gone fishin'

INUVIK, NT

This weekend, I was invited out to a cabin for that most Zen–like of (generally male) activities: ice fishing. The art of the catch refined down to its purest minimalism, one sits in the cold of winter, holds a small piece of wood, and stares into a dark, watery aperture. In fact, perhaps the Zen comparison isn't that useful. When ice fishing, you cannot perceive the fish in any way, and yet you must believe in its existence in order for the exercise to have meaning. So, ice fishing is kind of like theism.

As it ended up, I found neither fish nor faith out on the ice, but it was a grand time just the same. When the wind died down, the temperatures were in the balmy teens (though when the wind didn't die down, the temperatures were in the testy thirties) and I learned useful things like what to do when the pullcord on your snowmobile breaks, and why it's important to get really trashed if you want to sleep in a small cabin filled with numerous other trashed and snoring individuals.

Hope that all is well.

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A view of the trail out to the cabin about halfway along. At this point, the land is 'open country,' populated primarily with willows and the occasional spruce—a boundary zone of sorts between the taiga of the Mackenzie delta and the high tundra.

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The willow branches in the preceding pictures were all covered with the most amazing ice/snow formation. Looking for all appearances like the delicate tissue paper covering a piñata, it was mesmerizing, like a snowflake crystal on a macroscopic scale.

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You're not really ice fishing unless you have to bore through seven feet of it to hit water. But one does wonder: if you have seven feet of ice on a ten–foot deep lake, how many fish can really be down there? We ultimately caught two fine trout, which became an exceptional first course. (One tries not to think about the accumulation of heavy metals and POPs in freshwater predatory fish up here.)

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Night photography without a tripod is generally difficult; night photography without a tripod at –30º, using a CCD sensor that simply accumulates noise over prolonged exposures is infuriating. However, the aurora borealis were so spectacular that I endeavoured to record them as best I could.

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The next morning we discovered a furry friend in the cabin, though it was only after this little ermine had successfully knocked several jars off the pantry shelves that we could be roused to attend to it. It was a startlingly rapid animal, and I was sad not to catch a photograph of it on its hind legs, but rather lucky to get a photograph of it at all in the end.

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A snowy lake passed on the way home. I had planned to make this a panorama, but by this point the cold had gotten to my battery, and so no more pictures could be taken. Just pretend the picture is wider than it is.

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An entirely unrelated picture, included only for its apt depiction of frostiness.

tuktoyaktuk

INUVIK, NT

Last Sunday, I ventured out on my first ice road trip. Yes, while we Southerners are accustomed to stern, well–intentioned warnings to stay off the ice, in the North frozen waterways are an essential supply route to dozens of isolated communities.

Our particular destination was Tuktoyaktuk. The hard–hitting staccato of the Inuvialuktun morphemes (meaning, in this case, "looks like a caribou") were particularly exciting to drum off the palate because Tuk is: a) at 69º15'36", the most northerly point I have yet travelled; b) home to an enormous communal freezer dug into the permafrost; and c) located on the Beaufort Sea! Forget the latitude—I was going to stand at the end of Canada's contiguous land mass and look out over the Arctic Ocean.

Tragically, the town no longer opens its communal freezer to tourists, so we didn't get to descend the thirty feet into the permafrost, but this lost opportunity did little to diminish the spectacular impressions of the trip. Aside from the photographs below, I snapped a preposterously large panorama of the town from the nearest pingo. See if you can spot the DEW Line station (explanations of the terms pingo and DEW Line).

All the best.

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On the ice, um... road? The friend who kindly agreed to take us on the trip is a native Inuviker, and seemed quite at ease travelling at Hwy. 401 speeds. I temporarily converted to Islam for the duration of the trip.

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Friendly ungulates along the way.

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Sadly, ice roads are not marked by inukshuks.

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Snowshovelling in Tuktoyaktuk may be the pinnacle of Sisyphean endeavours.

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It's as if humans are the Doozers, and the weather is the Fraggles.

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Like Nasa, I'm not opposed to false colouration. Hence this view out over the Beaufort Sea, altered from its original blank whiteness. Somewhere out there is the North Pole. Also, some pingos.

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The operatically typical ending to the adventure.