Word: muskeg
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...Great Slave Lake area 540 miles north of Edmonton, where Canada's timberlands fade into bleak muskeg swamps stretching northward toward the pole, the signs of oil are as persistent as the mosquitoes. The first Canadian explorers found lakes covered with oil seeping from holes in the ground. Indians and traders skimmed it off for their cook fires, scooped up fistfuls of the rich black muck to waterproof their boots. But to commercial oilmen, the potential of the Great Slave oil has long been only a tantalizing dream. No one had much encouragement until this year. Then Phillips Petroleum...
Last week northwest Canada's barren muskeg was crawling with oilmen. To get in on the continent's hottest oil play, well over 200 companies will spend $160 million for exploration this year alone, and they are just getting started. Says Home Oil Geologist Alexander Clark: "This region is where Texas was 30 years ago. In the next 25 or 30 years, it is not unreasonable to expect there will be found hundreds of fields, some small, but others as big as anything yet found...
...dormitory improvised from the old stern-wheeler Delta King, which used to ply the tourist trade out of San Francisco. Alcan has elaborate plans for a model city (600 houses by next spring), with schools, a shopping center, streets and parkways where now there is only bush and muskeg. The plans are based on the confident expectation that the capital of the world's newest aluminum empire will some day be a city of 50,000 people...
...Wildlife Service field men caused a flurry of excitement by reporting that they had spotted two cranes in the Northwest Territories. But there was no sure evidence of nesting. Last month Professor William Rowan, the University of Alberta's expert zoologist, got word that in the muskeg wilderness of northern Alberta an old Indian guide had seen two big, white birds. Rowan interviewed the guide and from his precise description identified the birds as whooping cranes...
...brutal battleground. The temperature dipped as low as 52° below zero. Soldiers clad in nearly 25 Ibs. of special Arctic clothing, carrying another 34 Ibs. of special equipment, crawled through waist-deep snow, over hummocks of frozen muskeg. For hundreds of miles on every side stretched trackless pine forests and mountains. Said one corporal: "Anybody who'd invade this Godforsaken place is just plain damn wacky...