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Inuvik Eye Candy

11/19/2014

Sorry ladies, I am talking about eye candy of the scenery variety. We are down to about 4 hours of sunlight here (we will be into 24-hour darkness in a few weeks).

The sun obviously wants to go out in style... over the last week we have had some amazing sunrises and sunsets.

These are some of the photos I took on Sunday afternoon – the trees were covered in frost and the sun broke through the clouds. I tried to narrow it down to my top 10 favorites but I couldn’t! So here are the top 11.

These pictures below were taken at the town dump - even a pile of garbage can be beautiful with the right lighting!

At some point in the afternoon there was a 'rainbow sundog', if such a thing exists. You can see part of the rainbow to the right of the photo.

The Igloo Church - I was playing with the fisheye effect.

And the day ended with an amazing sunset!

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Tuktoyaktuk Underground Ice House

11/17/2014

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When my parents visited me in the spring this year, we drove a couple of hours up the ice road to Tuktoyaktuk on the Arctic Ocean and took a guided tour of the town. The highlight was going underground into the 'ice house', which is used as a community freezer.

It is a large underground cave cut into the permafrost. You risk breaking your neck climbing 30 feet down a slippery, ice-covered ladder, but the trip is worth it. You can see the tunnels and rooms carved into the rock – the rooms have doors where families can store food, like whale meat or other local meat. The temperature stays pretty consistent at -15 Celsius (about 5F).

The rock walls and ceilings are covered in ice crystals and you can see what permafrost looks like – layers of rock, sand and pebbles.

It reminded us of very cold catacombs.

Here is some more information from http://wikitravel.org/en/Tuktoyaktuk:

“The Ice House: This freezer was dug in 1963 in the permafrost underneath the town and has been in use as a permanent fridge ever since. Very eerie but amazing. Used by locals to store meat collected during hunts. There are 19 rooms in total, divided into three "hallways." Strangely, it is coolest in the ice house during the summer months, but in the winter it warms up and meat is taken out to prevent molding."

Above is the entrance to the ice house - our guide had a key to let us in and we had to use headlamps. Below is the staircase that you use to descend into the icy darkness!

The walls and ceilings are covered in beautiful ice crystals.

Above is a view of the tunnels, with doors on either side. Below is a view of permafrost - you can see the layers of rock, sand, dirt, and ice that the builders had to dig through.

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Northern Lights

11/14/2014

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After three years in the Arctic I'm starting to get sentimental... And there's no better way to express my appreciation for this beautiful place than through some northern lights. These are my favourites from this year.

The first ones were taken in April when my parents came for a visit. They were so excited to see the lights and I was really happy that the last night we went out we saw a spectacular show. The fact that we were in a cemetery only added to the cool factor!

We even got to see some pink colour in the lights - usually they are green, so any other colour is a real bonus!

The photos below were taken by the river in November 2014 when there was also a full moon.

The three pictures below were taken in the early hours of November 15 from my balcony because I didn't want to get out of my pyjamas. They were unusually bright that night so I wish I had got away from the town lights, but at 2 am, I preferred to get back to bed!

These pictures were taken late Saturday night, by the river and at Boot Lake.

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Ice Road Fun in Inuvik

11/13/2014

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I can hardly wait for the ice road to open up for the season. My dream is to drive to Tuktoyaktuk again and see the northern lights over the pingos (and if you don’t know what pingos are, now is the time to learn! Read here).

However, until the ice road officially opens (when the ice is thick enough to withstand vehicles), I will have to settle for posting some cool pictures of the ice road that I took in March and April of this year. I bought an SUV in January and it has opened up a world of opportunities and allowed me to have a lot more northern adventures!

Relaxing on the ice highway. The colours on the road are beautiful in the sun... this must be where the term 'ice blue' comes from.

Sometimes air bubbles get caught as the ice freezes, creating these crazy stacks of bubbles on top of one another.

Sometimes the road cracks as the temperatures rise and fall - you have to watch that your tires don't get caught in the cracks.

Someone got creative with the marker - a snow bunny!

Driving the ice road to Tuktoyaktuk.

In some areas, you can see down to where the black water remains unfrozen - sometimes the ice is 6 or 8 feet thick.

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Arctic Sunsets

11/12/2014

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Winter is here. Which means I have more time to spend indoors around the fireplace doing creative things... like blogging, which I have neglected for way too long! I have been going through photos of the last couple of years and getting inspired.

For now, here are some pictures of recent sunsets. It’s the time of year when the daylight hours are getting shorter and shorter and we seem to get one long sunrise-sunset combo. Today we had just over 5 hours of sun. Sunrise was at 11 am, and sunset was 4:20 pm.

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Inuvik Eye Candy

Tuktoyaktuk Underground Ice House

Northern Lights

Ice Road Fun in Inuvik

Arctic Sunsets

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