Lifeblood: Fort Chipewyan’s relationship to water

Through photographs and interviews, Canadian photographer Sara Hylton explores how human-caused impacts are damaging Fort Chipewyan, a small community in northern Alberta

Fort Chipewyan is a community born of the water. On the northwest shore of Lake Athabasca in Alberta’s far north, people have long subsisted off the lake and its tributaries by fishing, hunting, trapping and gathering medicine. But for decades, the tiny community — including the Mikisew Cree First Nation, Athabasca Chipewyan First Nation, Fort Chipewyan Métis and settlers — have found themselves at the forefront of the climate crisis. They’ve watched as warmer winters have eaten away at their ice road, the only road into the community; as increasingly frequent and intense wildfires have engulfed their town in smoke — this year, the town was evacuated for three weeks; as their water has receded and the health of their people and wildlife has declined. The ravages are human caused: climate change, the damming of parts of the watershed and, perhaps most damaging of all, Fort Chip’s location downstream from the Alberta oilsands.

"I mean, mushrooms are everywhere,” Robert Courteau tells me with an easy smile and a small shrug. There’s a toadstool in his Zoom background, a mushroom on his T-shirt. “When I’m walking through [Ottawa’s] Central Park, I see mushrooms — I see them everywhere. I’m that weird guy who’s just standing on someone’s front lawn photographing mushrooms.”

Courteau is the 35-year-old former chef behind FungiQuest, the largest fungi bioblitz in North America’s history. Between September and October 2022, some 34,538 people took to the woods, parks, and their own backyards, on a quest to document as many mushrooms, slime moulds and lichen as possible. To do this, Courteau, through his organization Think Fungi, partnered with BioSMART, an Australian tech company aiming to map every species on the planet. BioSMART had expected about 50,000 observations, but “we basically broke the internet,” laughs Courteau. Observations poured in from across the continent, topping out at 148,214 sightings and 4,393 species. A handful of these are marked on this map.

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Just how big an impact can one bird make?

In summer 2020, a bird with a two metre wingspan made landfall on the North American continent for the first time. Its golden-orange beak and distinctive flashes of white on its shoulder and tail feathers identified it as a Steller’s sea eagle, native to the Russian Far East down and coastal Japan. It was soon photographed in Matanuska-Susitna County, Alaska, and shared among the online birder community. Already so far from home, “Stella” didn’t stop there. The following spring it was sighted more than 5,000 kilometres away in Victoria, Texas. Next up were stops in the Gaspe Peninsula, Que., and New Brunswick in summer 2021, followed by Nova Scotia in the fall and a winter spent in Massachusetts and Maine. Stella has been bouncing around Atlantic Canada and Northeastern United States ever since.

A spectacular journey through Peru’s varied landscape encompassing coastal desert, snow-capped Andean peaks, the high altiplano, and lush cloud forest. The most famous sites are all visited including the mysterious Nazca Lines, awe-inspiring Machu Picchu in its incredible mountaintop setting, Lake Titicaca, where the night is spent in an island homestay, and the remarkable 3000m deep Colca Canyon. On the way, we encounter traditional culture, condors, llamas, and a warm welcome from the Peruvian people.
Meet your ambassador: Jill Heinerth

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