10 
This part of Alberta plateau is a poonj drained area, except for the 
valleys of the larger streams, such as Peace and Athabaska rivers, which 
are graded and occupy deep, broad valleys. The soils are sands, clays, 
and tills of lacustrine and morainic origin. 
The topography between the Salt Mountain escarpment and the base 
of Caribou mountains has been adequately described by Camsell (14), along 
the routes which he travelled. It is a very gently rolling plain broken only 
by a range of hills extending in a northwest-southeast direction between the 
Moosehorn slough district and the Ninishith hill country north of Little 
Buffalo river. The entire extent of the range cannot be defined with the 
present state of knowledge but its general position is sufficiently w y ell known 
to make its physiographic significance clear. The hills appear to be of 
morainic origin and consist largely of sand with a variety of rounded 
granite boulders. They are up to 100 feet above the general level, and are 
usually along fairly straight lines, often extending as nearly straight ridges 
for several miles. Camsell has observed, and the writer’s own notes bear 
out the fact, that the ridges tend to converge northwestward, forming, for 
the most part, one main ridge north of the point where the Little Buffalo 
cuts through the Ninishith. Between Pine and Moose lakes and southward, 
the hills cover most of the country. 
Throughout the upland there are numerous sink-holes of varying sizes, 
some being a mile or more in length or diameter. Some have lakes in them, 
whereas others are completely dry. At two places along the Pine Lake- 
Moose Lake trail there are sinks into which sizeable streams flow, but from 
which there is no surface outlet. The holes are not evenly distributed over 
the country, but tend to be localized. 
Lying between the ridge country and Caribou mountains is a broad, 
shallow depression, containing many lakes and wide muskegs. This depres- 
sion, called the Moose Lake basin, is bounded on the south by ridges lying 
north of Peace river, through which Jackfish river has cut channels. Cam- 
sell describes the first hills met with in his descent of the Jackfish as being 
about 20 miles below Jackfish lake (19), indicating that this area was 
approximately on the margin of the basin. The northern extension of the 
lake country has not been defined, but probably continues northwestward 
around the base of the Caribou plateau nearly to Buffalo lake. The only 
elevations within the basin are low boulder and sand ridges such as appear 
on the shore of Moose lake. 
Although the section lying north of the 60th parallel has not been 
extensively described, the notations on Seibert’s map (63) indicate that it is 
similar in topography to that about Pine lake. 
Three streams drain the region: Jackfish, Little Buffalo, and Salt rivers. 
Western tributaries of the Little Buffalo — the Sass, Bear, Clewi, and Nyar- 
ling — form the drainage of the northern area. Salt river rises in McNeil 
lake, southwest of Pine lake, and the other two streams rise in Moose Lake 
basin. The height of land between the headwaters of these two was crossed 
by Camsell in 1902 (18), the portage trail being only miles long, and the 
elevations low boulder ridges. Within the basin, and in the upper part of 
their course in the upland, neither of these streams receives any large tribu- 
tary, but they are connected by small creeks with the larger bodies of water, 
such as Moose and Bog lakes. They are much ponded, but in many places 
