Boats of the Mackenzie River watershed carrier business in 1947. The last steam-propelled sternwheelers, the "S.S. Distributor" and "S.S. Mackenzie" were retired around the same time. In later years, with the construction of the Mackenzie Highway from Alberta to Great Slave Lake, the importance of the Athabasca-Slave River route dwindled and NTCL operations were based from shipyards in Hay River after 1959. NTCL became the primary water operator in the Mackenzie River watershed with the purchase of Hudson's Bay Company's fleet and equipment in 1958, and the total buyout of Yellowknife Transportation Company in 1965 including its fleet of diesel tug boats. Other small commercial operators
Oil sands sands and merge at Lake Athabasca to form the Slave River, which flows into the MacKenzie River, one of the largest rivers in the world. All of the water from these rivers flow into the Arctic Ocean. The Peace River oil sands probably contain over 30 billion cubic metres (200 billion barrels) of oil-in-place. The thickness of the deposit ranges from and it is buried about deep. Whereas the Athabasca oil sands lie close enough to the surface that the bitumen can be excavated in open-pit mines, the smaller Peace River deposits are too deep, and must be exploited using