Faye and Maciek's Adventures in the frosty Canadian North
I spent a few weeks up on Banks Island helping out with a caribou & muskox survey. We saw a bunch of those, plus plenty of snow geese, arctic hares, quite a few wolves, and a grizzly bear. I started an iNaturalist account.
We flew around in one of these…
…looking for these guys.
We got to see some cool Arctic landscapes.
Inuvik is very multicultural, which the greenhouse capitalized on this year to offer cooking workshops from various different places. Maciek and I were able to attend a couple of them, and it was very exciting to try new cuisines here in Inuvik!
Ethiopian & Sudanese
Nigerian
We unfortunately missed out on the Nepalese, Filipino, and El Salvadoran workshops.
Sam, Colin, Tess and I paddled down Caribou Creek yesterday. The weather was beautiful and there were astonishingly few bugs! We probably hit this one at just the right time for weather and water levels. We paddled ~7km down the creek and then walked about 800m back to the Dempster. Despite the somewhat serious-looking rapids at the campground, the current became less intense after the bridge. There were a few shallow and rocky sections, which were fine in a packraft but a bit trickier in Tess’ folding kayak (but still doable). There were a decent number of downed trees along the route, but the chill current plus lots of good areas to pull out and portage made them fairly easy to navigate. The creek is muddy, so we accumulated mud every time we got in and out of our boats. We followed a cut line out from the creek, which made for an easy exit. It’s possible to paddle all the way out into Campbell Lake, but the exit would be a lot trickier and I suspect the creek would get slower/shrubbier/marshier, so I think we took the best exit point. We were out for about 6 hours, including driving and scouting.
