For my 60th birthday, I booked a trip. I know. That's such a surprise! So, on June 2, I boarded a plane to Ottawa, Canada, (Well, two of them, to be exact.) where I met up with a group of folks bound for cold weather. The plan from there was to get up early the next morning to catch another two planes to a place inside the Arctic Circle called Pond Inlet. The Arctic Circle is the location where there is polar night and midnight sun. In our case, we were expecting the midnight sun. It sits at approximately 66° North latitude.
The hamlet of Pond Inlet, in Nunavut Territory, Canada, sits at about 72° North latitude. It has a population of about 1,500 people, mostly Inuit. It sits on the northern edge of Baffin Island, a little over 1650 km from Greenland. The Inuit name of Pond Inlet is Mittimatalik, or the place where the landing place is. Some translations say it means the place where Mattima is buried. Nobody seems to know who Mattima is other than some ancient person. Anyway, I'm getting ahead of myself.
So, after waking up at 3:30 am and heading to the airport, we learned our first flight to Iqaluit was canceled for mechanical reasons.
Our initial schedule was that we were to fly all the way to Pond Inlet that day. We were scheduled to spend the night and the next morning in town, leaving for the ice floe and our camp site after lunch. Our guide, Ken, and the tour company, Eagle-Eye Tours, managed to get us rebooked onto the afternoon flight to Iqaluit with a morning connection on to Pond Inlet. They just weren't able to get us all in the same hotel. Iqaluit is just below the Arctic Circle at about 63° North Latitude. Not high enough for the midnight sun, but it never really got dark there, either. Around midnight, I got a picture out my window. The sky looked like a sunset. It's easier to see how dark it was through the hotel window. It never got darker than this, but the camera drew in more light than was actually there just taking a picture of town. The picture in the room was really more accurate, but you can still see the lights from buildings in the lower shot, too.
After a nice evening in the hotel, not long enough to be able to use the huge bathtub in my room, but only allowing for a quick shower, it was back to the airport. The Iqaluit airport has a variety of handmade Inuit tapestries on the walls. Some of us spent some time trying to figure out some of the meanings and hearing stories of the area from our tour guide.
It was a beautiful flight over snowy mountains and frozen rivers and lakes. We finally landed in Pond Inlet, where even the airstrip is unpaved! We all went in one door and out the other of the approximately four-room airport (3 private offices and one open hall for passengers and friends). They took a truck to the airport to gather our luggage and dropped it off outside, where we claimed our own out of the pile. Jim from the hotel we were supposed to have stayed at met us there with a van and loaded up our bags. Since it was only about a quarter of a mile from the airport to the hotel, most people walked. I rode with the bags.
We had a few minutes, so some of us walked up to the town's gazebo.
From the gazebo, you can see Bylot Island across the frozen Eclipse Sound.
Following a delicious burger lunch, we changed clothes and headed for our final destination. I was glad I brought Bruce's suspenders with me because I bought my insulated snow pants a little too large, even considering all the layers that were under them! We traveled by komatik pulled by Skidoos over the frozen Eclipse Sound close to the mouth of Baffin Bay, where the ice opened into the open water along the migration path of the unicorn of the sea, the elusive narwhal!
A komatik is a partially enclosed sled that travels along the ice and snow behind Skidoo snowmobiles. Our local Inuit guides were expert at pulling us over the ice and being careful to cross any cracks in a safe manner. We rode two to a komatik.
The Sound in front of Pond Inlet was a parking lot of Skidoos and komatiks.
This is the inside of my komatik. Thankfully, Lee, our guide, had a mattress in it. That came in handy when we got cold and decided to duck inside for part of the ride.
A video of leaving Pond Inlet
One of the cracks we crossed. The wood is the side of my komatik.
Driving down the Sound and crossing a crack. We were moving pretty fast!
Just a lovely view with Baffin Island on one side and Bylot Island on the other and the trails of the vehicles.
The first iceberg we encountered. These icebergs flow in from Greenland and get stuck in the ice as the Sound freezes (floe ice). I liked this framing, which shows how large the mountains on Bylot Island are. This may not have been a huge iceberg, but it was not small by any stretch of the imagination.
We took a break about an hour and a half down the Sound. They put up a tent for a bathroom for us.
We finally arrived at our camp, where the kitchen tents (blue) and the dining tent (orange) were already set up and waiting for us.
This was the iceberg that was by our camp.
After we arrived, the local guides set up our individual, yellow tents. Then they unloaded sleeping bags, which we chose. I got a good, brown -35 sleeping bag, but some got some flimsy regular temperature bags. The guides ultimately had to send some folks back to town to get heavier bags. Once the sleeping bags were chosen, our luggage was unloaded and we grabbed it. I kept mine outside my tent because crawling in over the plywood base was absolutely miserable. I didn't want to enter the tent other than getting in and out for sleeping.
When they set up our bathroom tent, we chose to leave the flap down. This was the view from our bathroom. The iceberg was much more imposing, but the camera wouldn't focus right to make it look as close as it actually was.
The interior of our toilet.
I never took a good shot of just our tents, but here is a shot of Bylot Island with the generator that gave us heat in the dining tent, a komatik, and a couple of our little yellow tents.
The interior of my tent. I'm not sure how they fit two people in these, but they did!
We had finally arrived at our camp site and settled in for the week. Three days of travel for five days of camping on the floe ice. And time to try to sleep in broad daylight. All the time we were there, dusk never arrived. The only time the sun wasn't shining was when the clouds were blocking it (which, to be honest, was most days).
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