Survivor Ellesmere

Yesterday was full of much activity, both for me and for the station. We woke up to the annual visit from the cruise ship. Once a year, a small band of rich, mostly elderly adventurers take an icebreaker cruise through the Arctic. One stop is the Eureka Weather Station. Shortly after breakfast, the station was invaded by yellow-coated tourists. Part of the tour is a tour of the building, so as we were getting ready to leave for the lab we had to fight off the tourists taking their identical parkas and boots off in the mud room. I managed to elbow my way past the old woman defiantly standing right in front of my boots and we were off. It was very weird to be surrounded by tourists. Eureka is a fabulous place, but my personal experiences with it do not mesh with it being a tourist attraction. It was very odd. I was glad to be able to escape to the lab. I was very glad to not be Heather, who gave them tours of the station. But she got to learn all sorts of Eureka history to do it. Eureka was founded in April 1947!

Up at the lab, I took advantage of the first sunny day since my spectrometer went into the hatch to take my first and most likely only walk around PEARL. I did my absolute favourite walk, across to the next ridge and down towards Cape Hare, and ran into my little spot of climbing that I discovered in March. As I discovered in Finland, it's hard to take pictures of yourself climbing on auto timer, but here you are. Climbing in Eureka. It went better this time, because my volume had decreased by 50%, thanks to the lack of Arctic gear. The winds were very light and it was about 2 degrees, so it made for nicer walking than I normally get in February/March. (Note: I am henceforth referring to the month I anually spend in Eureka as Smarch.) I walked further down the ridge than I ever have before, and got some great views of Cape Hare. I also encountered some birds and guard bunnies. It would have been the perfect afternoon, except when I returned to the lab I discovered that in my absence the shutter on my spectrometer had broken for the second time this campaign. Colour me very unimpressed at shoddy shutters. I luckily had brought the two extra ones we have, so could still replace it. There are no more extra ones, so I'm hoping no more break. Otherwise, my instrument is working very well.

After supper, Pierre, Keith, and I decided to head out to the Thule rings, which are along an unmaintained road along the fiord. I've never been before - the road is too sketchy to attempt in the winter. The ride was very bumpy and muddy, and I channelled my mother by holding onto the handle of the truck with a white-knuckle grip. I didn't gasp everytime the truck did anything "scary" though. (Well, at least not out loud.) We eventually made it to the site, and along the way had some awesome views of the fiord and the pack ice. The Sun is almost setting (I think it gets below the horizon Monday night) and to those of us deprived of night for the past couple of weeks, seems very twilight-y. The fiord is starting to freeze up, so there's some lovely reflection off of the thin ice between the pack ice. Everytime I come here I'm amazed at its beauty.

The Thule people are the ancestors of the Inuit, and had a summer hunting camp here about a thousand years ago. The Thule rings are the rocks left over from their tents when they lived here. The ring of rocks would hold down the animal skins, and we think the rocks in the middle of the ring were for their lanterns. (I'm not so sure about the Thule, but Inuit used to light their dwellings with an oil lamp, the oil coming from whales.) There were about ten rings like this, and then a few larger piles of rocks which were used as food caches. We also found what appeared to be a tomb. The whole place was very serene. It was also amazing to think that these rocks were placed in these positions a thousand years ago. The people who lived there most likely looked out over the exact same view as we had yesterday. The onset of twilight would have meant that they had to head South for the winter. As I'm heading that way Sunday, I felt very connected to them.

After we got back we ended up in the bar, where the Fluffy Pink Bunnies (Pierre and I, undefeated at shuffleboard since the first of Smarch) upheld their record by winning a close game. (FPB was the scariest name I could come up with on short notice after a beer or two.) The station fox was napping on the picnic table outside the window, and I managed to wake him up enough to get some fuzzy pictures. The foxes are so cute! And this guy was so curious/terrified of me. He did not appreciate my interrupting his nap. Next time maybe I'll bring him food to apologize for scaring him. He eventually ran off, and I felt bad for disturbing him, but five minutes later he was back on the picnic table in the cutest little foxy ball of fluff.