Canada's Deserts by Joan Donaldson-Yarmey

https://books2read.com/The-Travelling-Detective-Boxed-Set

https://books2read.com/u/bapW6a

Canada’s Deserts

Only forty-one of the one-hundred ninety-five countries on this earth have deserts but the deserts cover almost one-third of the earth’s land mass. I am a Canadian writer and all my mystery, historical, romance, and young adult novels are set in Canada. Canada is the second largest country in the world and home to one desert and three pseudo-deserts. A pseudo-desert is defined as an area that has some of the qualities that make up a desert, but does not meet the technical standards to be termed a true desert

There are three main features of a desert: less than 250 millimetres (10 inches) of precipitation each year; sparse vegetation; and severe weather changes. Other characteristics include humidity, high winds, little cloud cover, and aridity. The types of deserts are semi-arid, cold, coastal, and hot and dry.

The people of the Southern Interior of British Columbia claim that Canada’s only desert is in the Osoyoos area. Many of the businesses in the region have the word ‘desert’ in their names, such as the Nk’Mip Desert Cultural Centre and the Osoyoos Desert Centre. Tourists come to this part of British Columbia to see this popular desert.

But others say that, although it does have desert type plants like cacti and animals such as the sage grouse and tiger salamander, it is not really a desert because of the precipitation which is 323 mm (12.7 in) annually. It is defined as a pseudo-desert.

Another pseudo-desert in Canada is the Carcross Desert, located outside the community of Carcross in the Yukon. At 2.6 sq km (1sq mi) it is called the smallest desert in the world. But while it is termed a desert it is actually the remains of an ancient glacial lake which left the sand dunes when it dried up. In spite of the strong winds from Lake Bennett which bring in more sand, kinnikinnick, Yukon lupine, Baikal sedge, and lodgepole pines are able to survive.

The local people used the dunes for sandboarding, hiking, beach volleyball, and all-terrain vehicles and there are scenic tours for tourists.

The third pseudo-desert in Canada is the Great Saskatchewan Sand Hills covering 1,900sq km (734 sq mi). Like the Carcross Desert they are desert-like sand dunes situated just north of the village of Sceptre in southwestern Saskatchewan. Also like the Carcross Desert, the hills were left when glaciers melted 12,000 years ago and are home to a variety of plants and animals that have adapted to the dunes.

The Canadian Arctic Tundra is considered the only true desert in Canada. However, it isn’t a hot desert; it is a cold polar desert and covers a large area in northern Canada. The land is covered by thick layers of ice instead of sand and has a cold, harsh climate with temperatures dropping as low as -40 degrees Celsius (-40F). Trees have a difficult time surviving in the permafrost during the short growing season so the tundra is covered mainly by small shrubs, mosses, and lichens. A number of animals--arctic hares, muskoxen, polar bears, arctic foxes, and caribou--manage to live in this cold desert in the far north because they have thick fur coats to keep them warm.

Canadian Lakes by Joan Donaldson-Yarmey

 

https://books2read.com/Romancing-the-Klondike

 https://books2read.com/Rushing-the-Klondike

 https://www.bookswelove.com/donaldson-yarmey-joan/

Canadian Lakes

 I am a Canadian and all my mystery, historical, romance, and young adult novels are set in Canada. Canada is the second largest country in the world and has about 20% of the world’s freshwater. It also shares the world’s largest body of freshwater-the Great Lakes-with the United States. Lake Superior, Lake Huron, Lake Erie, Lake Ontario, are divided by the border while Lake Michigan is totally in the United States.

Nearly 14% of the world’s lakes over 500 sq km (193.05 sq mi) are within Canada’s borders. The largest lake totally within the country is Great Bear Lake in the Northwest Territories. It is the 4^th largest in North America and the 9^th largest in the world. The name comes from the Chipewyan word satudene which means ‘grizzly bear water people’.

Great Slave Lake, also in the Northwest Territories is the second largest freshwater lake in Canada and the 10^th largest on the Earth. With a depth of 614 metres (2,014 ft) it is the deepest lake in North America. It was named for the Dene, the first nation’s people who were called Slavey by the Cree first nations.

Lake Winnipeg, in Manitoba, is Canada’s third largest freshwater lake and has the largest watershed (the rivers that drain into a lake plus all the land with streams that drain into those rivers) in Canada. Its watershed is about 982,900 square kilometres (379,500 square miles) which is about 40 times its size. This ratio is the biggest of any other large lake in the world. Waters flow into Lake Winnipeg from the provinces of Alberta, Saskatchewan, Manitoba and Ontario and from the states of North Dakota, South Dakota, Minnesota, and Montana making it the 11^th largest freshwater lake in the world.

Lake Athabasca sits on the northern border of the provinces of Alberta and Saskatchewan with 26% in Alberta and 74% in Saskatchewan. It is the fourth largest lake totally in Canada and waters from it flow northward through the Slave and Mackenzie river systems to the Arctic Ocean.

It is estimated that there are about 2 million lakes of various sizes in Canada and they make up about 9% of the country’s mass. This means that 891,163 square kilometres (344,080 sq mi) of Canada’s total area of 9.985 million square kilometres (3.8 million sq mi) is covered by freshwater.