The Group of Seven painters used strong colors to depict a landscape of wind-blown pine trees, rocky outcrops, rushing rivers and hidden lakes.

This landscape is the Canadian Shield, also called the Precambrian Shield or the Laurentian Plateau.

It is a vast horseshoe-shaped area covering eastern and central Canada, and a small part of the northern United States.

One half of Canada's totoal area is Canadian Shield.

The Canadian Shield landscape exists in a remote northeastern corner of Alberta in the Kazan Upland and Athabasca Plain sub-regions of the Canadian Shield.

The Shield region comprises 3 percent of Alberta's lands.

Some of the oldest rock on earth is exposed here, great outcroppings of Precambrian granite scoured clean by the Ice Age glaciers that retreated 10,000 years ago.

The underlying bedrock largely determines the vegetation diversity of this landscape by creating dry, soil-poor highlands interspersed with wet hollows and sparse open forests.

photo: Alberta's Canadian Shield Region

Jackpine forests carpet much of the Kazan Uplans sub-region with strange, other worldly understoreys of pale raindeer lichen, dusty green sage and bearberry.

Along the shores of Lake Athabasca, vast sand dune landscapes grade into pine forest and provide habitat for plant species found nowhere else in the province. The locals refer to this sweep of shorreline as Alberta's best-kept secret -- and for good reason. Granite headlands and bright sand beaches stretch from Fidler Point to White Sand Point and beyond. The landscape has never been scarred by industrial activity and the feel of trackless wilderness is nearly absolute.

This far northern region is one of Alberta's harshest and most spectacular landscapes where peregrine falcons and golden eagles nest on granite cliffs. In winter, Arctic animals like the barren ground caribou, Arctic fox and willow ptarmigan occasionally find their way south into this are of our province.

It remains little-known, little-visited and only vaguely imagined by Albertans who mostly live in the southern third of the province.

Want to help protect the Rocky Mountains? Join or Make a Donation to an Organization that makes a difference.

• The Alberta Wilderness Association, Calgary, Alberta
• Canadian Parks & Wilderness Society
• The Federation of Alberta Naturalists
• World Wildlife Fund - Canada
• Canadian Nature Federation
• Canadian Wildlife Federation
• Green Links: USA and Canada

Boreal
Region