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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It's getting close to the end of winter in the North, although you'd never know it by the cold temperatures (still in the -20C range) and the snow on the ground. We get lots of sun (about 15 hours a day), but not much warmth yet. Fortunately, Spring means it's jamboree time in our local communities. Last year I posted about the Muskrat Jamboree in Inuvik - it's hard to believe a whole year has passed and it has rolled around again. This year I got to participate more, as the weather was slightly improved (by that I mean it was still cold but at least it was bright and sunny and the wind wasn't blowing snow and ice into your face the whole time!) The funds raised during the 4-day event (April 5-8) were donated to the NWT Council for Disabilities. Below are some photos I took of the skidoo races, dog-sled races, log-sawing contests, and "honey bag hockey" which I got roped into playing! The other activities that I didn't get pictures of were the harpoon throw, plank walking, nail driving, egg tosses, jigging contests, tug of war, drum dancing, pancake breakfasts, talent show, and my favourite, the trapper skills contest - including boring a hole in the ice for fishing, building a fire on the ice (yes, it's possible!) and making tea and bannock - see last year's post for pictures of that. This is going to be a random post in which I revel in the warm, sunny, t-shirt weather. With 24-hour sun, it stays warm all night! I walked down to the channel yesterday lunchtime and took this video of the ice flowing down-river. In just a day you can see the difference, and now the river is almost completely clear. If you compare these pictures to the ones from yesterday, you can see what a difference a day makes! It was neat to see people by the river having picnics and BBQs and watching the ice break up and drift away. We do what we can to entertain ourselves up here! This warm, sunny weather has got me in the mood to grow things! I have a planter on the patio ready to go for flowers, which I will get from the greenhouse on Saturday (more about the community greenhouse later). A few weeks ago I started some herbs in little pots in my window -- I bought this starter kit at the local Home Hardware. This is what they looked like after a few days (from left to right - basil, cilantro, oregano). I planted them in alphabetical order so I would remember! And after a couple of weeks, they are thriving. I took this photo from the other side, so they are reversed (just to test myself!). From left to right - oregano, cilantro and basil. There have been some big changes in Inuvik -- all the snow is gone from town, and the mud puddles have dried up. We're expecting temperatures up to 20 degrees Celsius this week, and we no longer have any sunsets, as we are into 24-hour sun for the next 2 months... bring on summer! The only place you can still see some snow and ice is down at the channel (which used to be the ice highway - read about it here and here). On Friday I walked down to the river channel to take some pictures and compare to how it looked a few months ago. Here you have then and now... Every year in early spring, the communities in the Beaufort Delta region celebrate the richness of their land through a series of jamborees, or festivals. Tuktoyaktuk has a beluga jamboree, Aklavik has the mad trapper jamboree, Sachs Harbour has its white fox jamboree, and Inuvik has a muskrat jamboree. Inuvik's muskrat jamboree is held in early April. Unfortunately, the weather is frequently bad (cold, overcast and snowy) that weekend, and this year continued the pattern! Nonetheless, the long weekend was full of interesting activities like drum dancing, jigging, dog-sledding, ice-fishing, and muskrat-skinning! The dog-sledding and trapper skills contest was held down on the ice highway. I went down on the last day to watch the trapper skills contest, which included digging a hole in the ice for ice-fishing, making a fire on the ice, and cooking bannock and tea. The top prize was $600 and the competition was fierce. People of all ages participated, from teenagers to elders. These were the tools -- a pick to dig through the ice, and a ladle to remove the snow and ice from the hole. And this is the end result. It's amazing how fast the holes filled up with water, and you had to make sure they didn't freeze over! Once a team had dug their hole, then they started making a fire on the ice. Then you're ready to cook your bannock and boil up your tea!
On our way back from Aklavik along the ice road, we stopped at a camp that belongs to the parents of one of my colleagues. They were generous enough to host over 30 people in our group for some stew and bannock! Then we continued our journey on the ice road back to Inuvik. Below are some more pictures of the road, because I never get tired of it, and I couldn't locate these photos on Monday when I posted :). Sorry for the lack of posts recently - I traveled last week for work to some remote communities (which of course, I will blog about shortly!) and over this past weekend I took a 2-day course to make mukluks (boot-like moccasins), which I will also show you soon. For today, I will show you pictures from our drive last Tueday to Aklavik, which is a town of about 660 people southwest from Inuvik, about 120 km down the ice highway. More on the town in a later post! We set out in the early morning - it was overcast but we still got to see some cool views of the ice road under the snow. We stopped for some close-up shots too! After we had driven about half an hour outside of Inuvik, we passed the sign for the split where you can either go straight to Tuk, or left to Aklavik. Seeing road signs on the side of a river is mind-bending until you get used to it! As you can see, parts of the highway are covered by snow, so you can't always see the ice. The highway is plowed after snowfalls -- this is the responsibility of the Northwest Territories, but they contract the job to local operators. When the sun came out, it was beautiful!
I woke up yesterday (Sunday) and felt like I was in Narnia. A cold fog had adorned every tree with white frost. It was beautiful -- I felt like I was walking around a movie set. Enough talking... I will let the pictures speak for themselves. Today is one of those days it's good to be alive. Inuvik is sunny and clear, with the bright sun painting shadows on the snow, and the warm temperatures luring you outside. We're having the equivalent of a heat wave, with temperatures as high as -10C (14F). With six and a half hours of sunlight, this is just the kind of Sunday I like. The warm weather meant I could walk around and take pictures without fear of my camera freezing up (or my fingers freezing off). My camera always gets cranky and sluggish when I force it to take pictures in -40C weather. I'm waiting for it to go on strike completely before the winter is over. I decided to walk down to the river, which freezes up in the winter to become an ice highway that runs along the south side of town and out to some remote communities. If you want to feel small and insignificant, but oh-so-lucky, stand in the middle of the river channel and look up and down the ice highway in both directions. That was something I've wanted to do for a while. Ever since I came up here in October for the job interview, I have been obsessed with the ice highway. The fact that you can drive on the ice, and that they have road and direction signs along the river is an endless source of fascination for me. My next step is to take a road trip and actually drive on it properly, to either Aklavik (farther south - about 120 km or 2 hours) or Tuktoyaktuk (farther north - about 150 km or 3 hours). In the 20 minutes that I walked along the river, I saw at least 10 cars and one snowmobile, although I heard many other snowmobiles through the woods. It's a busy place! Below is a picture of the "on-ramp" for the highway - one of several places you can get on and off the highway in Inuvik. They even have stop signs - very official! These boats are patiently waiting for the spring melt. This poor guy is completely buried.
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