Curare's Adventures

A Quick Trip Up North

One day I was working in the rain in central BC and the next I was bathed in 24 hour sunlight at the geographic center of Canada - Rankin Inlet, Nunavut.  Linda had to leave her posting suddenly last week and since I had just finished a project I was able to fill in for her (metaphorically of course, since no one could really fill those boots!).  I had never been to this area of the Arctic before but had heard lots about it from Linda's previous trips up here.  It most certainly is a unique and strangely wonderful place - from the 42 sled dogs outside my window that love to howl at any opportunity, to the lovers that cruise main street in the fuel truck because his pickup was broken.  The town has it's unique characters.

The terrain is barren of trees with numerous lakes and small hills scattered around.  I often imagine on my daily commute to work what it must be like to travel overland through the sinuous system of lakes and rivers.  Winter would most likely be the best time to travel as you could go in a straight line over the frozen lakes and wouldn't have to contend with the bugs.

I have yet to be able to stay up all night, but   daylight certainly does extend well into the morning hours at least.  And the high temperatures that are happening throughout the central part of North America has created nearly unprecedented temperatures in the Arctic.  It's been sunny and more than warm since I arrived last Thursday.  Rocks get hot to touch and the wind feels like its blowing across a desert, which technically this area is but generally due to the lack of precipitation not high heat.

While there have been signs of animals in our area of work so far I have only seen one muskox, but lots of caribou antlers are lying around.  With this warm weather we should see the caribou migrating north to their summer grounds very soon.  In the past couple of days we have come across a number of stone cairns.  Historically these cairns were used to guide travellers through this land devoid of significant topographic features and they can be a thousand or more years old.

Fishing

Our camp is located very close to south Henik lake so one of the favourite evening activities is fishing. The camp owns a small aluminum boat and motor and if the weather is nice a few people will float down the river after supper is over. A fish is guaranteed with every cast, and every fish is a lake trout.

Lake trout are indigenous  to North America and are found in most provinces and territories, with the exceptions of Newfoundland and Prince Edward Island. However from a zoogeographical perspective, lake trout are quite rare.  In Canada, approximately 25% of the world's lake trout lakes are found in the province of Ontario, but even at that, only 1% of Ontario's lakes contain lake trout. The distribution of lake trout is largely due to glacial activity and the retreat of the Wisconsin ice sheet about 10,000 years ago (had to sneak in some geology somewhere). As this ice sheet melted and retreated northward, it sculpted the landscape, producing thousands of freshwater lakes, perfect for lake trout.

Lake trout inhabit deep, clear, rocky lakes and their native American name of Namaycush means dwellers of the deep. However they also inhabit shallow lakes and rivers in the northern part of their range; i.e.  Henik Lake. Lake trout avoid light, spawn at night and may migrate up to 300 km to their spawning grounds.

Lake trout are the biggest trouts in the world and the largest fish weighed 46.3 kg (102 lb). This huge fish was caught by the commercial fishery at Lake Athabasca, Saskatchewan in 1961 but the angling record is equally impressive. A lake trout caught in 1995 at Great Bear Lake, Northwest Territories weighed 32.8 kg (72.25 lb).

Since so many fish are caught on the camp's fishing excursions we generally practice catch and release, but on two occasions we have brought trout back for supper. The first fish was caught by the camp cook, and although the camp did not have a scale at the time, it's weight was estimated at 11 kg (24.2 lb.). That fish fed seven of us, plus we had leftovers. The second two fish were brought back by a geologist and the helicopter pilot. One of these fish weighed 14 kg (30.9 lb.) and the second was a wee bit smaller. I hate to think what a 46.3 kg fish would look like, and how do you get a thing like that into your boat?

When the cook slit her fish open she found an entire fish backbone inside of it's stomach. Apparently this is normal; in big lakes the trout are piscivorous (a fancy word for fish eaters) but in smaller lakes they eat plants, small crustaceans and aquatic insects (aquatic insects???).

By the end of the summer I may be tired of lake trout but right now it is a tasty treat.

Ice

Arriving in the arctic at the beginning of July means that winter is just ending. On July 4, flying into the camp, the ground was bare of snow and all of the smaller lakes were free of ice, but the larger lakes were still frozen although the ice was rapidly breaking apart.

Our camp is located on an esker between north and south Henik lakes and the two lakes are connected by a swift moving river, about 3 km in length. Shortly after our arrival small rafts of ice started moving from the north lake to the south and as they passed by camp an eddy pulled them close to the shore where it was shallow. Approaching the land the rafts ground along the bottom with mournful groaning noises and broke apart into ice bergs cubes. Other sections of the raft remained intact and slowly melted into a mush of stubby ice crystals.

I have never been in the north during an official "spring breakup", where huge sheets of ice float down a river, but after seeing this mini-breakup I have added that event to my bucket list.

Arctic Wildlife

Last summer it was all about caribou. I saw giant herds of them from the helicopter and smaller herds surrounded us as we worked in the field, but other animal sightings were rare. This year my wildlife sightings have been more abundant and varied.

On the second day in camp we saw a brown furry object about 1 km from the kitchen shack. It was rapidly moving away from us and we all thought grizzly bear. Sure enough when I walked down to the small lake just below the camp I saw the bear's footprints and it was big! I don't know if bears hang out in the same location year after year but we saw one last summer in about the same spot so I am hoping it is the same one. She/he didn't bother us last year so why would he bother us this year?

The next day I was sitting on an outcrop waiting for my helicopter ride back to camp when I heard some noise, looked up, and there was a muskox munching some leaves. This animal was clearly a male because his horn "helmet" meets in the middle, female muskox have a gap. I was on a small cliff downwind of him so he didn't know I was there and I managed to creep pretty close. If you enlarge the photo you  can see the cloud of mosquitoes swarming about his face.

  Then I saw a white arctic wolf - one sighting per day so far. I was eating lunch on a rock, looked up and saw the wolf staring at me from across the creek. She/he was about 100m away and once we made eye contact it melted away into the scrubby bushes. I had no time to grab my camera for an animal photo but I did find it's tracks.

The next two days were bird days: a ptarmigan at camp and baby birds in a nest under some bushes with an anxious parent squawking nearby.

 

 

 

The final sighting (so far) was a fox. I was looking at a rock with my hand lens and saw a movement in my peripheral vision. When I looked up there was a fox only 3 meters away. I felt rather sorry for it because it seemed kind of sickly;  skinny with a swollen left eye. The fox and I looked at each other for about 3 minutes and then it loped away across the tundra disappearing in the low bushes.

I have yet to see a caribou.

Lousy Weather

Everybody loves to complain about the weather.  It's either too cold or too hot, too dry or too wet.  After spending several months for the past few years in the tropics, I always enjoy the changing seasons when we return to Canada.  But after nearly two months of cold and wet weather, it is a little depressing.  And as I keep hearing from everybody, the weather has been like this for several months.

After camping out in a small tent over a rainy Canada Day weekend I had thought the rest of July would be the normal warm and sunny stuff.  Well, not this year.  It's been raining so hard in central BC, where Jessie and I are currently working, that roads are being washed out and all the rivers are flooding.  When we first set up our camp the area was completely dry.  The heavy rains have turned our camp location into lakefront property.  And of course Jessie is not amused in the least to have to work in the rain all day.  The one blessing that can be taken from the wet weather is that the mosquitoes have a hard time flying in the rain.

Back to the arctic

The blog site has been stagnant for a while because there has been nothing much for me to say. I could have scribbled about my life away from the boat; couch-surfing, buying boat parts and visiting  family and friends but that is not very exciting to read and even less exciting to write. BUT ---- now that I am working in the arctic I hope I can  write a few entries and post some photos.

I left Vancouver the evening of July 3 and flew to Winnipeg Manitoba, arriving at 11 PM. The next morning at 7 AM  I flew north to the community of Thompson Manitoba, and from there flew 2 hours northeast to southern Nunavut, back to the camp where I lived last August. Although the owner of this camp promised that it was "new and improved" little has changed and it is still rather squalid.  To be fair I will admit that there are new tents and a large new kitchen structure, but the site remains strewn with miscellaneous items from previous camp users and camp equipment (stove, fridge, shower, pumps, beds etc) are either broken or in poor repair. When the six person geology crew is not out working in the field  we are working at camp; fixing up our living spaces and shuffling the many discards from one place to another. We can, and do, burn the camp garbage and small pieces of leftover wood but there are things like iron bed frames, empty fuel barrels, tent insulation, oil stoves and broken pumps that will probably stay at this site forever. It is far too expensive to fly out unusable items so we are living amongst a mess created by others.

The camp is located at 61 degrees north, well south of the arctic circle, but it is still far enough north to have 24 hour daylight. There is a twilight period from about 11 PM to 3 AM but it never gets dark enough for a flashlight and the sunlight does not bother me when I am going to sleep. Although I probably get less sleep at camp than I do on the boat (where I sleep in the dark for 8 hours) I feel more rested.

A summer geology job usually means I get to look at rocks, but there are not many of those in this part of the arctic so my days are spent searching for outcrops in the shrubby tundra and stunted trees. Some of the time my quest is successful, other times it is not, but every day I am guaranteed a good walk. A very long time ago continental ice sheets (glaciers) covered this part of Canada and made it very flat;  hiking is relatively easy and I  can walk several kilometers during a 7 hour day but poor drainage makes it rather wet. In some locations walking is an acrobatic exercise as I leap across swamps from hummock to hummock, in other locations I am jumping from glacial boulder to glacial boulder, hoping that I do not sprain an ankle. I never know what the day will be like until I step out of the helicopter but it is always interesting and new.

Working out of doors is a great job; lots of fresh air, exercise, sunshine and mosquitoes. These annoying insects form thick clouds and fly into my tent, crawl up my pant legs, get into my hair, bite me in the shower and even get inside of my mesh bug jacket. I have been bitten so many times during my previous forays north that their bites do not bother me but their buzzing drives me crazy. Right now I am inhaling the wonderful aroma of a mosquito coil, not very healthy for me but lethal for them.

Every year I debate with myself about getting a summer geology job because it is not a lifestyle that the majority of people would choose or enjoy. I wonder if I really like the work conditions and or if I just put up with them because the job provides an income? Perhaps by the end of this summer I will have an answer, but I have asked myself this same question for such a long time I don't know if I will ever decide.

Jessie Does It Her Way

Jessie Does It Again

I wasn't sure what was really going on as we loaded all this camp gear down to the dock, but one thing I knew was it was going to be trouble.  Sure enough I get loaded onto a float plane and we fly up to who knows  where and get tossed out.  The first thing I see is all the sign of bears enjoying the fresh berries. Oh great, how am I supposed to entertain these hairy fur balls.

As it turned out, over the next three days I had to do double duty keeeping those silly bears away.   It was exhausting work and I know I earned my kibble those days.  I was serious about my duties and I made sure that no bear was going to bother us.  They thought I was going to let them into camp, no way.

I've had a few days off now and am ready to start our next big program - moose patrol.  I was brought up on it so hopefully it works well.  I actually skinned my head on Geoff's axe on this very same property all those many years ago.  Let's hope he doesn't skin me!

Jessie