Blogs from Northwest Territories, Canada, North America - page 8

Wild Saturday night at the Trapper. The Trapper is the local pub in Inuvik and this past Saturday night a talent show was held in the establishment! This social event was being held to raise funds for the End of the Road Music festival (http://www.eotrmusic.com/) held every year in Inuvik mid August so we all went out. I was told it is illegal to take photos inside so I will have to get some pictures of the outside of the Trapper, it is totally welly and looks even sketchier than the Cecil, hee hee. There were about 10 performers all singing, playing guitar and fiddle. There was one amazing fiddler that got the crowd going. I think he probably won but we left before the winner was announced. Sean and I both won the door ... read more

Today Sue and I did our sampling from helicopter floats! Such an adventure. Some of the lakes Sue has included in her study are more isolated than the ones we have been using the canoe on and would be a 45 min hike dragging the canoe through the forest to get to them. So helicopter is our mode of transportation. Helicopters are soooooo expensive! Luckly the Lesack lab has a grant for helicopter time so we hopped onto a Long Ranger at the airport and off we went. The delta looks so unreal from the sky! Hundreds of lakes scattered around the muddy river. We went to 4 lakes today and collected our usual samples. The pilot kept the helicopter running while we climbed out onto the floats with our zooplankton nets, bottles, seives and ... read more

Well today was our first field day on the Mackenzie delta and the weather apparently did not know this, or maybe it did.... Sue is studying the landscape-level variation of dissolved organic carbon amoung the delta lakes, particularly the effects on food web structure and implications of the future (ie global warming). We roared down the silt filled channel in our 16 foot motor boat. Sue says that the river is low this year, meaing that there was not as much of a flood this year. The banks of the river looked like perfectly aligned vertical stacks of mud with trees leaning directly at us as we passed by. The trees lean in toward the centre of the channel because the permafrost beneath them is melting in the summer sun (24 hours/day of it!). Our ... read more

If your not already in a boredom induced coma, here is the final installment… While the entire trip was a challenge and provided me with the opportunity to visit some amazing places, it definitely stepped up a notch over for the last ¼ of the distance. This was when I crossed the Arctic Circle (an imaginary line, being the furthest south that the sun will shine for 24 hours during the summer solstice). It almost seemed like as soon as that line was crossed it became colder and the landscape began to change. Trees were smaller the further north I went due to permafrost (permanent layers of ice in the soil or frozen soil) and the season was literally changing before my eyes. Trees started to have hints of yellow and quickly changed to red ... read more

Its difficult to convert 49 days of paddling experiences in to words, so much is lost in the translation and there were a lot of “you had to be there” moments but here goes… The stats: Distance covered: 1500+ km Change in elevation: 175m Lacation: Northwest Territories, Canada Route: north from Great Slave Lake (the town of Hay River) through Fort Providence, Jean Marie, Fort Simpson, Wrigley, Tulita, Norman Wells, Fort Good Hope, Tsigachic, Inuvik and Tuktoyaktuk on the Arctic Coast. This included a side trip to Delane on the Great Bear Lake, via the Great Bear River. Cultural regions passed through: Dehcho (in the south), Slavey, Sahtu, Gwitchen and Inuvialuit (in the north). Geographic areas passed through: flat Canadian Shield, the Northern Rocky Mountains and Arctic Tundra. The Boreal and Taiga forests of the south ... read more