The Sky is Crazy here...

We've been getting a lot of low lying clouds and fog, so when the sun breaks through, we are treated to some stunning light effects...


On this day, it seemed we had searchlights from the heavens (sorry about the blurr)...


The view walking down to work in the morning through the city...


Some no-knead bread I decided to experiment with. The thing is practically no work at all - just mix a few ingredients (flour, salt, water & a tiny bit of yeast) and let it sit and rise for between 12 - 18 hrs, then form it into two loaves, let it rise for an hour and pop it into the oven in a covered pot... my first attempt turned out not bad...


On my next attempt, i got kind of busy and ended up letting it sit for closer to 24 hours. It didn't turn out as well - seemed to have an unpleasant edge to the taste and the texture wasn't as nice, probably because of the over-fermenting. So... if you're lazy, but like the taste of homemade bread, this might be the recipe for you.

One of those extended sunsets we get here...

Swing through the Arctic...

I traveled up to Cambridge Bay for a five day visit this past week, with a night in Yellowknife both ways. En route, we stopped over in Rankin Inlet... so, I got to see a bit more of the North.

My route:
Here are some pictures I took along the way:

Rankin Inlet...

It was windy with a splattering of rain in Rankin Inlet:
the Rankin airport:Iqaluit had great weather that week - up in the 20s, so the greeting provided to me by the cool wind, rain and local mosquito committee was a bit of a shock...


Yellowknife...

Moving on to Yellowknife, it was nice to be south of the treeline again. With a population of around 20,000, Yellowknife sits on the north shore of Great Slave Lake and is the capital city of the Northwest Territory. Besides the government activity, the city's growth is fed by local diamond mines, including De Beer's new Snap Lake Diamond Mine. Yellowknife was warm - humid even, in the 20s.

Here are some pics from around the city:
... and, of course, no visit to Yellowknife would be complete without taking in some of the historic landmarks, like the Wildcat Cafe:...and the notorious Gold Range Hotel:I managed to fit in an evening at the Gold Range, sampling some of the local culture and entertainment. The decor and ambience is vintage "Northern Tavern".


Cambridge Bay...

The hamlet of Cambridge Bay sits on the last leg of the fabled Northwest Passage - Franklin never quite made it that far; his ship ended it's journey in the ice pack surrounding nearby King William Island and from there he and his crew struck out on their final ill-fated attempt to save themselves by traveling overland.

There was a low ceiling of clouds over Cambridge Bay when our plane landed - they send up balloons and time how long it takes for them to disappear from sight to determine the height of the cloud cover and whether or not it's safe to land. Rain and cold wind greeted me in Cambay (as the locals as the locals sometimes refer to it)... and, of course, the local mosquito committee.

The hamlet is situated well above the arctic circle and even in the end of July there was only maybe an hour or two of darkness/twilight - as was confirmed to me when I woke up at 4:30am the first night with the sun beating down through the bedroom window at me.

My hosts graciously allowed me the use of an ATV while I was there and it was great fun to go tooling around the town and countryside. The ATV is even more prevalent as everyday transportation than in Iqaluit; I'd guess that the auto to ATV ratio is about 1:1.

There is a stark beauty to the place with its vast expanses of barren tundra where the pure colours of sky, water, soil and rock are unchallenged by distraction.

Here is a picture of the town:
When I first arrived, ice still clung to the shoreline of the bay; a couple of days later it had disappeared.
The Barren Ground Caribou migrate through the area and hunting them is a part of everyday life in Cambridge Bay. Here are some skulls and antlers which were piled at the side of a house:
This is Mount Pelly, an esker (soil deposit left by a glacier) which is in Ovoyak National Park, a few kilometers outside of town:
This is a docking station for float planes:
The view from our office in town:
A local graveyard:

We got a chance to take a ride out the southern coast of Victoria Island where we saw the strait leading into the last leg of the Northwest Passage, Coronation Gulf. Local inhabitants build cabins out here where they come on weekends to escape the hustle and bustle of the hamlet:
On our way back to town from Mount Pelly, we noticed a couple of Muskox very close to the hamlet. My host didn't want to bring her truck over a small bailey bridge, so when we got back to town, I jumped on the ATV and headed out to see if I could get a picture of them. I saw them again from the road near town, but when I got down close to that area, I couldn't see them from the road... so, I guessed that they might be over a hill, and I parked the ATV and climbed up and over. Sure enough, there were two of them on the other side of a flat area with a marsh on the far side, just in front of the Muskox:I tried to get as close as I could... the ground was mushy muskeg (not good for running) and I was alone - as I got closer I began to appreciate just how big the creatures were and my bravery diminished proportionally. Unfortunately, my camera is just a little point-and-click thing so I couldn't get the pictures I wanted (that's next on the shopping list). Once the older, grey shaggy one started paying attention to me (in spite of my sideways approach trying to make it look like I was just going down to the waterhole for a drink), discretion became the better part of valour and I figured I was close enough...

This radar station was part of the Defense Early Warning ("DEW") Line that the Americans set up during the cold war. It is now part of the North Warning System.

Making Ulus...

My Inuk friend, Josephee, makes a variety of implements and tools in his shed down by the shore. Josephee works pretty well exclusively with hand tools. I've been watching him making Ulus - knives used traditionally by women to cut meat, skin, and anything else they need to.

He started by drawing the blade patterns on a saw blade and cutting them out with a hammer and chisel:He then filed the rough edges of the blade, filed and shaped the shaft, cut a slot in it with a hacksaw and drilled holes in the pieces. A common nail is filed until it fits the holes drilled through the shaft and blade and then sawed off to be peened into a rivet to hold the blade on:

This is what the finished ulu will look like:Here is Josephee and his companion at his shed:
These are some char hanging to dry off the back of Josephee's shed. Apparently, the rope is wound around the board because it scares the ravens so they won't steal the char:

The Road to Nowhere...

I live on the Road to Nowhere:
The road got its name, I guess, from the fact that it leads out of the city and just kind of peters out a short distance off into the tundra:
My mom had warned me in the past that she thought I was on this road... and now, I guess it's official. But it appeared the situation was even more dire - this past week, I attended at the Iqaluit Post Office to get my new post office box. The fellow behind the counter shuffled through some papers and then glanced up at me and asked "are you superstitious?" "No.." I replied. "Good - because I'm assigning you box 666; I'll go get the key". I considered this as he went into the back room. Geez... my address will be P.O. Box 666, The Road to Nowhere... that can't be good. I must confess to a bit of relief when he returned and advised me that somebody else had taken that number and he assigned me another.

Panorama Iqaluit...

This morning I had some time to kill so I climbed the highest hill in the city and took some photos:
The tide is partly in at this time; you can see the boats sitting on the mudflats beside the pier waiting for the water...
Somebody has erected a small cross on top of the hill. I was thinking it would be a great spot for a huge Inuksuk. You would be able to see it clearly from the bay and all over the city - kind of like the giant Jesus statue in Rio:

Sea Lift...

Sealift started this week - this is the annual summer arrival of ships with cargo which people have ordered in - a lot cheaper than the fall/winter/spring airfreight method. The discerning Iqaluit shopper will order a years supply of staple goods (flour, sugar, canned goods, toothpaste, etc.) from southern stores like Costco and ship them up at this time. It is also the time when big-ticket items, like SUVs, ATVs and snowmobiles are shipped in.

When I first heard of this practice, I had the naive idea of a bunch of cargo vessels arriving at once with the townspeople huddling together on the shore eagerly awaiting their goods (followed, no doubt, by a huge celebration - almost like harvest time).

The reality is not quite like that... for one thing, I didn't take the tides into consideration. The tides vary from day to day and it takes time for the cargo shuttles to reach shore from the ship.

A ship at anchor outside of the bay in front of the city:
Everything has to be timed with the tides - so what they do when they don't have enough time to shuttle the barges all the way in is anchor them at a buoy in the bay until the tide comes back in...
Once on shore, Loaders come and remove the contents...
Most of the goods are shipped in large steel containers. This is the stack of them at the landing:
This is a shot of some of the larger ships ashore at the landing:

Tidbits of life in Iqaluit...

Some of the differences I've noticed between life in Iqaluit and life in London, Ontario: For one thing, road vehicles stop to let you cross wherever you want to. Another is taxicabs - they charge per-person ($6.00 anywhere) and will pick up other fares on the way. You don't give them a street name, just a building number. Cabbies make good money up here and bar staff can make 50K a just in tips.

Another thing is alcohol - the only place you can buy booze is at a bar - no takeout. So... if you like to have wine with your meals, as I do, it seems you have to either order from a limited selection which is flown in from Rankin Inlet, or get a government import licence and ship it up from down south - both options at a greatly inflated cost.

There is the home-brew option, which I will probably explore (seeing as how I've already got the brew equipment), but frankly, I'm not that optimistic about the quality... . I understand that bootlegging is a thriving business up here; apparently, at some of the more isolated places like Arctic Bay or Pond Inlet, a mickey of liquor will fetch between $100 and $150. Prohibition has never worked anywhere, anytime, I don't know why they think it would work here...

Some Pictures from Around the Town...

This is the new Canadian North airline hangar that opened in Iqaluit:


Inuk mother & children:

This is an impromptu drum circle which assembled outside of my office:

This is the down-hole machine which is drilling the holes for the steel pile foundation of a new building in the core area:

A couple of people out on the flats when the tide is out (maybe they were digging for clams)...

Typical Iqaluit residential buildings. The concept of a "yard" hasn't really caught on here yet - there are no fences between buildings and nobody has a lawn: