Keg River-1975-1976

WHERE?

Keg River is on the MacKenzie Highway about 120 miles north of the town of Peace River. It is almost equidistant from Manning to the south and High Level to the north. It was a farming community with a population large enough to sustain a K-9 school, with students drawn from an area extending from Carcajou, thirty miles east, to Twin Lakes, thirty miles south, and some from Paddle Prairie Metis Colony twenty miles north.

When we arrived there was a store and Post Office on the highway where the bridge crossed the Keg River, and the school and five mobile residences up the hill. Across the highway was a small Forest Ranger station with a grass airstrip.

The school was named after Dr. Mary Jackson, a pioneer physician and homesteader in the area.

The waters of the Chinchaga River run into the Hay River and over a series of spectacular escarpment waterfalls to empty into Great Slave Lake. The waters of the Peace River turn east not far north of this map, flow past Fort Vermilion, through Wood Buffalo National Park and into the Peace/Athabasca Delta, one of the world's greatest waterfowl nesting areas, at the west end of Lake Athabasca. From there they flow through the Slave River into Great Slave Lake and then down the MacKenzie River to the Arctic Ocean.

Between the Eagle Hills to the south, the Naylor Hills rising to the west and the wet drainage basin of the Peace River to the east lies the arable land of the Keg River community, an oasis in the endless forests of the north.

The Alberta Resources Railway runs through the heart of this country on its way to the mines at Pine Point, NWT. and hauls the grain grown here. There is an elevator where the railway crosses the Keg River Post road.

A Northern Adventure Tale, sort of. Cry Wolf!

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