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WILFRED R. WOODS feed. At the present time 40 per cent of Alberta's irrigated acreage is used to grow crops for cattle We found the Lethbridge leaders interested in further reclamation and eager to find ways and means of bringing more water to the vast areas of that province. EDMONTON, ALBERTA: The red carpet treatment was never more evident than our over- night stop in Edmonton. Here we were guests of the City of Edmonton and the Province of Alberta. Provincial Lieu- tenant Gov. Grant McEwan was the banquet speaker, who stressed the traditionally unguarded frontier that divides our two countries. We were surprised to see Edmonton celebrating Klondike Days, and some of their entertainers gave us a preview of the coming celebration.(some of the folks in Yukon Territory weren't especially pleased with Edmonton's taking this over. But she does a tremendous pro- motion job of it,) Edmonton is a town that has quadrupled in just 20 years, thanks to the oil boom, primarily. She now has nearly half a million people. And as the jumpoff point for the vast north, she is the hub of a huge section of our hemisphere. We found that the province gets about half her revenues from the oil business-royalties and oil land sales making up the bulk of it. FT. MCMURRAY, ALBERTA: Our party flew from Edmonton to the oil sand capital of the world. Fort McMurray is the site of the oil sand processing plant that was built to extract the oil from the enormous deposits of this region. Oil sands are no recent discovery, but their extraction is. Peter Pond, fur trader, reported in 1788 that the Indians were using a sticky substance oozing from the riverbanks to water proof their canoes. It was only two years ago that the plant to extract this molasses-like deposit was put into oper- ation. The secret sounds simple-hot water flotation-but it was the result of decades of work and re- search to find a means of extraction. .. . The Athabasca sands are now being mined by a plant that extracts 45,000 barrels of oil a day and sends it by a 266-mile pipeline to Edmonton. It is a gigantic operation. Seventy feet of overburden are stripped to expose the ISO-foot deep bed. Two great excavators bite out the sand from the great pit (which will later be filled in and refor- ested). Some $240 million was invested in the process. Under the present lease 3,800 acres of land is being developed, which is enough to keep the plant operating for 20 years. The total Athabasca beds are some 30,000 square miles in extent, with an estimated 600 bill- ion barrels of oil-more than all the rest of the known oil reserves put together in the world! , PINE POINT MINE: Our party flew on to the south shore of Great Slave Lake, where the fab- ulous Pine Point Mine is located. This open pit lead-zinc mine in its first two years of operation netted its company $56 million on a $70 million gross. The ore is shipped to Trail, B. C., for smelting, the home of its parent company, Cominco. About two million tons a year are currently being shipped. YELLOWKNIFE, NORTHWEST TERRITORIES: We had only to fly across Great Slave Lake to get to the capital of Northwest Territories, but it took our plane half an hour. The ice flows were still breaking up under the late June sun. Great Slave Lake is the head of navigation for the Mackenzie -16-