Time to put out my Christmas Stockings.
Each one can hold 30 lbs. of candy with room to spare.

It's a wolf. Honest. Can you find him in the picture below?
I had a hard time finding this wolf in a set of 8 pics. I knew he was in there.

Here is a photograph of Sylvia Grinnell river on Baffin Island near Iqaluit. I had taken a panoramic series of pictures in an effort to make one large mosaic picture. After taking the pictures, I noticed an arctic wolf wandering over the frozen river. I downloaded the shots and looked through them to see if I captured a big bad wolf. Indeed I had! It is in the picture above. Honest. I scoured every pixel to find him but he is in there. The enlarged picture is below. It will give you a hint.
TIme to get a better camera. The resolution here is a result of a 2 megapixal camera. 10 megapixals would have been so much better. There isn't much daylight at 11:00 AM on Baffin Island. The windchill at the time of this shot was minus 41C. That would be minus 41.8F for non metric thinkers.

Kimmirut

Niaqunnguusiariaq Road. 

Say that ten times fast.

This pic is very poor. First of all it is cold outside. Secondly, I should have taken the picture well before 2 PM as the sun was setting and it was not very good lighting for such a shot.
The name of this road has caused many tourists to tie thier tongues in knots. The locals do not even use the street names but rather locate things by a unique house number. Get in a cab and say "Take me to 3238" or "Take me to 164B". No street just a number.

arctic bloggers

I ran into a blog that I could really relate to. The post is called "The Plane" and you can view it at http://www.nunablog.ca.
I had to leave a comment on the post. I have been to Igloolik many times. The plane trip to Igloolik from Hall beach is only about a 30 minute flight. Landing is always subject to weather in these far flung northern communities. Here is the comment that I had left on the site. It awaits moderation from the owner of the blog but you can read it here first!


The plane? I was on it. We went from Hall Beach to Igloolik but on the way there it got foggy. So we turned back to go to Hall Beach. The pilot announced 15 minutes later that the fog had lifted in Igloolik. We turned back to Igloolik. When we got there, it was foggy. We circled for 11/2 hr. The pilot decided to head back to Hall Beach again. When we got there, it was foggy. We were then told the wind picked up in Igloolik clearing the fog. We turned around and headed for Igloolik.When we got there, it was too windy to land and the snow was blowing.We headed back to Hall Beach. I don’t know what happened after that as I decided to take a nap. I finally was awakened and found myself somewhere in Nunavut. It was Igloolik. Two inuksuit at the front door told me so.

I encourage you to read "The Plane" at http://www.nunablog.ca
Has the plane come in yet?
I'm going to the airport. See ya.

This is a very old snow knife. It is made of whale bone. It was used to carve blocks of snow for the building of an igloo. It is on display in the dining room of the South Camp Inn in Resolute Bay. I had spent several days in Resolute last week. The dark season has set in. The people will not see the sun again until mid February. There were many polar bears just outside of Resolute. The bears were feasting on a whale carcass that lay on the beach. The ice still hasn't formed yet. It is late again this year. The bears tend to hang around the beach waiting for the ice. If they cannot get to the seals at the floe edge then it is feared that they may start to wander into town. Climate change is having a profound effect upon the polar bears. 

Here are a few things you might see if you were driving around Iqaluit. Not much snow for this time of year. The temperatures are +10 degrees C warmer than usual as well. Home sweet home through the windshield. 

some sites along the way.... 

drivin' drivin' drivin' 

drivin' around the arctic. 

Polaroid of a Polar Bear. 

Testing, testing one two three...

This is the first pic ever taken with my new digital camera. It is an inexpensive camera with a whopping 2.0 megapixals! That's right! Count them! 2,000,000 pixels. Okay, so maybe 2 megapixals is not up to par with the state of the art equipment, but for $100 or so, it's not bad. I wanted something usable and readily disposable. I have not had much luck with digital camera equipment. Most pieces of high tech end up broken one way or another. The extreme cold is a factor. Digital camera's do not perform well in minus 40 celcius temperatures.
Anyway, here's Patches, the cat. She is a Calico kitty cat born and raised on Baffin Island in Nunavut. Say hello Patch... 

High Arctic Travelling

Once again I find myself travelling to the high arctic. I will be going to Resolute Bay and to Grise Fiord. Grise Fiord is Canada's most northerly community. There are picturesque mountains as well as barren rocky tundra that combine to make panoramic view of beauty and contrasts. I must be wary as this time of year is likely to bring me into contact with polar bears. Polar bears will walk right into town in Resolute Bay. I have seen them fight over a seal carcass on the streets. Look for new pictures to be posted after November 14. Of course if there are any blizzards then I may be returning a bit late. I can't wait to try out my new digital camera!
See you all then!

Summer's almost over.

I have been busy all summer. There hasn't been much time to blog anything. This summer was full of family activities, BBQ's, campfires, fishing, berry picking and a few frosty beers. The fish didn't come until late July this year. The ice had all melted earlier this year and made fishing in July a bit safer and easier. I hooked a very large char late in July. We threw it on the BBQ soon after I had caught it. This fish fed 8 people and there was plenty left over. I do not know how much the char weighed in at but it was about 29 to 30 inches in length. I would say that all in all a total of 60 fish were caught in July. Most of the char was hung out to dry in the persistent arctic sun. This dried char is a favourite among the local crowd here.
In the first week of August, a deck was built in behind my inlaws house. The deck is about 150 square feet of unfinished 2 x 4 lumber. It juts out over the hillside above the shore of Frobisher Bay. The view is awsome. We hope to enjoy the deck for many years to come. I will get some pics posted as soon as I get a new camera.
The blueberries are ripe and the picking is still good. Baffin Island is covered in blueberries and black berries. The arctic varieties are smaller than the southern counterparts but just as tastey. Blue berry pancakes, blue berry muffins, blue berry pie and blue berry jam make August a special month.
People have been digging up buckets of clams during the lowest tides. Frobisher Bay has up to 12 meter tides. When the tides are in the range of 10 meters high and 1 meter low, this is the time to take a boat out to the clam beds. The arctic clams have to be caught one at a time. The people use garden tools to dig up the clams as they find them at the low tidal pools. The clams are tastey and plentiful. I don't mind them raw but prefer to make a clam chowder at home with them. The digging is hard and cold even in the mid summer. It is wise to take a warm parka with you when you go boating on Frobisher Bay.
Golfing on the tundra is still a favourite with the local men. The "course" was always busy this year and still loads of fun to play. The Canadian Military have been here doing some war games and stuff. They also had a chance to take a shot at my tundra golf course. The verdict? They loved it. HooWa. No fairways, no out of bounds and no trees. I think that they all enoyed the golfing. I know that this year, I had played a few very good rounds. I think that we should build a new course though. It would be nice to have a change in scenery while playing. It'll have to wait though. The snow is on it's way. It is getting dark and cold. Another arctic winter. I wonder what it will bring me this time around?

Summer's almost over.

Spring in Iqaluit. The snow is slowly dissapearing. The sea ice is changing colour from bright white to various shades of blue. The sun rises and rounds the sky for a 20 hour day. The winter darkness has left us for the season. God bless my little home in the middle of nowhere. 

One dead polar bear. It is unfortunate that these mighty animals cross paths with humans. This is the usual result. This bear attacked unsuspecting campers near Kimmirut on Baffin Island. Some of the campers had been brutally injured by the bear before it was shot. I warn you that the following photographs are quite graphic. You may not want to see these images. 

Aside from suffering a scalping by a swift polar bear slap, this poor man also had been clawed and mauled by the angry bear.  

Every camper's nightmare. A hungry polar bear attacks the sleeping campers. The bear tore through the tent without warning. 

This is The Ungava Crater as seen from a high altitude aerial photograph. I didn't realize how large this crater actually is. Whenever I have had the rare opportunity to view this meteor crater, it was usually from 21,000 to 30,000 feet and many kilometers distant. It was hard to estimate the actual size of the crater from my viewpoint. I was amazed to find it's dimensions to be 3.44 Km in diameter and 445 meters in depth.

Ungava Crater

The Ungava Crater is an impact crater located in northern Quebec near Ungava Bay. The meteor crater is 3.44 Km in diameter and over 400 meters deep. I have seen it from the air several times now but have never been close to it on the ground. It would be a great place to explore in the short summer. The water in the crater bowl is a deep blue colour. This photograph shows the crater in it's usual arctic deep freeze state. The Ungava Crater is also known as the Chubb Crater or The Northern Quebec Crater.

Come on in! The water is fine! Seals will keep several holes like this open in the sea ice. The seals need to come up for air from 4 to 10 times an hour. Sometimes they will use the holes to look around to see what is on the ice above them. Polar bears may hunt for seals by waiting near the breathing hole. Inuit hunters can stand motionless over a seal's breathing hole for hours in hope of harpooning the animal. Seals are an important food source for inuit across the arctic. 

Cliffs rise 1000ft straight up out of the ocean. These red cliffs are near Arctic Bay on the northern shores of Baffin Island.  

Here is an interesting building. It is located in Iglulik. The building was originally a research facility. It was built in the 1960's during an era when prefabricated fibreglass panels were the wave of the future. The building is now being renovated and will be used as an arctic wildlife research facility. Spiral staircases bring you up to a central common area and the various labs radiate from the building's centre.

Starting off my morning in Hall Beach. These are the conditions just before we got the plane on it's way to Iglulik. The sun hasn't been seen for a long time. The sun looks like an atomic blast (In a way it is). Blowing and drifting snow was just the beginning of a massive blizzard covering much of Nunavut. We were to stay an extra day in Iglulik then on to Arctic Bay where we were once again weathered in.

This is Hall Beach Nunavut. That's it that's all. Hall Beach is in the middle of polar bear country and is often visited by the bears. The community is small but surprisingly busy. The community suffered damge from very high tides. The sea ice kept piling up on the shore one day. It crushed many boats and threatened homes on the shoreline. One of the local people told me that they believe that there was a tsunami. She pointed out onto the sea ice and said that sea quakes occur there sometimes. I know that the tides were unusually high then as the moon was on it's closes approach to earth at the time. This caused very high tides around the world. 

One of the thousands of unnamed peaks that we flew over during our run about the Baffin Island region. This shot was taken at 21000 ft. from within our chartered single engine Pilatus. 

This Clyde River. They have been having a few blizzards. Every home has a snowbank trailing from the leaward side. The winds were over 100K/hr for several days. Where is my snowshovel? Where is my car??  

We left the plane in Nanisivik overnight. It's a good thing that it wasn't buired in the snow!