Wood Buffalo National Park

The land where the Athabasca, Peace and Slave rivers meet has been inhabited since the end of the last ice age and was travelled as a canoe route for millennia. In recorded times the Dane-zaa, Chipewyan, South Slavey and Woods Cree lived here. Fur traders followed, and in 1788 posts were set up at Fort Chipewyan, just east of today's park, and at Fort Vermilion to the west. On 21 June 1899 the Crown signed Treaty 8 with the First Nations of the region and took much of the land as Crown land.

The park was created on that land in 1922 to protect the world's largest herd of free-roaming wood bison, then numbering 1,500 to 2,000. Between 1925 and 1928, despite protests from biologists, the government moved nearly 6,700 plains bison here from Buffalo National Park. They interbred with the wood bison and brought in bovine tuberculosis and brucellosis, which park officials have tried to undo ever since. In 1957 a relatively pure herd of about 200 wood bison was found near the Nyarling River, and in 1965, 23 of them were moved to Elk Island National Park.

Covering more than 44,000 km², larger than Switzerland, Wood Buffalo is Canada's largest national park. It takes in most of the Peace-Athabasca Delta, one of the world's largest freshwater deltas, and the nesting grounds of the endangered whooping crane, and it was inscribed as a World Heritage site in 1983. In 2007 satellite images revealed a beaver dam about 850 m long inside the park, the largest known. In 2019 UNESCO raised concerns about declining water quality, and the Canadian government has since funded an action plan for the site.