Picea maritima). It is accompanied by larch, balsam poplar, and quaking aspen. White spruce occurs only on higher ground. The forest floor is a thick spongy mat of sphagnum moss, saturated with water. There are occasional small flowers, but nothing showy. The mosquitoes are terrible.

Black spruce are not very impressive trees, rarely growing more than twenty feet tall in this area. But the fact that they grow here at all is remarkable. This is about as far north as trees grow anywhere in the world — in eastern Canada the treeline is hundreds of miles further south. It is the moderating effect of the huge amount of water in the Mackenzie River system that allows trees to grow almost up to the Arctic Ocean in this area.