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!
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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One effect of the extremely cold temperatures in the Arctic is that occasionally you find yourself driving on square tires. If you get in a vehicle, and the ride feels like you're bumping along in a Flintstones car, it's because the tires got so cold that they froze flat on one edge and stayed that way! I should have written this post back when we had -40 temperatures, as it would have been more relevant then. Now we're hovering around freezing, so this effect doesn't happen, but I thought it was interesting enough to share anyway. On the subject of weather and temperatures, we now get almost complete daylight. Sunset is technically at around 1 am, and sunrise is 5 am, but even in the middle of the "night" it's not completely dark. We will experience our last sunset in a couple of weeks. Then it's 24-hour sun through the summer... what an adjustment that will take. At least the temperatures are warming up slightly, although we are still experiencing snow! |