Upper Summit Lake (British Columbia) River, Great Slave Lake and the Mackenzie River into the Beaufort Sea portion of the Arctic Ocean. Upper Summit Lake (British Columbia) Upper Summit Lake is a lake in Regional District of Fraser-Fort George, in the Central Interior of British Columbia, Canada, about north of the city of Prince George and south of the community of Bear Lake. It lies just west of Highway 97 (John Hart Highway). Upper Summit Lake is about long and wide, and lies at an elevation of . There are no inflows, and an unnamed creek flows from the southern tip of the lake to
Mackenzie River the northwest, establishing the present flow direction to the Arctic. Fluvial deposits and other erosional evidence indicate that around the end of the Pleistocene, about 13,000 years ago, the Mackenzie channel was scoured by one or more massive glacial lake outburst floods unleashed from Lake Agassiz, formed by melting ice west of the present-day Great Lakes. At its peak, Agassiz had a greater volume than all present-day freshwater lakes combined. This is believed to have disrupted currents in the Arctic Ocean and led to an abrupt 1,300-year-long cold temperature shift called the Younger Dryas. The Mackenzie carries a very large