We visited Kimmirut yesterday, a tiny community on southern Baffin Island, where we were given a warm welcome by what seemed like every one of the hamlet’s 400-odd residents. We were the first large vessel to visit this year. Kids mobbed us as we entered the harbour. An elder shared a seal that was caught that day, carving it up and dividing it in front of us. My verdict? The same as the Governor General’s: seal’s pretty great, a tender red meat with a subtle seafoody flavour. Like surf ‘n’ turf, but all within a single delicious animal. You could make a killing selling it as “Inuit Sashimi” at trendy Manhattan restaurants. (more…)
LYUBOV ORLOVA, FROBISHER BAY, NUNAVUT — Throughout this Arctic trip I’ve been trying to get a few minutes with Geoff Green, the expedition leader and founder of Students On Ice. But the man’s been busy – up on the bridge urging our captain to anchor in uncharted waters, down in the presentation room, talking to the sixty-odd students about the need for positive action.
This seems to be his usual state of affairs. Since his first expedition in 2000, Geoff has turned a rag-tag group based out of his basement into a serious organization. On this trip to the arctic, he’s taken 60 kids, from every province and territory including about 20 students from across the north. About eighty percent of the students are fully funded through a mish-mash of corporate, government, and charitable funding. Finding the money to do this is probably one big reason Geoff is so busy.
We finally found time to talk yesterday afternoon, after landing at Shaftsbury Inlet. Compared to the other places we’ve been, the place was incredibly lush, the ground covered in white heather and ripe blueberries. Two loons flew overhead while an ungodly number of mosquitoes and black flies formed clouds around us. It felt like Ontario in August. (more…)
LYUBOV ORLOVA, HONTSCH ISLAND, NUNAVUT – Above is the walrus, as captured off the coast of Baffin Island by my neighbour onboard the Lyubov Orlova, photographer Lee Narraway. We saw over eighty of the creatures yesterday, lolling around on ice floes in all their wrinkled glory. And it must be said: the walrus is a deeply undignified, almost repulsive animal. I don’t know what the founding editors where thinking when they named the magazine.
Picture a Volkswagen-sized ball of fat squeezed into a lumpy, ten-foot sausage casing. Attach a tiny pinhead, some bristles, warts, and those stumpy, perpetually wet-looking flippers – “the asset” as David Foster Wallace would call them – and you’ve got the walrus.
And the smell. Imagine the smell of pig shit. Now let’s say that pig weighs four thousand pounds and lives on a diet of mollusks. Now imagine five or six of these monster sea pigs, wallowing together out on an ice floe, burping and farting and generally rubbing up against one another, as is typical of this disgusting, highly social animal. Does this sound like an appropriate name for a high-brow, general-interest magazine? (more…)
LYUBOV ORLOVA, HONTSCH ISLAND, NUNAVUT – Joshua Illuaq was six years old when he killed his first polar bear. He was hunting with his uncle and cousin out near Pond Inlet when they spotted the animal out in the snow. “Me and my cousin both tried to shoot it, but I’m the one that got it,” he told me. “It was my bear.”
Since then, for the past fifty years, Joshua has taken a polar bear each year. He took one this winter near his home in Clyde River, hunting by himself on a skidoo. He’s killed dozens of bears with a rifle and three with a harpoon. Once, a bear surprised him while he was sleeping in an igloo. “He knocked the wall down and my rifle was out by the sled,” Joshua casually told an audience of slack-jawed students yesterday evening in the ship’s presentation room. With no other option, he took out his knife and stabbed the bear – once, just under the arm and into the heart. That was the first time he had to kill a bear with a knife. Years later, a bear caught him while he was up on a cliff, away from the rifle in his boat, and he was forced to do the same thing. “With a polar bear, as soon as his head is sideways you have to move away from the jaw side,” he told us matter-of-factly, while the students took careful notes – “if in hand-to-hand combat with polar bear, avoid jaw.” “The other thing is you have to look out for the claws,” he added. (more…)
LYUBOV ORLOVA, BAFFIN ISLAND – Besides being a charming cabin-mate with fine taste in contemporary rock music, oceanographer Eric Galbraith is also the casual bearer of terrifying news. “Oh yeah, it’s pretty clear,” he said yesterday. “By 2030 there will be no sea ice in the summers.”
This seems impossible. Just yesterday we plowed through miles of the stuff. The captain – who looks vaguely like Lenin, only less playful, and is quickly becoming a real hero of arctic exploration in my eyes – steered the Lyubov Orlova through enormous ice fields, the ship reverberating alarmingly each time we collided with a large floe. Today we saw polar bears off the coast of Baffin Island, swimming through the water and clambering over the ice pans. We saw groups of walrus, stacked on ice floes like enormous brown sausages. An arctic without sea ice is almost unimaginable – like a desert without sand.
Nevertheless, according to Eric (and, it should be said, the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, the National Centre for Atmospheric Research, and just about everyone who’s seriously looked at the numbers) the ice is disappearing. John Streicker, the climate change specialist on board, is even less optimistic. He gives it a decade before summer sea ice in the arctic is a thing of the past. (more…)
LYUBOV ORLOVA, CUMBERLAND SOUND – We’ve spent the last few days puttering around the Cumberland Sound after ice floes jammed around the eastern coast of Baffin Island forced a change of plans. The expedition was originally supposed to head north to Clyde River and Isabella Bay to celebrate the opening of a new National Wildlife Area – the world’s first bowhead whale sanctuary which will provide an important summering home for the creature. A visit to the bowheads at Isabella Bay would have been wonderful, but with our path to north cut-off we decided to stay in Cumberland Sound and explore the nearby Kingnait Fjord.
Despite the wealth of arctic knowledge aboard this ship, no one actually knew much about Kingnait. Fred Roots, the eighty-six-year-old geologist and explorer who seems to have explored every nook and cranny in the north, only knew that it had been the site of one of scientific stations during the first International Polar Year in 1882-83. The waters are uncharted – the place is rarely if ever visited by ships our size – but our Russian captain agreed to give it a shot. A zodiac motored ahead of us with a depth sounder, reporting back to the ship while we inched forward. (more…)
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. (more…)
LYUBOV ORLOVA, CUMBERLAND SOUND, NUNAVUT — Resolution Island is a collection of three-billion-year-old rock plunked into the sea just off the coast of Baffin Island. So it’s remote. Going east, the next stop is Greenland. As our ship pulled into Acadia Cove on the island’s southern coast yesterday afternoon, we could just make out some white markings on the granite cliffs. Fred Roots, the all-knowing geologist on board, had spent the morning talking about rock formations, so I was eager to investigate further. As we got nearer, the thin markings began to look more familiar, until they finally took on a clear form: the words “MOON MAN MARTINEZ” carefully printed in foot-high capital letters, possibly the work of some poor soldier in the Canadian military bored out of his skull while stationed at the base nearby. Graffiti in the arctic: a testament to the humankind’s indomitable spirit.
In any case, Martinez the Vandal wasn’t wrong: the place looks like it’s from another world, with sheer rock faces rising out of a grey, soupy sea and none of the obvious signifiers of life familiar to southerners like me. As we made our way further inland three polar bears appeared off the starboard side on rocks in the distance – a mother and two cubs, according to the various wildlife experts onboard. Before we could get close, they took off up the steep face of the rock and disappeared behind a ridge.
A strong wind sweeping down from the north has made our trip across the Hudson Strait a little rougher than expected, and the ship’s common areas are littered with the bodies of seasick students and staff, who have immediately dubbed themselves The Horizontals and seem to have decided to make queasiness the price of membership in their exclusive club.
My cabin mate, Eric Galbraith, is a young professor at McGill University and the ship’s oceanographer. During his lecture this morning, for which he had carefully prepared a PowerPoint presentation, Eric excitedly explained exactly what was causing the motion of the ocean. “We were lucky enough this morning to get some really great swells,” he said enthusiastically, as queasy students fled to the outer decks.
My appetite is fine. In fact, one of my small pleasures onboard the Lyubov Orlova – our Soviet-era icebreaker – is comparing our comfortable 21st century Arctic travel to the breathtakingly awful, almost comically disastrous conditions on famous expeditions of the past. Our first evening, for example, we dined on penne with sautéed mushrooms, roasted turkey, a spinach salad with red pepper vinaigrette, and, for dessert, a chocolate brownie topped with whipped cream and blueberry compote. We were served, in the dining room, by a crew of thick-accented Russians, who played disco-remixes of Nina Simone at discrete levels from the sound system behind the serving station. (more…)
And we’re off! This afternoon, under a cold mist, the passengers of the Lyubov Orlova set off from Kuujjuaq, a small community just south of the lip of Ungava Bay. I’m traveling with Students On Ice – an organization that, in an act of extraordinary optimism, brings sixty high-school students from across the country on a two-week expedition through the Arctic. From Kuujjuaq we’ll move north, into the Arctic circle along the north-east coast of Baffin Island, before returning to Iqaluit in two weeks.
The students are accompanied by 45 staff members, who seem to have been selected for their combination of scientific knowledge and extreme positivity. There are climate change experts and marine biologists, oceanographers and botanists. There is an Inuit printmaker, an oil painter, and a songwriter, but the artists are well outnumbered by the scientists and conservationists, who chat amongst themselves about the latest research, share adventure stories about finding the perfect sedge specimen, and squabble over whether or not someone has, in fact, seen a black guillemot, and this despite the fact that such a sighting would be highly unlikely in the middle of Ungava Bay.
For the next two weeks I’ll be blogging about the trip via satellite, taking advantage of the expertise onboard to try to make sense of the things that I’m seeing in Canada’s north. I’ll be posting interviews, photos, observations and stories.
I will also be doing my best to see some polar bears.
Sky Goodden: This is startling, refreshing, overdue, and damn good. Thank you, Shary.
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