I have flown over this dam on a search and rescue exercise. The tower at the left of this photo was so close, I felt I could reach out and grab it. The sensation as you pass over a tower like that is really quite surreal, you feel like you're hanging in the air for a few moments. The dam itself is quite impressive. It's holding back a lot of water, and the water thunders as it pours out of the chute.
Whiteshell Provincial Park is just east of Seven Sisters. There's a nice little museum at Nutimik Lake, fairly close to the park entrance.
The museum has a collection of stuffed animals representative of those found in the wild, and also a couple of good displays about the native peoples who lived in the area several hundred to a couple of thousand years ago. This is a display on wild rice farming.
A small display of native artefacts, showing pottery shards, stone tools, and worked copper. Some of these items date back more than 2,000 years.
Close to the Whiteshell Museum, there are some petroforms that date back hundreds of years. Petroforms are shapes created from rocks, intended to represent things. The things, in this case, are fish, turtles, and snakes, as well as some geometric shapes. These are located at Bannock Point, an area of open rock amongst the trees. It's quite a large area, several football fields in size, and easy to get turned around. There are no signs to lead you back to the trail.
The first image quite clearly is intended to be a turtle. Turtles are one of the most common shapes, and some of the less distinct shapes were probably turtles at some point, too. Although it's not possible to date the petroforms - it's all rock, after all - it's estimated that some of the shapes may have been created over two thousand years ago.
A very nice snake, created from rock.
My camera facial recognition software identified this as a face. I personally have no idea what it's supposed to be.
The whole area is considered sacred to the local natives, and there are cloths hanging in the trees everywhere around the site. I have seen the same type of cloth offering at Devil's Tower National Monument in Wyoming.
I walked along the Pine Point hiking trail next, which turned out to be a long, straight walk, without much of a pay off. There's a nice set of rapids / small waterfall at the end of the trail, that's shallow enough that you probably wouldn't want to take your canoe through it.
The rapids at the end of the Pine Point trail.
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