My NWT: Soaring with Ted Grant

Longtime bush pilot Ted Grant, president of charter and flightseeing company Simpson Air (www.simpsonair.ca), comes by his bush pilot genes honestly. His grandfather’s first cousin was legendary World War One flying ace and pioneering bush pilot Wop May. Ted’s road to becoming a bush pilot took a bit of a detour before he headed for the skies over the Nahanni River. While growing up near the farming community of Portage la Prairie, Manitoba, he dreamed of joining the Royal Canadian Mounted Police, owning a plane and a lodge.

After RCMP postings in Saskatchewan, Ted headed to the Northwest Territories to work at the Fort Simpson detachment from May to August 1976. Bush pilot Dick Turner invited the young Mountie along on a flight to drop off some fuel at a camp. “We got to fly in and see the Nahanni (River),” Ted says.

He immediately fell in love with the area’s landscape. “It’s an experience to see such varied scenery in such a short amount of time. You go from the deepest canyons, highest waterfalls, around the Cirque of the Unclimbables and pristine lakes. There’s no other place like it.”

More RCMP postings took Ted to Grise Fiord and Rae-Edzo (now Behchoko). Then he realized it was time to turn a hobby into a business. Armed with his pilot’s license, he quit the RCMP after nearly 13 years and bought Simpson Air in April 1981. In the 1960s, the small company was first known as Arctic Air - yes, the same name as the CBC Television drama.

Ted began offering visitors flightseeing tours into Nahanni National Park Reserve. “Being a prairie boy where you can see your dog run away for four or five miles, Nahanni is like going to six national parks in one because of the diversified geography and geology of the area,” he says. He hesitates when asked for his favourite spots. It's tough to pick in Nahanni country. Virginia Falls, Rabbitkettle Lake and Glacier Lake, he finally replies.

In 1985, he bought log cabins at Little Doctor Lake from trappers and prospectors Gus and Mary Kraus and turned them into Nahanni Mountain Lodge some 90 kilometres west of Fort Simpson. Some guests have been coming to the area for more than a dozen years. One couple has made four trips to the Nahanni over the past 25 years. He and his staff have hosted many people, from tourists to such foreign dignitaries as Britain’s Prince Andrew. The September 2006 issue of Air Canada’s EnRoute magazine listed flying with Simpson Air as one of the “100 Things to Do Before You're 100.”

Ted has worked tirelessly to market the region. He won Northwest Territories Tourism’s Operator of the Year award in 2006 and the 2009 Tourism Industry Association of Canada’s Lifetime Achievement Award for helping to open up the North as a tourism destination. But at the end of each day, he happily returns home to the log building that was once the Arctic Air staff house.