THE LYUBOV ORLOVA, CUMBERLAND SOUND — After a 12-kilometre hike through Auyuittuq National Park yesterday, my first view of the Arctic Circle was majestic: a glacier-covered mountain above a wide flat valley bed on which, catching the light of the sun, ran a naked man.
It was unseasonably warm for 66 degrees north and Climate Change Specialist John Streicker, though not entirely naked on second glance, was definitely stripped down and charging towards the polar river with a real sense of purpose. The kids from Students On Ice – the group of absurdly accomplished teenagers I’ve hitched a ride with for the next two weeks – are never lacking in enthusiasm, and soon the icy river was full of people splashing and gasping with the shock of the cold.
The dip at the Arctic Circle came after a four-hour hike through what was probably the most dramatic landscape I’ve ever seen. Auyuittuq National Park is just kilometres away from Pangnirtung (“The Switzerland of the Eastern Arctic!” according to the Baffin Island travel guide – a charming but bizarre slogan that immediately makes you wonder if there is, in fact, a competing community somewhere in the Yukon somewhere calling themselves the “Switzerland of the Western Arctic”). The flat valley we trekked through was surrounded enormous cliffs and jagged ice-caped mountains. Glaciers like enormous blue fingers gripped the mountains at their crevices, the run-off creating icy fast-running streams that we carefully waded through.
The place basically looks like a high-school geology lecture in action – the land carved and churned and cut away by the park’s glaciers. As Eric, my oceanographer cabin-mate put it, glaciers are just “huge sediment machines.” The rivulets constantly carry huge deposits of silt downstream, and the valley floor is covered in enormous slabs of rock, dropped by retreating glaciers or pushed down from the mountains by the pressure from the ice above.
The fact that puny humans could affect these enormous natural forces seems incredible, but it’s happening. In Pangnirtung, two elders spoke about the rapid environmental changes they’ve seen in their lifetime: the sea ice now arrives later and departs sooner; the snow caps that used to cover the mountains around town have melted in the past few years. The Auyuittuq park ranger we spoke to, a jokey northerner who gave us our obligatory Polar Bear warning, also talked about the changes in the park. To him, the effects of human-drive climate change were pretty clear: Ayuittuq, a word that means “it never melts” in Inuktitut, is in fact melting. He said they were considering a name change.
Photos by Eric Galbraith.
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