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Running east from the northern end of Lake Winnipegosis and across through the isolated community of Grand Rapids, the 53rd parallel was Manitoba's boundary until 1912, when it was moved up to the 60th parallel on Hudson Bay. This tripled the size of the province and provided its inhabitants with new resources of timber, minerals and hydroelectricity as well as a direct sea route to the Atlantic Ocean. Today's northern Manitoba is a vast and sparsely populated tract mostly set on the Canadian Shield, whose shallow soils support a gigantic coniferous forest broken up by a complex pattern of lakes and rivers. It's a hostile environment, the deep, cold winter alternating with a brief, bright summer, when the first few centimetres of topsoil thaw out above the permafrost to create millions of stagnant pools of water, ideal conditions for mosquitoes and blackflies. There are compensations: out in the bush or along the shores of Hudson Bay you'll find a sense of desolate wilderness that's hard to find elsewhere, and a native wildlife that includes caribou, polar bear and all sorts of migratory birds. Most of the region is inaccessible and its limited highway system was built to service the resource towns just to the north of lakes Winnipeg and Winnipegosis. One of these, the paper-and-pulp complex at The Pas , is served by buses from Dauphin and Winnipeg, and provides a convenient base for the region's two main parks, Clearwater Lake and Grass River . Northern Manitoba's key tourist centre, however, is Churchill , a remote and windswept township on the southern shore of Hudson Bay where the main attractions are the polar bears that congregate along the Bay shore from late June to early November. Churchill is well beyond the reach of Manitoba's highways, but it is connected to Winnipeg and The Pas by train along one of the longest railway lines in the world. The trip from Winnipeg takes about 34 hours, but if you haven't the time there are regular excursion flights from Winnipeg .
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