waterfalls. Most spectacular are the canyons of the South Nahanni River, with vertical walls as high as 460 metres, and Virginia Falls, which, at 92 metres, is almost twice the height of Niagara Falls. Both the canyons and the falls are located in Nahanni National Park Reserve, a UNESCO World Heritage Site.

Winters in this northern region are long, cold, and dark. The climate is strongly influenced by weather systems from the Arctic and Alaskan coasts, and snow remains on the ground for up to eight months a year. The coldest mean winter temperatures can be found in the British and Richardson Mountains (-25°C), the warmest in the Selwyn Mountains, in the south (-19.5°C). During the very short, cool summers, mean temperatures rarely rise above 10°C, averaging 8°C across the area as a whole. Annual precipitation is lowest in the northwest (300 millimetres), and highest in the southeast uplands of the

Selwyn Mountains (750 millimetres).

Human beings have lived in the Taiga Cordillera for between 20,000 and 40,000 years or more, making it probably the longest inhabited area of the land we now call Canada. The descendants of these original inhabitants include today’s Inuvialuit and Vuntut Gwitchin peoples. The population of this region is very small, only about 300, almost all of whom live in the settlement of Old Crow, on the Porcupine River. Hunting, trapping, and fishing are the occupations of most these people, with some involved in ecotourism and recreational services.