Survivor Ellesmere

Many early morning flights later I am finally back home in Toronto. Although I always appreciate how long it takes to get to Eureka, I never appreciate how long it takes to get home. Three days is excessive.

My last night in Eureka was spent mostly defending the Fluffy Pink Bunnies' near undefeated streak. I played four games, and we very sadly lost the third. The score was super close: 21-20. It was a sad moment for the FPBs, but we rebounded by winning by something like 21-16.

The next morning the produce charter left at 8:30 in the morning, and I spent most of it glued to the window as we flew over the glaciers of Axel Heiberg Island. Flying in the North in the winter can be very beautiful, but I think the summer wins out. There's so many more colours (than just white ice and snow) and therefore it is much easier to make out what it is you're looking at. The Twin Otter is a great little plane, if only because it flies low enough that you can make out a lot of detail in the landscape. I still think Eureka in the winter is more beautiful than in the summer, but flying there in the summer definitely wins. (Excluding annoyance at delays due to fog.)


Then I was left with another day in Resolute. It was nice and sunny, and would even have been warm, if not for the super high winds. (That incidentally made landing a bit scary.) We drove out to the Thule rings, and found them easily. (Deb and I had almost been in the right place!) These ones must have been more permanent housing (or perhaps from a later group of Thule) because they were much more elaborate. The entrance to the hut would have been at bottom left in this picture, and the structure was made with whale bone draped with skins. They all had a few areas elevated from the rest, which I think may have been for drainage, or possibly as a way of heating the floors.

We also visited a plane wreck near the airport that I noticed for the first time when I flew into Resolute on my way up to Eureka. I never got a chance to find out under what circumstances it crashed, but if you believe the dates people leave with their graffitti, it was 1968 or earlier. I'm fairly certain it was a military plane, but aside from that, it remains a mystery to me. The wreck highlights how slow things can happen in the Arctic. There's no need to use the land, so there's no need to move the plane. In the meantime, it is slowly being blown away and disintegrating into the tundra.

My flight out of Resolute left at six in the morning, so I had a bit of an early last night and declined to stay up to watch what would have been my first sunset since leaving Ottawa August 10th. It was a little plane - a Beech 100 - and it took about five and a half hours to get to Iqaluit. We stopped in two new places for me: Pond Inlet, which is super pretty, and reminded me a bit of Bergen, and Igloolik, where the airport was full of maybe 40 people waiting for another flight. It sort of freaked me out. There were more people in that little room than I had interacted with in quite some time. In Iqaluit I had a six hour layover until my flight that evening. I was traveling with a woman I met in Eureka who was doing an environmental site analysis, and we wandered into town to have lunch and explore a bit. Unfortunately it was raining, so it wasn't all that pretty. Iqaluit is fairly small (~6000 people) and we walked the whole town in about an hour. With nothing else to do we headed back to the airport and patiently waited. I was glad to have a traveling partner. Sitting in the Iqaluit airport for two hours alone could not have been fun. I watched my first sunset from my flight back, and then spent most of it sleeping. We arrived in Ottawa about twenty minutes late, which meant that I got to see the last plane to Toronto at the gate, but as I couldn't check myself all the way through in Iqaluit, I couldn't actually get on the plane. (I flew Canadian North from Iqaluit. I'm pretty sure he could have connected me the whole way, but he didn't know how. So he told me he couldn't.) There were no remaining Air Canada staff available to talk to, so I found the 1-888 number and luckily could change my ticket to a flight this morning. Since no trip involving the Arctic can go smoothly, I was very glad that it was the Ottawa - Toronto leg that got delayed. Anywhere else and I would have had to wait at least 24 hours to get on another flight. And pay for an expensive hotel room. Luckily Hotel Fraser is always free to me. (As I'm headed to Katrin's wedding in New Brunswick Thursday, getting delayed was not a happy option for me.) I'm finally home, luggage intact, and will patiently await my next trip to Eureka next Smarch.

I'll get around to posting more pictures soon. As always, you can find them on my website.

Thanks for reading!