The House & other Arctic musings

They have returned

Yesterday, some gulls returned to Arctic Bay, possibly even beating the Snow Buntings back.  I've been anxiously awaiting the return of the Snow Buntings, listening and watching and hadn't seen any yet, when Leah told me last night that there were Nauja (gulls) down on the sea ice.

So this afternoon Hilary and I took a drive, first off to the water lake and First Bridge to see if we could find any Snow Buntings.  We had a great time in the sun at the lake, but there was no bird song or sign of any life, so we moved on to the bridge.  As we pulled up I could see a Snow Bunting flying, and after we sat for awhile, and listened to the singing we came up with a total of three males (the females arrive later after the males have staked out their territories).  Unfortunately they wouldn't co-operate for a photo.

We headed on back to town and near King George I noticed a couple of gulls out on the ice. I was so tickled I didn't notice the other 34 Gulls closer to shore (and to me).  This is the first bunch to arrive here and while, predictably most were Glaucous Gulls one was an Iceland Gull. I think there was only one Iceland Gull but they moved off before I took a really good look at the rest.

Here is a picture of the main group, see if you can pick out the Iceland Gull (although granted this isn't the best photo for ID purposes).

How about now with the field narrowed down?

Or a closer crop?

Really the only diagnostic feature here is the size, but when its head wasn't tucked under its wing beak and head proportion was visible. I also swore I heard a lone goose at lunch time while I was out on the deck having a coffee and soaking up the warm sun, but I couldn't for the life of me see any geese anywhere, and I think it's a touch too early.  But you never know.

Another Mother's Day

I'm not sure that we ever really give our mother's their due. I mean, how can we really? We are their children and we embody almost every one of their hopes and fears for the future.  My mother would never forgive me if I publicly posted her age here, but she has three grown children, the youngest of whom hits 45 this year. You can figure out some sort of estimate that satisfies you.

We are three grown children, with various successes and failures that coat our lives. We are, if I do say myself, a pretty good bunch. That is thanks in no small part to our parents and the values they instilled in us. But I don't think there is a day that goes by that my mother doesn't worry about us, fret about some incoming calamity or our health, our happiness, if the loves that share our lives are treating us right and on and on.

Both parents do this I know, but I've long suspected that mothers never lose that amped up worry that they acquire when their children become teenagers. No that's not right, that amped up worry that they acquire when we are born.  Fathers tend to temper theirs more I think.

There is a photo in my parent's room at home of my mother as a young woman. It is a glamorous photo, worthy of any Hollywood starlet, and I used to believe that my mom was movie star when she was young. How could anyone that beautiful not be?  And while she may not be a movie star, her beauty still shines through, for her beauty is timeless, painted in her eyes when she looks at us those moments when her adoration overtakes the worry.

So while Sunday was Mother's Day (and yes I called), I wanted to let you know Mom she deserves one of her own, not shared with all of the mother's of the world. That for me, today is my Mother's Day.  Don't worry, we're all fine.

I love you.

Fail

Not quite the photo I wanted...

Scenes from a Quest too

Wednesday, saw the end of the race here in Arctic Bay. Things started to happen around noon, when the barbeques were fired up down on the ice and lunch was provided for anyone who wanted.  There were, of course, games, while the crowd waited.  There are always games.

Around two thirty the snowmobiles, and komatik, of the support team appeared around the point at Uluksan. As you can imagine an event such as this, involving twenty teams of racers, almost 200 sled dogs, plus race officials and timers etc, is a major undertaking. Each racer has a support team that travels ahead to the days finish line, sets up camp, gets food ready for the dogs, and the drivers.  Any work on the race komatik, icing the runners etc has to be done by the racer (I believe). Each komatik carries the driver, a grub box with some basic survival gear and necessary equipment, and a rifle. But everything else is carried by the support people.

As the support teams appeared they lined up on the far horizon and then slowly drove around Arctic Bay (the body of water not the town) single file. They then turned and one by one parked next to the crowd and the festivities to the cheers of the crowd, who immediately moved through them, shaking hands and cheering.

A little after this Hilary had reached well beyond her reasonable limit, and I took her home where she promptly fell asleep for almost three hours, giving her dad a much needed break from a major grumpiness outbreak which featured liberal use of the word "no". Sorry that should be the word "NO".

A couple of hours later the first of the teams began arriving, led by Moses Oyukuluk of Arctic Bay. He may be the overall winner but it is still to be announced.  The young woman pictured above, Denise Malliki of Repulse Bay, is Leah's cousin and she is staying with us until she returns to Repulse.  She won last year's Nunavut Quest at the age of 19.  She finished quite respectfully this year, despite the fact that she was sick for the entire race.

This year a rider from Grade VIII IX was chosen to be a passenger on the final leg. Each team chose a student by drawing names and the lucky student rode on the komatik for the final stage. After each team crossed the finish line the komatik, driver and student were hoisted into the air by the crowd, while everyone cheered.

There is a $10,000 purse for the winning team, but each participant is treated like a winner. It is a major undertaking to travel over 500 kilometres by dog team, not to mention the distance travelled by the competitors to get to the start line or home afterwards.  Denise, her dog team, and support people, for instance travelled a further 600 plus kilometres from Repulse to get to Iglulik, and in a couple of days will travel almost twelve hundred kilometres on snowmobile to return home.

Importantly each and every participant is helping to keep tradition and traditional skills alive in the High Arctic, and each one, in that way, is a winner.

More photos below the fold, any picture with a racer or dog team in was taken by Leah.

Scenes from a Quest

The Nunavut Quest dog team race ended here in Arctic Bay yesterday. The race itself ended but there are still festivities going on until the weekend.  The final leg was won by Moses Oyukuluk of Arctic Bay and he may have won the overall title but the winners won't be announced until a dance on Friday or Saturday. The race consists of a series of legs and the combined times of all the legs determines the winner.

The start and end points change from year to year, rotating through the communities of the North Baffin. This years race, the 10th anniversary, was from Iglulik to Arctic Bay. Just to give an idea of the distances they traveled, as the Raven flies Iglulik is over 400 kilometres away from here, their route would be longer than that.

Most of the images on this post were taken by Leah. Tuesday she went out to the final camp. Most of the town heads out to the final stop when the race ends here. Yesterday I was present for the arrival of the support teams, but Hilary was far too tired and cranky to stay out there and I missed the arrival of the dog teams.

There are a lot of images here, and I've posted them below the fold.  For more pictures stop by Way Way Up and Kennie's two blogs, Tales from the Arctic and Views of Canada's North.

Worldwide

Statcounter has a feature that shows a map of the world with the location of your hits on it. I look at it from time to time and think it would be pretty cool to have hits from the six populated continents. (Not sure if I've ever had a hit from Antarctica since the Simon Down South days and I can't remember if it showed him as being from Antarctica or Britain.)

I rarely get hits from Africa, and its even rarer to get a hit from South America (perhaps I need to write more Spanish or Portugese), and usually by the time I do get a hit from South America my hits from Asia have dropped off the log.  So this afternoon when I checked this was a pretty cool thing to see.  I know its just navel gazing but its my navel.

Infernal Combustion Engines

I'm not what you would call very mechanical.  I wish I was, and darn it mechanical skills should be innate. Shouldn't they?  Luckily I live in a place where everyone else is a small engine mechanic. It is not unusual to come across someone on the land, tarp filled with parts spread out beside their snowmobile, replacing a piston in their machine. I'll walk over with the rest of the men and play the part, peer and nod knowingly, but truthfully my mind is going "How could anyone do this out here? Look at all of those parts. I wonder what those pieces are for? I wonder if tea is ready? Where did I put that chocolate bar?"

Leah's brothers and father are all part of this cult of engine wizards. This, is a good thing. Honestly you need to be up here, there are no garages, no dealers, no warranty work. Resourcefulness is a common trait up here, and probably has been for untold generations.

One of my favourite stories of resourcefulness comes from when I was still a member, and involved in search and rescue.  One summer day the Search and Rescue committee got a call that a couple of men from the community failed to return from an evening of hunting the day before.  They were only expected to be gone for a couple of hours and it was now almost 24 hours later.  When we finally got a boat and search team organized a thick fog had rolled in, and the searchers and searchees missed each other as the searchees returned to town. 

They had been out in the middle of Admiralty Inlet when the prop fell off their boat! After a bit they rooted around the bottom of the boat and found some metal from which they fashioned their own prop! To be sure they could only travel very slowly but they could travel, so they headed over to the nearest shore and began walking back.  After a little while they found an old boat prop on the shore and so they headed back to their boat. It was, of course, the wrong make of prop that wouldn't fit their motor, but that wasn't a really a problem, they modified it so it would fit!

My point is that I am not like that. Sorry to say if it had been me I'd have been bobbing around in the middle of Admiralty Inlet, hoping that someone found me before I'd be forced to eat my companions. 

Our four-stroke snowmobile needs a new alternator, which is very expensive. I finally found someone down south to rebuild our old alternator, a much cheaper (but not cheap) solution. Three bolts and two electrical connections and its still sitting there, undone.  I was flummoxed at the first electrical connection I tried to disconnect.

A couple of weeks ago I dug the ATV out of its snowbank, and over the course of a couple of days got it started again.  It did not want to stay running, but after I took it on a short run it stayed idling, until the moment I went back in the House. Then it stopped, and would not start again, and there had been something leaking from it. So there it sat.

Getting around town on her snowmobile was becoming increasingly problematic. We are rapidly losing our snow cover in town, and most of the roads are increasingly bare. So on Friday one of Leah's brothers stopped by to look at the ATV. After a couple of nanoseconds he pronounced the problem as a frozen carberator and took the ATV back to his place.

So on Saturday I needed to whip down to the store to pick up some stuff for the baking Leah was taking to a table sale. One of the tires on the truck was low and rather than pump it up, I hopped on Leah's snowmobile, went down the hill to the ice, scooted across the bay and parked across from the store, only one road to cross.  I ran in, jumped on the machine and scooted back across the bay, almost. The snowmobile suddenly stopped, and wouldn't start again so I walked home. There I pumped up my tire  and drove Leah to the table sale.

Then her brother brought back the ATV, fixed.  Leah once again had a vehicle to get around in, and her brother went and got the snowmobile and took it home to fix. Sunday we learned that the oil reservoir had broken and the oil drained out. Even I know that when it comes to engines, oil is a good thing, and while he initially thought that one of the pistons was blown (we had a spare) he later determined it was only stuck. No idea when it would be fixed though.

But I wanted to go check out the Gyrfalcons. "Why don't you take the four-wheeler?" Leah asked. Great idea, it would be a slower trip covering the eight or nine kilmetres out there, and colder as it doesn't have a windshield, but the way is smooth and snow packed, shouldn't be a problem. Wrong. About a kilometre out the ATV slowed, and slowed, and stopped, and wouldn't start again. So, once again I was walking home. I borrowed another machine and once again I was towing one of ours back to Leah's parent's place. And there it sits, a bit more of a puzzle for her brother.

I'm pretty sure that I'm going to be barred from anything other than the truck, and Leah was forced to hitch a ride out of town to meet the dog team racers from Nunavut Quest. Tomorrow they finish their last leg of the race here in town.  I'll be there. I'm walking down to watch.

Franklin,

It is always interesting to read of the modern popular take of Sir John Franklin as “unimaginative” incompetent and the author of his final Arctic Expeditions demise (see the comments in this CBC article). Franklin was chosen, partly because of lobbying, but partly because he was the British Officer with the most Arctic experience.   His final trip was his fourth to Arctic regions.

Yes, his first overland expedition was beset with disaster, starvation, murder and a summary execution, but to state that he never learned from it, or that it wasn’t successful in part is just wrong.  The expedition mapped a large part of the Arctic and Arctic Coast, from the mouth of the Coppermine River to Point Turnagain.

More importantly he did learn from his experiences and mounted a very successful Second overland expedition that mapped much of the Arctic Coast in the other direction.

People tend to point to the size of the Franklin’s last expedition (and compare it to Rae’s small party led by natives) as a reason for the failure, and miss the point that they were looking for a commercial route through the Northwest Passage, much of which had been mapped. The whole idea was to be able to find a passage for ships through the NW Passage, not dog teams. They were, at the time, the best equipped Arctic Expedition ever, employing ships with reinforced hulls for the ice, that were equipped with steam engines, and they had some of the best officers available for their crew. It was provisioned with over three years of food and supplies (Hmmm…. And they didn’t start looking for them for how long?) and were expected to take at least two years to make the passage.

They also ran into some very bad luck.  Inuit testimony recounts there being “no summers” those years, resulting in greater ice pack than even they expected. Problems with the quality of their provisions  (supplied by a government contract) were out of their hands.  There is actually a suggestion (again by Inuit testimony) that there were still provisions left on board the ships.  And of course, by the time the crew was making their death march south, well Franklin was already long dead, probably from natural causes, given his age.

People who point to the Rae expedition as the model of success (and don’t get me wrong he was a very successful, capable Arctic explorer) ignore the fact that starvation regularly visited the Arctic Regions. A similar small expedition looking for Franklin evidence, the US Schwatka expedition, small, guided by Inuit and traveling in Inuit style, narrowly escaped starvation on their return to the Repulse Bay area from King William Island. Indeed starvation constantly stalked Inuit throughout the Arctic. It can be a very unforgiving place, even for those who have thrived up here for thousands of years.

In fact a major Starvation Event took place on King William Island shortly after the Franklin tragedy  It may have been even caused by the Franklin expedition, as (once again according to Inuit testimony) at some point the Franklin survivors had shot many caribou, carcasses were lined up from shore to the ships. Tragically many of the people best able to offer evidence of the Franklin Expeditions final years (there were probably still survivors in 1851) perished in that starvation event.

It is true that when Rae brought back his stories that the  Inuit had told him, of starvation and cannibalism that they were discounted, but it is hardly surprising. The British at time were not prepared to believe that their officers and men would resort to eating human flesh, and it was all to easy for them to dismiss the reports. But the British empire at the time all too often looked at indigenous people with indifference at best and disdain at worse. Wrong? Of course it was, but given the times it could hardly be unexpected.

For a good analysis of just what the Inuit have told us about Franklin I heartily recommend David C. Woodman's book Unravelling the Franklin Mystery: Inuit Testimony, an excellent insightful book.

The look of TBOABN

I've sort of settled on a look for The Birds of Arctic Bay, Nunavut (TBOABN) after fiddling with the design during the weekend.  Once I add some content and put it up it should look something like this...

Zacharias Kunnuk

Isuma, the production company that made Attanarjuat and The Journals of Knut Rasmussen, have a website dedicated to promoting Indigenous Film.  Check out IsumaTV for some unique films.  But first go read this interview with Zach Kunnuk, the force behind Isuma.  Thanks to Michael of Canadian CKayaker for pointing the way to the interview.