Above the Gate of the Nahanni
If you can imagine the foreground right wall descending to river level, that's where we camped our fourth night on the trip. It was Canada Day, July 1, so we celebrated with temporary maple leaf tattoos and a hike up to the overlook. Scramble was more like it, a scree slope with almost enough trees to grab onto and pull oneself upward. About 900 ft from river level. The Canadians are bi-measurable, and we worked in both metric and English all the time.
The Nahanni drainage is composed of four main canyons, each with its own character, like Third Canyon here. In between are wide expanses of country, a place where a person can breathe deeply, even if summer is short. The compressed calendar is made up by sheer quantity of light - it never got dark in our tent, not once at any hour of the night. Some people can't sleep. I couldn't sleep for the excitement of a four hour sunset that blended right into sunrise.
