places. The road runs along the west side of Hay Lake, crossing into Calling Lake at the mouth of the Calling River via a bridge.
- 1921 – The rough road from Athabasca is graveled and multiple bridges put in, but getting there still takes two days, or even longer.
- 1930 – Free ferry begun at Athabasca settlement.
- 1934 – A cage is installed at Athabasca crossing so people and goods can be shipped during spring and fall, when neither river nor ice crossings are possible.
- 1931 – Buffalo Bill Day and Joe Uchytil begin blazing a more direct route to Athabasca. Work is done manually and completed in 1933.
- 1940 – A paved highway opens between Athabasca and Calling Lake.
- 1940s – Advocacy for a bridge across the Athabasca River are rebuffed, in part due to competing priorities during the Second World War.
- 1944 – Area road begin getting their first coat of gravel. Pulled out of pits on horse-drawn fresnos, the gravel was loaded onto loadlifters and deposited into trucks to be spread on the roads.
- 1952 – A bridge opens across the Athabasca River, making it possible to reach Calling Lake without relying on a ferry or ice bridge.
- 1958 – A road to Sandy Lake is completed by an oil exploration company, although by 1971 the Metis Regional Council hears a call for improvement, as “The roads are bad for the people to come out on.”
- 1962 – Provincial plans for a road to Fort McMurray show two possible routes: east of the Athabasca River from Lac La Biche or west of the river from Calling Lake. As built, Hwy 63 runs west of the Athabasca River but not from Calling Lake.
- 1989 – Road to Wabasca from Calling Lake opens. The 180-km route along Hwy 813 improves access for residents, tourists, forestry and the oil and gas industry.
- 1992 – The road from Calling Lake to Rock Island is being widened and upgraded, but remains a fair-weather road, recalls Bruce Mayer, who lived in Calling Lake that year. “Once it rained, all bets were off.”
- 1990s – Roads are added and upgraded to serve the Al-Pac pulp mill, which begins operating in 1992, and to serve other resource exploration. The resulting network of roads includes the Connector Road running east of Calling Lake and the 1000 Road on the south and west side of the lake.
- 1993 – New bridges open across the Athabasca River and the Calling River, part of the new Al-Pac Connector or “C” Road north of the Al-Pac mill.
Sources include histories written by Dora Shwaga, by Avard Mann and the Kito Sakahekan Seniors Society and by the Northern Heights Historical Society
As indicated by the final entries in that timeline, Al-Pac’s decision to build a pulp mill in the area fueled expansion of the road network around Calling Lake, both to reach the forests needed to feed the mill and to carry the product away. The Calling Lake Connector, or “C” road facilitated local traffic, running north from the millsite, to just north of Calling Lake, where it joined Hwy 813. The route was among a set of roads built under a “roads to resources” program funded by Alberta Transportation. Much of the work was done by local contractors, an approach strongly advocated by then-MLA Mike Cardinal. Among the contractors involved were Frank Crawford, Rudy Wiselka, Pac Construction, Pacholoks and Uchytils.
Al-Pac built the 1000 Road to serve one of the first areas around Calling Lake to be logged. It travels west off the “C” road south, north of Pleasant Valley, to Hwy 813, curves around the south end of Calling Lake and continues to the west side of the lake. The network of roads also included a “K” road on the east side of Al-Pac’s Forest Management Agreement, running from the millsite up to Heart Lake – and others, as needs arose. Off those main connectors, Al-Pac created other haul roads to carry logging equipment and loads of logs. Many of those remained dry-weather rather than all-weather roads. The public can use haul roads for free, but other industrial users sign a road use agreement with Al-Pac to cover maintenance and damage.
Given all those advances and more, the trip from Athabasca to Calling Lake these days takes little more than a half hour by car.
“Lovely Calling Lake Opened to Motorists by New Highway: The new Calling Lake road is now passable for cars, and a number of people have been up fishing and bathing in the lovely old Calling Lake, which promises to be one of Northland’s finest lakeside resorts. 150 miles straight North from Edmonton, the lake is teeming with the finest whitefish in Canada and for years large shipments have been made to New York & Chicago… Appreciation for the good work of road foreman Art Laporte, who stretched his appropriation to make the trail into a highway. Our fishermen also remember how the Edmonton trucks picked up the fish at the nets daily last winter, a convenience never before possible till the good work done on the road. Calling Lake is calling city tourists for camping, bathing, fishing and yachting de luxe.”
– Reflections from Across the River, quoting Athabasca Echo, August 2, 1940
“The old forestry road from Calling Lake to the Calling River was a key piece of infrastructure. Built by the Alberta Forest Service in the 1950s and 1960s, my guess is it followed what might have been an old trapper and Indigenous trail from the Calling and Athabasca Rivers to Calling Lake itself.”
– Bruce Mayer, who lived in Calling Lake in the 1990s while working as a forest ranger with the Alberta Forest Service.
Air travel
Various pilots flew for McIntosh, recalls Jim Bissell, who has roots in Calling Lake and Wabasca. “But anybody could fly fish to McIntosh, and he took it from there. Most times they dropped fish in either Calling Lake or Slave Lake, and from there it went by truck to Edmonton.”
One well-known area pilot, Charlie (Junior) Fix, once told Jim Bissell that he’d crashed seven Cessna 180s, some of them so totally that they couldn’t be salvaged. Generous in providing rides, Junior regularly carried passengers (including Jim) in the rear, with no seats. Jim recalls a time when Junior’s right ski broke off on take-off from Sandy Lake. With an overload of unbelted passengers, he flew to Wabasca and circled to burn off fuel while dropping loose items overboard. Jim was among the spectators as the plane jounced down on one ski and spun, its passengers intact but shaken.
Ike Glick, who led a Mennonite Voluntary Service unit headquartered in Calling Lake from 1955 to 1969, learned to fly so he could reach outlying communities as needs arose, whether landing on wheels, skis or floats. Like others who flew, he experienced the dangers of flying in the north and told tales of narrow escapes, including one involving a pregnant passenger, a broken front ski and a flipped plane. Again, all passengers survived.
I started out with the Piper Cruiser. And then the Cesna 170 for floats, but it didn’t have the power needed for taking off with a load on floats. Then the way opened to get a 180 that had more muscle.
They were used planes. Lindford Hackman, who owned the first plane and whose health failed at the right time for us to get the use of his plane, continued to be supportive and helped us locate planes. He was more familiar with the field of aviation than I was. The 180 was purchased in Ontario, and then he and I went to Ontario and flew the plane back.
A close call: I had flown a grandmother and her granddaughter to Wabasca for Christmas, and schoolteacher Paul Landiss’s wife Suzanna and her two daughters flew back with me to spend Christmas with us at Calling Lake while Paul drove the car the long way, around Slave Lake and Athabasca. She was very pregnant and shouldn’t have tried riding in the car that distance, especially with the road conditions then. After a mail drop at Sandy Lake, upon take-off the children noticed that the one ski was hanging down unusually. I did sense a bit of yaw to one side, which one feels if there’s a crosswind, so I just assumed it was that. And the children had no way of communicating with me. Because Suzanna was seven months pregnant, when I got to the Calling Lake airstrip, I chose to land on undisturbed snow rather than the bumpy frozen track of other landings. In this case, it was the wrong thing to do. The ski that hung down buried in the snow and caught on the turf and flipped the plane over. Fortunately, nobody was hurt. One little girl began to cry; Suzanna, who was holding the youngest, tried to comfort her by saying, “Everything’s okay,” but she hadn’t asked my opinion!
A neighbour, Joe Logan, heard us coming in, and then the sudden silence, so he came running to assist. Meanwhile, I was fumbling in search of the door handle, to get out of my upside-down position and get out.
There was no fire, and no one was injured, which was amazing! The foot of the little girl on Suzanna’s lap apparently caught in the seatbelt clip and the belt unbuckled, so Suzanna wasn’t left hanging on the belt. She wasn’t hurt and the children weren’t either. Nor I. The plane had to be partly dismantled to convey to Edmonton, where repairs were undertaken.
It hadn’t actually been an aspiration of mine to become a pilot, but the situation demanded it and the coincidence of the plane becoming available and even of being trained in the plane I would be using (with the cooperation of Chinook Flying Services in Calgary, which Lindford Hackman had negotiated) made it possible. I enjoyed flying. It wasn’t something I wanted to make a career of, but in the situation, it was necessary and there was a lot of learning involved with that.
Not all were so fortunate. Case in point: Walter Kiehlbauch was delivering 600 pounds of fish from Peerless Lake to Calling Lake for the McIntosh Fish Co. on a clear but windy February day in 1941 when his plane crashed in the Pelican Mountains. He did not survive. The wreckage of this Curtiss-Robin plane was spotted from the air north of Calling Lake, but planes could not land due to heavy tree cover and ground searches were turned back by waist-deep snow and severe cold. More than three months later, two Indigenous trappers found Kiehlbauch’s body beside the plane, which was upside down near a broken tree. The cause of the crash remained unknown.
Yet pilots persisted in challenging the elements and providing essential service by air.
Land Acknowledgement
Recognizing that we are all equally responsible to know our shared history and journey forward in good faith, we acknowledge with respect that Calling Lake stands on land, and alongside water, where Indigenous peoples have gathered, hunted, fished and held ceremonies from time immemorial.
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