After 10 years in this job, I have finally made it to the Northwest Territories. This past week I was in Fort Smith, NWT to locate a new monitoring site in Wood Buffalo National Park. Fort Smith sits on the border with Alberta and the National Park straddles the border with the majority of the park in Alberta. Our new site will be on the NWT side.

It was more of tramping through the bush marking trees that will be cleared for a new site.

In the existing clearing, the wood bison are frequent visitors as noted by their calling cards. The white stuff is snow.

This vehicle was along Highway 5, not sure what the story is behind it. It looks like it either hit a wood bison or a moose. The bison graze at the side of the road, but they don’t move that fast, so it’s hard to believe it was a bison that was hit.

We only saw four wood bison, but I think 3 and 4 were the same. The wood bison harvesting (hunting) had just finished the past weekend, so they may have been deeper in the bush.

Here is a close up of the wood bison as I drove past.

Not often you come across warning signs for buffalo.

Wood Buffalo is the largest National Park in Canada and has the world’s largest herd of free roaming Wood Bison. There are over 5000 in the park, along with about 5000 wolves to keep them in check.

It was looking like it was going to be a nice day when we were leaving, although a little chillier. I was flying Northwestern Air from Fort Smith to Edmonton.

My flight out of Edmonton to Toronto was late 30 minutes leaving Edmonton and then as we approached Toronto we must have circled about 4 times, resulting in us arriving 50 minutes behind schedule.