Author: Faye

Stream Monitoring Field Trip

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I spent the last week of August in Nááts’ihch’oh and Nahanni conducting Canadian Aquatic Biomonitoring Network (CABIN) sampling. CABIN is a nationally standardized protocol for the collection of benthic macroinvertebrates and stream information in order to monitor stream health. This involves tasks such as kicking little stream critters off of rocks into a net, measuring the stream depth, width and speed, collecting water samples, taking direct steam measurements, and reaching into freezing cold streams and pulling out 100 pebbles to measure them. This can help to identify if a stream is healthy and if it is changing over time. We also collected environmental DNA samples, which is a really promising emerging technology.

In practice, this meant a week of flying around in a helicopter to scenic locations. I already sorted and uploaded a bunch of photos to facebook, so if you haven’t seen them yet, here they are.

And here’s a bonus exclusive video for our blog readers: flying around Nahanni in a helicopter.

Shipping up North

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Tulita is serviced by Canada Post – we have a little post office that’s open for a few hours every weekday. Due to the remote location, however, we are considered an “Air Stage Office“, which is a Post Office to which all mail must be airlifted for more than six months of every year as a viable surface transportation alternative is not available. This means that shipping rates can be astronomically expensive. You can play around with the Canada Post rate calculator here and see for yourself (our postal code is X0E 0K0).

Companies vary in how willing they are to ship to remote northern locations. MEC honours its “free shipping on orders of $50 or more anywhere in Canada”, which is great for us. Some companies are accustomed to shipping up North and have well-established policies (like this company that I recently learned of). Many companies have never encountered Air Stage Offices before and therefore offer reasonable shipping rates until they realize how much money they’re losing (or they try to FedEx the package, which then gets stuck in Edmonton or Yellowknife). Other companies will charge prohibitive amounts to ship up North. Amazon used to ship for cheap, but changed their policy last year.

But, fun fact: lettermail through Canada Post is the same rate to anywhere in the country. So if you ever want to send us a normal-sized letter, it will only require a regular stamp. You can reach us here: PO Box 157, Tulita NT, X0E 0K0

Homemade Bread

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In case you were getting worried that our diet was made up mostly of KD, here is some homemade cranberry-rosemary bread that Maciek made:

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Also, here is some baked brie topped with walnuts, cranberries and honey:

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The brie, walnuts, and crackers were sourced from Fort Simpson.

The wine was sourced from Norman Wells.

The honey was sourced from Vancouver.

The cranberries were picked locally.