If there had been any doubt that we were in true wilderness, it was dismissed when guide Dave O'Farrell placed his 12 gauge shotgun in his boat. "Did you bring your bear spray, Don?”

Plummer’s Great Slave Lake Lodge is one of the oldest lodges in the North. Great Slave Lake itself is the ninth largest lake in the world (28,500 sq. km; 11,000 sq. mi.), and the deepest in North America (614 m; 2014 ft.). It is ice free maybe four months of the year and the water is cold at all times. Under such conditions, fish grow slowly; and under low fishing pressure, they grow very large over a long life.

Although I had been in northern Alberta several times as a biologist and angler, I had not been in northern Saskatchewan, where this incredible northern landscape is in stark contrast to the stereotypical Saskatchewan image of prairie wheat fields. So, when I was contacted by Tourism Saskatchewan to be part of a group of American and Canadian outdoor writers touring some of the many fishing lodges in northern Saskatchewan, I jumped at the opportunity.

Crossing lake ice can be nerve racking if you let your imagination get the best of you — even when you're crossing a lake with ice ten or more feet in thickness. That's what I was doing many years ago on the Boothia Peninsula in the Canadian High Arctic. My Inuk assistant, David Nanook, and I were following fresh caribou tracks across the lake.

I've fished my share of "honey holes" in my life. You know, places where the fishing is so red-hot that the retelling of their stories makes them legends in our lives. The earliest such legend I can remember was when I was about six-years-old.