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Stretching from Prince Albert National Park to the border with the Northwest Territories on the 60th parallel, the inhospitable and largely uninhabited expanse of northern Saskatchewan accounts for almost half the province. The region divides into two slightly different areas, the marginally richer flora and fauna of the Interior Plains lying south of the more spartan landscapes of the Canadian Shield , whose naked rock stretches north of a rough curve drawn between La Loche, La Ronge and Flin Flon, on the Manitoba border. Northern Saskatchewan's shallow soils are unable to support any form of agriculture, and its native peoples, the Woodland Cree , have traditionally survived by hunting, trapping and fishing. In recent times, this precarious and nomadic existence has been replaced by a more settled and restricted life on the reservations which are concentrated around Lake Athabasca in the extreme northwest corner of the province. Nearly all the other settlements in the north are mining towns , the result of the discovery of uranium in the 1950s. The main exception is the tourist-resort-cum-mining-centre of La Ronge , situated on the edge of the lakes and forests of Lac La Ronge Provincial Park . La Ronge is also near a section of the Churchill River , whose remote waters boast some of the north's longest and most varied canoe routes. Finally, Clearwater River Provincial Park , near the Alberta border, provides some of the region's most challenging white-water canoeing. Although northern Saskatchewan attracts hundreds of hunters, anglers and canoeists throughout the summer, it has an extremely poor public transport system. There's just one really useful bus , a daily service connecting Saskatoon, Prince Albert, Waskesiu (mid-May to mid-Sept only) and La Ronge.
Your Tip for Northern Saskatchewan
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