Arctic Adventures

This link is, more or less, our blog space.  We just want to tell anyone who will listen about some of the highlights of the places we have been, people we have met, things we have done, and internet sites readers might want to know about. 

Auyuittuq National Park Hiking

            What a place to start our Arctic adventures!  Upon hindsight, we know that we should have begun more conservatively, since this is the wildest of the wild.  We thought we were prepared because we had years of experience in places such as the Boundary Waters Canoe Area, the Canadian bush, and all sorts of backwoods places in the U.S.  I guess the real reason for our ardor was the lure and beauty of the place.  It is way up there. The Arctic Circle runs through it, and it is all festooned with the Penny Ice Cap, a rushing river, a nearly 100 kilometer pass, and a sky as ice blue as the glaciers that abound there.

            We spent the first couple of days in Pangnertung, the community at the south end of the park.  It's tiny, but a dream place for people like us, who have read nearly every book ever written about the Arctic, the Northwest Passage, and the native people.  One day walking around town we met this cool little girl, who was then about 7 and carrying her baby sister around on her back in a small version of an Imuiti.  She was drawn to us by my dog guide, Dinah, because "your dog looks so shiny and clean," she said.  Obviously, she was accustomed to sled dogs, which are kept in people's side-yards during the summer and are far from clean and shiny.  Anyway, she accompanied Sue and me to the interpretive center in "Pang."  The Center has a traditional summer hut set up as an exhibit, so we were asking her questions about it.  She asked us to wait a minute and went off to get her grandfather, who didn't speak English, but took the next hour or so explaining every part of the hut, the traditional whale hunt, and all sorts of cultural tidbits with us through the 7-year-old baby-sitter, interpreter.  Wow, what a morning.

            Access to Auyuittiq Park is mostly possible by chartering an Inuit guide with a boat to run you up the fjord to the trailhead, so that's what we did.  The only problem was the boat didn't really get there.  It broke down about halfway out there, so the guide gave us a couple of fish, a camp stove, and said, "Well, I'm going to walk back to town and get another boat."  It was the penny loafers he was wearing that gave us pause for concern, so we gave up on him and hitched a ride with a young Inuit couple sitting on the back seat of the boat with their arms all wrapped around one another.  Eventually, we got there and set up camp, where we discovered that we had a short tailed weasel as a pet for a day.

            We bid farewell to our little buddy the next morning and headed off down the trail in a light rain.  It was unbelievably exciting.  The pass is composed primarily of gravel, reindeer moss, and other knee high vegetation.  The trail is not marked in any way, but visitors have worn a deep path or paths which we could easily follow.  At a distance of a half-mile or more to the left and right of the path, the hills continuously rose and were topped with ice fields, from which hundreds of streams flow and ice avalanches were continuously breaking off with resounding booms and resulting ice and landslides.  There was a constant cacophony of sound and continuous wading across the numerous glacial rivulets.  The little streams were generally measured in tens of feet in width and a few inches in depth, and were as cold as the ice itself. 

            All went wonderfully for the first few days, as we hiked and camped our way away from the trailhead, but it continued to rain and to melt the glacier above us.  The trail is far from harms way in terms of the avalanches, but the little rivulets were becoming more like rivers themselves.  Also, after a few days of enjoying the area, we reached a huge bolder field, which we had read about in the Park literature and that appeared to be pretty unsafe for my dog guide.  The boulders were all larger than cars and many were building sized.  It was an awesome land formation and gave us a good reason for heading back. 

            After hiking most of the next morning, we came upon one of those rivulets that had gone from 10 feet wide and ankle deep to a couple of hundred feet wide, chest deep, and so powerful they could carry some pretty big boulders that could be heard bumping along with the current.  The experience that we were about to have would teach us that we should have simply set up camp, waited for the rain to stop, the water to go down, and then hike around and enjoy the surrounding hills.  Instead, we compounded our mistake of trying to cross by not roping ourselves off before Sue headed across.  She didn't make it half way before the current picked her up and tumbled her head over heals towards the confluence of the stream we were crossing and the main river.  It all happened too quickly to understand the full consequences of what was happening at the moment, but I knew that I could not help her.  Before it all sunk in, I heard her yell, "I'm okay, I'm okay!"  Just as the river was about to pick her up and take her to certain death, she reached up and grabbed a couple of handfuls of tundra vegetation and hung on for her life.

            As in all such situations, the fear comes afterwards.  When she hauled herself out, we got the tent set up as quickly as possible, and got the wet clothes off of her.  She was shaking uncontrollably by then and she could hardly talk for her teeth banging together.  We tried rolling her up in a sleeping bag to warm her, but it didn't do the job quickly enough, so we began to hike up the mountainside to make her body generate some heat.  After 15 or 20 minutes, she quit shaking and we finally talked coherently about how careless and lucky we had been. 

            This is a good story to start this link with, just in case anyone reading this is planning an Arctic wilderness trip.  We figured that our overwhelming need to meet our airline schedule in Pangnertung was the reason the trip nearly ended in disaster.  From that point on, we never allowed our below 66 degrees view of time endanger us up there in that most wondrous of places. 

            In summary, Auyuittuq is pure and beautiful Arctic wilderness, Pangnertung is a friendly and culturally educational destination, and both are easily accessible, so anyone wanting to sample the "North," couldn't do better than Auyuittuq. 

Contact:

Auyuittuq National Park

P.O. Box 353

Pangnirtung, Nunavut Canada X0A 0R0

Phone: 867-473-2500

Fax: 867-473-8612

Email: nunavut.info@pc.gc.ca