Morgan Voyageur was about 20 feet out on the ice of the Rivière des Rochers in early January when he heard the cracking sound beneath him and his snowmobile.

He stopped and waved at his co-workers, warning them not to go any further, then started to head for shore. That’s when he fell in.

“In a matter of three seconds, I was up to my chest in water and holding onto a sheet of ice,” said Voyageur. Then his training kicked in.

He held on and kicked until his torso was on top of the sheet of ice. Then he rolled himself away from the hole. A few feet away, he stood up, began running and didn’t stop until he was safely back on the shore.

Earlier in the day, a group of children were driving snowmobiles across the very same patch of ice, Voyageur said.

Residents like Voyageur and community leaders say climate change, hydroelectric damming and the nearby oilsands are to blame for the weakening of their ice year after year. The traditional way of life — including trapping, hunting and fishing — is becoming more difficult year-round for the local Indigenous people, throwing the future of Fort Chipewyan and its residents into uncertainty.

For the past six years, Voyageur has been part of the Athabasca Chipewyan First Nation (ACFN) ice monitoring team responsible for checking the ice on Lake Athabasca and the Rivière des Rochers, gathering data and posting updates for the community.

Over the years, he said he’s noticed the water getting warmer, the ice getting thinner and the lake freezing over later.

“Where the usual crossing is, now there’s open water.”

***

Every year, around the middle of December, a winter road of ice forms a link between Fort Chipewyan and the rest of Alberta, carving over frozen marshes and rivers.

The winter road’s last crossing before reaching the small town is over the Rivière des Rochers, near where the river joins the lake, right where Voyageur fell in.

The small northern Alberta community, home to around a thousand people, is on the western point of Lake Athabasca, where the lake flows into the northward-bound Rivière des Rochers. Established as a fur trading post in 1788, the town is home to the Mikisew Cree and Athabasca Chipewyan First Nations, as well as the Fort Chipewyan Métis Local 125.

Fort Chipewyan residents drive on the ice road for between three and four months, visiting family in Fort McMurray or Edmonton. The rest of the year, they have to take an airplane.

This year, the road opened slightly later than normal, on Dec. 19. It’s also 22 kilometres longer than usual, because the des Rochers river crossing had to be moved eight kilometres down after a van went through the ice, according to Kendrick Cardinal, the new vice-president of Local 125.

On Lake Athabasca, open water is clearly visible from the town. At this time of year, it’s usually frozen.

Candace Voyageur has spent the last 15 years of her life in Fort Chipewyan. She said she arranges medical appointments during the winter so that she can drive to Fort McMurray or Edmonton using the ice road, because flying out with her children is too expensive.

The opening of the ice road this winter is the latest she’d ever seen it. Over the years, what was once a long, reliably cold winter has become marked by fluctuations in temperature, she said, and it’s causing concern in the community.

“You’re so used to just hopping in your vehicle and taking off whenever you want … now, things are so uncertain,” she said.

The road is currently open for light traffic up to 5,000 kilograms.

Chief Allan Adam of the Athabasca Chipewyan First Nation said that if the road doesn’t open for heavier traffic soon, the community will be in a state of emergency.

Tankers that carry in enough diesel to last Fort Chipewyan until next winter require a load limit of 45,000 kilograms. Fort Chipewyan is not on the electrical grid, so the diesel carried into town is used to keep everything going and to heat and power residents’ homes.

***

On Jan. 7, the day Morgan Voyageur fell through the ice, Adam put out a news release about the incident, warning it was a sign of things to come.

“Indigenous communities in the Peace Athabasca Delta have long warned about the culmination of high water levels from the (W.A.C. Bennett Dam), unknown substances being emitted into the water by industry and unpredictable weather patterns from climate change. The result is that even in the coldest time of the year, traditional travel routes that have been utilized for millennia are no longer safe,” the release read.

Adam and Cardinal agree that climate change is a major cause of the problems with the ice around Fort Chipewyan. Adam said this year, which has been particularly warm, illustrates what has been going on for years.

On Jan. 26, Cardinal posted a video to Facebook that has been viewed by thousands. In the video, he’s driving his snowmobile on the frozen part of the lake.

Ahead of him there’s snow, then open water. A small motor boat is speeding along just a few feet away from where the white ice disappears in large, triangular chunks into the dark water. “January 26! Boating on Lake Athabasca!” Cardinal shouts with a laugh. “The boys are cruisin’!”

It’s been almost a decade since Scott Stephenson and his colleagues at the University of California published their research about the effects of climate change on ice roads, attempting to project the effects into the year 2050.

Stephenson said their modelling showed that by 2050, areas that were previously suitable for building winter roads no longer would be; and what’s happening around Fort Chipewyan shows that the modelling was correct.

“If anything, our climate models have been broadly conservative in the sense that they haven’t projected enough climate change,” he said.

The Peace River, which converges with the Athabasca River into Lake Athabasca, was first dammed in 1968. Research shows that the damming essentially reversed the natural cycle of the water: Where there had once been high water in summer and low water in winter, the opposite became true.

Both Morgan Voyageur and Chief Adam agree that the water around Fort Chipewyan has never been the same since the dam was created — especially since the sinkholes appeared.

In 1996, two sinkholes were discovered in the dam. To reduce risk of the dam breaking, its reservoir was lowered by releasing some of the water. This caused water levels downstream to rise and “tore the winter road apart,” according to Adam. The community had to call upon the government to deliver fuel by air, because the ice road couldn’t handle heavier loads, just like this year.

Before the dam’s waters were released, Voyageur said there were at least four feet of ice in front of his family’s cabin on the Athabasca River every year. Now, they’re lucky if they get a foot and a half.

Adam said higher, warmer waters as a result of the dam and climate change have made the ice unreliable.

“If the water is warm from underneath and if it’s running at a swift pace, no matter how much ice you make on top, it’s going to eat it out from the bottom,” he said. “It’s just going to get worse from here … we shouldn’t be going through this scenario, but unfortunately we are.”

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In an emailed response to a request for comment, a BC Hydro spokesperson said the company believes that climate change is playing a stronger role than the W.A.C. Bennett Dam in the changes in the Peace Athabasca Delta water levels, citing a recent University of Waterloo study. They said BC Hydro is committed to working with Indigenous communities and has been consulting local First Nations and reviewing studies on downstream effects since 2007 in preparation for the controversial Site C Dam.

In 2017, the ice on the lake broke up in April — much earlier than normal at the time — and four trappers took a boat out onto the lake. Adam said they hit a chunk of ice and drowned.

Candace Voyageur said the accident left “a big sore in the community.”

“It definitely rocked the whole community, and a lot of people are still being affected by it,” she said, adding that the loss has made people more cautious of the ice, and more aware of the changing climate.

***

It’s not just the ice that’s changing. It’s also the water, and what’s in it.

Around 20 years ago, elder Raymond Ladouceur started catching fish that were deformed.

“All species, even the jackfish, the northern pike, and then pickerel. There’s whitefish I’ve seen deformed, humpback, crooked tails, bulged-out eyes on their head, my goodness’ sake.”

Locals, including Ladouceur, blame the deformities on pollution from the oilsands. Many have started fishing elsewhere. In 2014, a report found that oilsands pollution was linked to higher cancer rates in Fort Chipewyan, especially in those eating locally caught fish.

To Cardinal, it feels like the oilsands are creeping closer and closer to Fort Chipewyan. The nearest project is Fort Hills, he said, around 150 kilometres upstream. And if approved, the controversial Teck Frontier Mine would be around 110 kilometres south of the town.

Ladouceur, a Métis elder who’s almost 78 years old, has lived just outside Fort Chipewyan all his life. He’s been trapping, hunting and fishing using the knowledge passed down to him by his father Frank, who was the subject of a 1975 National Film Board documentary. Frank received the knowledge from his father, Modeste.

Ladouceur remembers catching five or six thousand muskrats each season in the 1960s. But since the ’90s, he’s hardly caught any. Birds like geese and ducks avoid the area, too, he said, and even the moose are becoming more scarce.

The open water that is clearly visible from the shores of Lake Athabasca this year illustrates what Ladouceur has known for a long time.

“The whole delta is destroyed,” he said. “Everything is just going down, going down the drain.”

Chief Adam said there has been talk of creating a year-round road to offset the increasingly unreliable winter one.

It’s either that, or build a new community that’s accessible by road, he said. It’s an extreme measure, but one Cardinal says he’s considered as well.

“The times are ever changing,” said Adam. “It’s getting harder and harder, and people’s lives are coming into play now.”

***

For Ladouceur, the land Fort Chipewyan is built on is everything.

“I love the land, because I was born out there,” he said. “(The) land is my world.”

Ladouceur said the changes in the ice have caused unease in the community.

“We used to trust the ice, you know?”

With the loss of the ice comes the loss of something else: Ladouceur’s knowledge, the thousands of years of history that his father passed along to him. What Ladouceur knows about his land no longer really applies to the world in which his grandchildren live.

“There’s nothing out there to teach them,” he said. “It feels pretty bad. I feel pretty bad.”

Morgan Voyageur has been teaching his son Sabian, now 15, everything he knows about trapping and fishing. But even in Sabian’s lifetime, so much has changed. In December, the pair were following moose tracks in the backwoods when Morgan fell through the ice into about three feet of water. This was just a few weeks before his big fall into the river.

Before this winter, he’d only fallen through the ice once in his life.

The ice isn’t breaking like it used to, he explained. It used to break off in the springtime in big chunks, which would dam up the river, causing flooding in small basins where birds and muskrats would gather. Now the ice just “rots” away, crumbling from beneath. It looks solid, but breaks when stepped on.

“I’m going through places that I’m not supposed to be going through,” he said. “I’ve travelled these places all my life and I’ve never seen it like that.”

He knows that Sabian, his “right-hand man,” might not get to use his community’s knowledge for much longer.

“It breaks my heart … it’s getting to a point where it’s kind of scary to practice that traditional knowledge,” he said.

“It just saddens me that we’re gonna one day lose our culture.”

With files from The Canadian Press

Correction - Feb. 1, 2020 : An earlier version of this article mistakenly called the Athabasca Chipewyan First Nation the Athabasca Cree First Nation. The article has been updated to reflect this.

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