Ollie Williams·Tuesday September 16, 2025 Cabin Radio
Colville Lake’s Our Lady of the Snows log church, built by the priest Bern Will Brown in the 1960s, has burned in a fire.
The picturesque church – routinely highlighted as one of the most beautiful in the North – had been a central feature of the Sahtu community of 150 people.
A photo of the church taken by its builder, Bern Will Brown, in the 1990s.
“The Diocese of Mackenzie-Fort Smith deeply regrets the loss of the beautiful and historic Our Lady of the Snows church in Colville Lake,” Bishop Jon Hansen of the Diocese of Mackenzie-Fort Smith told Cabin Radio in a statement on Tuesday morning.
“It served as a place of prayer and worship to the local community for many decades and will be missed. The diocese will work with the community to see how to go forward together in a way that best serves the spiritual needs of the people.”
The bishop said he had not received any reports of injuries associated with the fire, but was awaiting more information from police.
Fort Good Hope has the nearest RCMP detachment to Colville Lake.
“On September 16 at approximately 7:09am, Fort Good Hope RCMP received a report that Lady of the Snows Church in Colville Lake was on fire,” police stated in a brief update after this article was first published.
“An investigation is under way. Given the recency and location of this matter, only limited information is available at this time.” The cause of the fire is not known. A photo of the scene taken by Colville Lake resident Joey Kochon at 7:30am on Tuesday suggested the church had been fully consumed.
“There was already a person there with water truck, but it was burning pretty hard,” Kochon told Cabin Radio.
“There wasn’t much people here, because most of the people went on the land to go hunting. But it looked like it was set on fire from the wood pile behind the church.”
Brown, the church’s architect, was a photographer, painter, journalist, dog-musher and pilot, among other vocations.
Born in Rochester, New York, he came to the North in 1948 as a young priest with the Missionary Oblates of Mary Immaculate, then arrived in Colville Lake and began building Our Lady of the Snows in 1962.
He documented the process of building the mission in the second volume of his Arctic Journal.
Bern Will Brown lights a pipe at his home in Colville Lake. Photo: Pat Kane
In 1971, Brown left the priesthood and married Margaret Steen of Inuvik. They spent more than 40 years in Colville Lake, which he helped establish as a permanent community.
When he passed away in 2014, then-premier Bob McLeod called his death a “true loss for the North.”
Aastha Sethi contributed reporting.
Mackenzie-Fort Smith 