2004/07 Yukon trip - Trek to the Arctic - |
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We had another sunny morning, and a hawk owl as a visitor. I guess if it doesn’t get dark then even the owls have to work a day shift. We drove the remaining 60 miles or so of highway to the Inuvik area. We climbed into hills surrounding the Mackenzie River and looked down on the massive river and its cliffs. I’d imagined that there would be no trees this far north but the Mackenzie Delta is warmed by the river and shielded by the surrounding mountains. The Delta is mainly river and lakes, but any land is covered in small trees.
Inuvik is very much an industrial town with lots of factories and austere townhouses, but there are some glimmers of the local culture. There’s the igloo church built to look like a giant igloo, and the visitor’s centre has local carvings and paintings. Like Fort McPherson, most of the buildings are built on pilings, but here they cover them, presumably to make their floors a bit warmer. There are also great rectangular boxes connecting all the buildings. These contain the water and sewer pipes which can’t be buried in the ground. We don’t know how they stop them from freezing in the winter. Some of the people here are Gwich’in and look Indian, others are Inuvialuit (or the western Inuit) and look “Eskimo” to us, a name they dislike. A bunch of local kids “helped” me fill the camper with water and they had the flat faces of the Inuit.
The main road through town is paved, but I think it was built before they understood permafrost behaviour. As a result it has some massive ripples that can get the whole vehicle bouncing to the limits of its springs. We quite often saw a local driving on the wrong side of the road to avoid a set of ripples.
We tried to book up for some kind of local tour but didn’t find the local agents’ office until it had closed. To go any further north from here we need either a boat or a plane. In the winter there are ice roads along the rivers to the Arctic Ocean but there’s no road in the summer that we could drive.
We camped at Jak Park, a few miles south of Inuvik in another government campground.
Monday 9th August
Monday was sunny but smoky from a forest fire somewhere. We planned to take it easy and do some shopping, posting, and Internetting in Inuvik. It’s a big town by Northwest Territory standards but everywhere is within walking distance. We found Arctic Nature Tours inside the Eskimo Inn and found they’d be quite happy to take our money for the trip to Tuktoyaktuk on the Arctic Ocean, but only if there were four of us that wanted to go, so we were left hanging waiting for someone else to show up. We did some shopping and used the library’s Internet to resolve the l
atest car collisions back at 3183 Midland (You don’t want to know!), and went for a walk along the Inuvik waterfront and around Boot Lake. It was 82 degrees, hot and steamy. This was not what we expected in the Arctic!
Back at the campground we called the tour company and found that we were on for the trip in the
morning. We also noted that the campground’s phone was picking up Barbara Budd and “As it Happens” on CBC, so we quickly had our radio tuned in to Canadian civilization. There seemed to be some excitement about the Olympics, so the Canadian underwater synchronized tiddlywinks team must be in with a chance for the medals. Every so often the station switched into news in one of the local languages such as Gwich’in but as there are no Gwich’in words for the white man’s concepts, the news report would still include words like “Olympics” and “tiddlywinks”.
The smoke seemed to be increasing and the setting sun was an orange ball that just dropped into denser smoke and disappeared.