Inuvik, Northwest Territories, Canada

We entered finally reached Inuvik! Our goal and destination after many months of planning this trip over a year’s time way back in Michigan.

The town of Inuvik was built on this site back in 1960. It was moved from a place called Aklavik, which used to sit on a delta in the Mackenzie River. The Canadian government was worried that when the Mackenzie floods every year at ice break-up in the spring, it would one day inundate the town and wash it away. There was also the problem that their sewer and water systems sat below flood stage level, so in the spring when the break-up came, the sewage and water would get flooded and all mix together with poor results for their population. They finally convinced all the Aklavakians to move the town to where it would last permanently.

Unfortunately, at the new location, they sank long telephone poles into holes drilled in the permafrost to bedrock, to use as foundations to build the new town buildings on. They neglected to use ‘treated’ poles and over the past 40 years, they were all rotting away. There was talk that they’d have to move their town AGAIN, which is not a popular subject in Inuvik.

All of the buildings were built above ground on poles with their utilities running in large, insulated and heated pipes, called ‘utilidors.’ Water, sewer, wiring, etc. Sadly, they insulated these pipe with asbestos in the early 1960s and it would all have to be removed and replaced with something less toxic.

It is strange looking, but you can’t build stuff directly on the permafrost. The heat from the buildings would melt the permafrost and everything would sink into the tundra and fall apart.

We found a great little cafe that served caribou and musk ox burgers which we wanted to try while in the arctic.

We got settled into an RV park right near the center of town. We wanted to be where we could walk to places part of the time. We could see into people’s back yards from our RV main window and their gardens were lush and beautiful. With 59 straight days of 24 hour per day sunshine that time of year, gardens flourish. There were profusions of wild flowers and wild berries growing everywhere.

There was an older German man parked in the space next to ours in a tent camper. He said he sold ads to merchants for a German-language newspaper that circulated all over northern Canada. He engaged Paul in some friendly conversation one evening as he was having real trouble with his electrical system and his visibly-worn tires. Paul graciously fixed his electrical problem and gave him some wise advice regarding his tires – get new ones in Inuvik. Part of the conversation went like this:

German guy, “Do you speak any German?

Paul, “No, I learned some when I was in school, but with no one to practice it with, I forgot it.”

German guy, “Then you are a teacher.”

Paul, “Why, yes I am a teacher. How did you know?”

German guy, “Because I saw you washing your RV windows earlier today.”

Can anybody think of why the German guy figured out that Paul was a teacher because he saw him washing his RV windows????

I later tried out a little of my German on him as I felt sorry he was alone, far from his home and missing anything German. He seemed happy that I was willing to speak to him in his own language.

“Ve gates, Herr Deutch!”

The next morning, as German guy was getting ready to pull out of the RV park to continue on his newspaper ad-selling route, he knocked on our RV door and gave us a can of pineapple. Curious, we asked him why the pineapple? He replied that it was to thank us for Paul helping him fix his camper. He loved pineapple and it was something he wished to share with us. We graciously thanked him telling him it wasn’t necessary, but we would enjoy the pineapple and think of him when we ate it. And, we did.

We needed to do laundry while we were in Inuvik and we were directed to the town’s only public laundromat. It was little bigger than a closet and had 2 washers and 2 dryers. Each machine took 2 ‘loonies’ and 2 Canadian quarters for a total of $2.50 for each machine. Canadians have a brass-colored, quarter-sized coin with a picture of a loon on one side and the Queen on the other. They call it a ‘loonie.’ They have another coin about the size of a U.S. silver dollar that is a silver coin with a brass coin molded inside it. It is worth two dollars so they call it a ‘twoonie’ for two loonies. When we first arrived in Canada and we were told we needed loonies to operate laundry machines, I thought they were talking about some kind of special token. After a few months, I came to be as familiar with Canadian money as our own American money. Back in 1998, Canadian money was worth 40% less than American money, so when we looked at prices of stuff in Canadian money, it looked horribly expensive. As another point, I couldn’t figure out how 2 washers and 2 dryers could possibly serve a population of 3200 people?

We asked around for a place we could get and send some of our email. I would write along the way on my computer, but back then, we periodically needed to find a place where we could hook into a phone line and download and send email using ‘800’ access numbers. We were also looking for a grocery store. They gave us a nice map of the town, but there were no physical addresses on it for anything??? All they have are names, post office box numbers, and phone numbers – not a physical street address. So it was impossible to find any place with their map. We had to get verbal directions from a person to find places.

A big place in Inuvik was the combination school and community center. It is where everything happened.

We found out that this was where the Northern Lights Art Fair would be held. We had a wonderful time seeing it and all the spectacular art created by the native people of the Arctic. There were magnificent carvings from whale and seal tusks (native people are allowed to use these scarce items) and beautiful paintings, etc. Most all of the themes were life in the arctic. Very beautiful. A few years later, when I got back into doing Ceramics, I did a piece inspired by some of the carvings I saw at the Art Fair. Here are two views of a polar bear trying to break into an igloo. It is a clay whistle.

To this day, I regret not buying a couple of the pieces we saw, but at the time, it seemed like we just couldn’t afford to do so. We actually met the artists who did the carvings and listened to their stories behind their work. They were very personal – reflecting their hearts and souls and memories in their works.

There was a great contest put on in Inuvik every summer. It was called The Good Woman Contest. The women competing in this contest are each given a dead seal and an ulu knife. Here is a photo of a ulu knife. I tried using it, and it is apparently, an acquired technique. In other words, it ain’t easy.

The woman who can skin the seal and process as much of it as possible, wins. Barbies need not apply. In the arctic north, no one talks about, nor values, big boobs or beauty as desirable in a woman. What makes a ‘good woman’ is one who has the skills of providing food and warm clothing for a family, which are skills that are a matter of life and death. Can you dry fish, preserve a whale or a caribou? Do you know how to build a storage cache that bears and other animals can’t break into? Can you find and pick and store enough berries to last all winter? Can you harvest, prepare and store enough food to last all winter and into the next summer when those things are again available? Can you make warm clothing that is waterproof?

Another contest is to see who could make the warmest and most waterproof clothing. Another contest is called the Muskrat Skinning Contest. The winning time in 1998 was 35 seconds – and if you damage the fur at all – you lose. Muskrat are highly prized for making warm winter clothing. No sewing machines or Cuisinarts are used in these contests. Everything is done by hand. With no electricity in a great many of the villages, appliances would be useless anyway. You need to be able to do these things all by hand. If women are looking for a place where they can be valued for what they can do, instead of how they look, then the arctic is the place.

Here is a semi-sunset taken from our RV campsite in town.

This was as dark as it got during mid-July in Inuvik. The sun never really set – just got close to the horizon then came back up. Very strange. People up there just seem to stay awake all the time during the summers. They say there is plenty of time to stay inside and sleep all winter. We had children riding tricycles and bicycles up and down the RV park roads at 3 in the morning! It really didn’t matter when they slept as there was no school going on nor any reason to be keeping a schedule.

We visited an interesting church that was build like an igloo. It was Russian Orthodox and they wanted to build a church that native peoples could identify with. It may be the most famous building in Inuvik.

We started looking for a place to send/receive our email in the town’s library. A library is always a good place to be able to do that in our experience. The woman at the library just looked at our laptop computer with its phone line connector like she was viewing some relic from the 1800s. She asked us, “You can do email by phone – like with dial-up service?” We told her “Well, yes. That’s how we do it in the lower United States.” She told us they only did email with broadband through satellites and she directed us to another office and told us they might be able to help us.

We finally ended up over in the Canadian National Park Service Office. In the arctic, everyone has broadband internet access through their cable TV systems which is all done off of satellites. They have schools set up that way because if you live in an arctic village in some remote place, you could never get to a physical school. There are no phone lines, either, it is all done through satellites. At first, we thought we were having so much trouble doing our email because this place was so back-woods. Then we came to find out, we were the back-woods people with old land-line-dependent email technology, while these Eskimos were using broadband wireless, satellite technology, even in their igloos, while we were still using dial-up phone service!

Paul took a couple of hours to go visit the Inuvik Research Center, which is home to a cosmic ray detector operated by the University of Delaware’s Bartol Research Institute. The cosmic ray monitor was funded by the Atomic Energy of Canada in 1962-63. Before they could assemble the detector, they had to get the blessing of the native peoples. A special drum ceremony was held in the circular detector building to bless the equipment before it was assembled.

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This photo was taken by the Inuvik Research Center and the Aurora Research Institute.

The cosmic ray detector collects data about the solar and galactic rays bombarding earth. They are particularly strong at the north pole, which is why there are so many Northern Lights in the higher latitudes. With Paul's Physics Professor credentials – a PhD in Nuclear Physics and a Masters in Electrical Engineering, he was invited in to privately tour the place. He found it extremely interesting.

We ate some musk ox one day and caribou burgers the next at the cute little To Go's restaurant. Caribou has a strong 'gamey' flavor with a taste similar to strong venison. Musk ox tasted pretty much like beef. One of the questions on an exit survey we were asked to fill out when we left was whether we had eaten any whale or seal meat. We did not find any of those in the grocery store or on the menus or we definitely would have tried that, as well. We did buy some caribou and musk ox to put in our RV freezer to have again later.

We found the grocery store in Inuvik to be shockingly expensive. Remember, these were 1998 prices. A small can of pears was $2.29. Potatoes were $1.89 per pound. A quart of milk was $2.50 – making it cost $10.00 per gallon. The grocery store check-out man told us that during “break-up” and “freeze-up” those prices were double what we were looking at. Can you imagine paying $20.00 per gallon for milk? During break-up and freeze-up times, all food had to be flown in, as the ferries couldn't operate in those times meaning vehicles couldn't cross the Mackenzie river. Once freeze-up occurred, cars and trucks could drive across the rivers until break-up happened again in the spring. So, for about 2 months out of each year, the prices in the grocery store were double. Yikes!

It was time for us to leave Inuvik and head back down the 456 mile long Dempster Highway to Klondike River Lodge. There we would get back on the Alcan Highway and drive back down it through Haines Junction, Whitehorse, Teslin, Watson Lake, Liard Hot Springs – almost as far as Fort Nelson. The Laird Highway heads north just 17 miles (27 km) west of Fort Nelson, British Columbia. This was our next destination, with our final goal of going all the way to Yellowknife – way up on the north side of the Great Slave Lake.

When we arrived at the ferry to cross the Mackenzie River, we had a short wait as the ferry was on the other side of the river from us. I used the opportunity to take a few pictures of some of the native people fishing for salmon in the river.

This man was taking his catch over to his summer fish drying house built on the banks of the river. They construct a new one every summer.

It keeps the bright sun from deteriorating the fish while it dries, but still allows the air to blow through.

A little further down the road, the air was pungent from the smell of burning forest fires that had gone through during the few days we were in Inuvik. The daytime temperatures were 80-85 and it went down to about 65 in the evening hours. We drove past an area where a fire had burned through a few weeks back and it was already carpeted by a thick growth of fireweed, aptly-named fireweed because it is the first plant to come back after a forest fire. It was so very vibrant and pretty. It is one of our favorite wildflowers.

We had another flat tire after driving over part of the road where they had used ground up shale for gravel. It was like driving 5 miles on glass shards. It just sliced and chewed up people’s tires.

At least it was out in the open where the wind blew the mosquitoes away. This tire that was sliced up by the shale was not reparable. We had to buy another one – our 8th new tire that summer – when we got to Whitehorse. We felt lucky as we later passed a Jeep with all four tires flat. Its occupants were gone so we assumed they got a ride into Eagle Plaines where they would need to buy FOUR new tires at remote Alaska prices. Ugh.

We stopped to take a break when we got to Eagle Plaines, which was half way to the Klondike River Lodge. While checking over the RV while I walked the dog, Paul noticed that with all the bumping along the terribly rough roads, the spare tires mounted on the rear bumper of the RV were tearing the bumper right off of the RV. Oh, no! Paul found a 17-year-old kid, the resident mechanic’s son, who said his dad wasn’t there but he was learning how to weld and could fix it for us. We had no other choice and Paul figured the kid’s welds just had to hold long enough for us to get to a place where there was a professional welder who could do a more permanent fix. Besides, being a teacher, Paul is incredibly patient with anyone trying to learn something new.

So the kid finished the welding job after getting the arc welding rod stuck in the welds a few times and he was beaming from ear to ear. He charged us $26.00 and when I went over to check out the welds, it was all I could do to keep from busting out laughing. Our bumper looked like someone had dribbled molten lava all over it. But we thanked him profusely and drove over to one of their RV sites for the night. We’d continue on to Klondike River Lodge the next day.

The next day, we made it clear back to the Lodge and fueled up the truck again and got it and the RV thoroughly washed. We were ready to head down the Alcan to make our turn onto the Liard Highway, which would take us all the way to Yellowknife on the Great Slave Lake – our next big goal.

Wheat Belly

Listen up, South Beach people. There is a new diet threatening the South Beach stranglehold on the culinary options of the hip and fit in America. It’s gluten-free and promises to have, literally, pounds and pounds of flab melting away from our pathetic, over-nourished, under-exercised forms, plus promising to completely eliminate diabetes from its victims. It is called Wheat Belly, by William Davis. M.D. There is also a cookbook so you can have tasty recipes for eliminating wheat from your diet.

Whereas the South Beach mantra is to avoid all carbohydrates except for a limited amount of whole grains and lots of red wine, the Wheat Belly theory bans ALL wheat and wheat-containing products. When you really get into this book, you learn about all the ‘hidden’ wheat that is in today’s products – like the glue on envelopes and stamps, lipstick and lip balms, prescription drugs, soy sauce, oyster sauces, soups, salad dressings, Teriyaki sauce, soups, Jelly Beans and Starburst candies, packaged seasonings, deli meats, and on, and on. Start fly-speccing labels and you will find wheat in an unbelievable number of products that you’d never suspect. (Jelly beans, REALLY?) Yes!

When I was in pre-op at our hospital waiting for my knee surgery, the anesthesiologist came in to talk with me about my imminent surgical procedure. He saw on my chart that I was a long-term, insulin-dependent diabetic and on the “heavy” side. So he asked me if I had heard of the ‘wheat belly’ syndrome. I had not heard of it, but now I had a name for the bulge that I have been hauling around on the front of my belly since I mysteriously became diabetic and went on insulin He briefly explained the book’s philosophy and I asked him to write the name of it down on my surgical instructions because in my gauzy, hazy pre-anesthesia state, I might not remember it.

Paul and I have been noticing the crush of products cropping up on the grocery store shelves proclaiming to be “gluten-free.” Since less that 5% of humans have Celiac Disease and require a stringent gluten-free diet, we were surprised that so much attention was being paid to products being gluten-free. I even saw a sticker on a watermelon proclaiming it to be gluten-free, for Heaven’s sake! After reading about the Wheat Belly diet theory, it is now more understandable. HOWEVER. You need to beware that a lot of products proclaiming to be gluten-free are, in fact, full of lots of other stuff you want even less than wheat glutens – specifically sugars. Many of these products have replaced wheat gluten with things like potato starch, rice starch, tapioca starch and corn starches. These cause blood sugars to skyrocket and you will not lose the promised weight replacing wheat with these substitutes.

I ordered both the Wheat Belly book and the companion Wheat Belly Cookbook. So, I was off on a new discovery that promised to utterly change my life – I would ditch both my own ‘wheat belly’ and my diabetes.

I began by reading the book first. It was interesting, but pretty quickly slipped into tedium. How many ways can you tell people to stop eating all wheat and wheat-containing products. The beginning discussion about how the wheat we eat today is nothing like the wheat our cave-man predecessors ate was instructive. Hunter gatherers began gathering einkorn wheat and included many wild grasses and eventually began saving some of the seeds and planting them closer to their homes making harvesting them easier. Over the millennia, people hybridized this crop until we ended up with what we call ‘wheat’ today. Today’s ‘wheat’ is a super-hybridized and genetically modified product which is way different that the wheat Pillsbury marketed even 50 years ago.

Our bodies treat today’s wheat just like pure sugar. It exacerbates putting on pound after pound and causes our blood sugars to rocket up and down. The Wheat Belly goal is to replace everything ‘wheat’ with flax and nut flours, etc. This is where the cookbook is terribly useful. For instance, I made their recipe for meatloaf, and instead of using bread crumbs as a binder, I used ground golden flaxseed which is also super-rich in healthy omega threes. It turned out absolutely delicious and I ended up with no hidden wheat in our meatloaf. Ta-DA.

Next I made their recipe for the Kansas City-Style Barbecue Sauce which only uses a little stevia for sweetness. Paul and I have decried modern bottled barbecue sauces because they are often sickeningly sweet. Not only that, but if you read the labels on bottled sauces, high-fructose corn syrup is often the NUMBER ONE ingredient – coming in way ahead of tomatoes, or any other ingredients. These sauces are a chemical stew of things you really don’t want or need on your food. I tried cooking some pork spare ribs using the Wheat Belly version of the sauce and it was actually quite good.

So far, the recipes I’ve tried in the cookbook have been very good and we haven’t missed the wheat at all. In reality, you could keep all your South Beach books and just eliminate ALL the wheat and wheat-containing things listed in them. Its just basically good, healthy unprocessed foods. You would probably benefit from the Wheat Belly Cookbook because it shows you how to substitute the wheat in regular recipes with other kinds of things that will work the same. For instance, you’d need to substitute almond flour and coconut flour for regular white flour plus adjust the leavening to make a decent cake. The cookbook shows you how to do this and adjust the leavening so that you actually end up with a recognizable cake.

Except for the wheat products, this Wheat Belly diet is pretty much just like the Mediterranean Diet that is being touted by researchers as producing the best long-term health outcomes. You do have to completely give up pasta and bread, though. That can be a deal-killer. However, you can drink all the red wine your little heart desires and you don’t need to worry so much about fats. Healthy artery-clearing fats such as olive oil can be used liberally.

The book does become repetitive and boring after the first half. Paul and I both found that to be true. We quickly grew tired of the same things repeated over and over again sixty different ways. We came away from reading the book with a better understanding about the role wheat plays in contributing to obesity and diabetes and it made a lot of sense. However, you need to have time to shop for and cook all your meals from scratch. There are no pre-packaged, frozen, boxed, or restaurant meals that meet the stringent requirements for a ‘Wheat Belly’ diet.

So on Saturday night, we are having company for dinner and I am cooking an Italian Tuscan Chicken dinner, and yes I am serving lemony orzo pasta, and I will serve an Italian boule of Pane Toscano bread with it. We have not made the complete transition to no wheat whatsoever in our diet, and we probably never will, but we are substituting and cutting back where we can without giving up wheat entirely.

I am hoping over time my own little ‘wheat belly’ gets less and less. I’ll let you know, or maybe you’ll just notice.

Driving the Dempster Highway to Inuvik

We knew we were truly back in Canada as all the distance road signs were in metric. The distance from the Klondike River Lodge, where we turned north on the Dempster Highway headed to to Inuvik, was 734 km or 456 miles. Using metric distances wasn’t too hard to get used to after traveling with them for a while. At first, you are always using a mental conversion to miles, since miles are the standard measurement of distance in the United States and are something we can understand in gauging how far away a place is from where you are. To spare you, the reader of these stories, the mathematical calisthenics involved in converting, I will include both units of measurement.

We drove the distance of about 40 miles from Dawson City to the Klondike River Lodge which is where the northbound Dempster Highway cuts off to go all the way to Inuvik our destination and goal. Only two roads in North America cross the Arctic Circle all the way to the Arctic Ocean and this was our second one. The first was the Haul Road in Alaska, and now this one in Canada. The Klondike River Lodge is the last place to buy fuel and check everything over carefully before getting on the Dempster. The next services of any kind are 230 miles away in Eagle Plaines.

In spite of how its size looks here compared to a big American truck stop, say, this was a major fueling place.

We had to wait our turn for an opening at a pump. Travelers are warned to check over their tires carefully and to not even think about going up the Dempster unless they are in top notch condition. We had two spares for both our truck and trailer, so we felt like we were in good shape. We planned to take it slowly and enjoy sights along the way. We figured about 2 & 1/2 days should see us in Inuvik.

The Dempster highway is considered an “all-season” road which meant it was also open all winter. As such, it was a better quality gravel road than many we had been on earlier in the summer. The earlier ones were only open in the summer months and were not nearly so robust and well-groomed.

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After the distance sign came an informational warning.

Most roads in the lower United States don’t carry advice signs like this one.

And, finally……

Don’t get into any wrecks where you would need medical assistance – because there is none available. The Royal Canadian Mounted Police do drive the road once per day. You could wait a long time for help. Forget cell phones, there was no service out there back in 1998.

We spent our first night at the Tombstone Mountain Campground.

It was next to Tombstone Mountain, a major landmark for pilots and ground travelers in the area. There was a staffed Interpretive Center at the campground with organized hikes, fossil displays, nature walks, area hand-outs, and a resource library. The campsites had picnic tables and fire rings and they said water from the river was available for free. Cool.

You can see Tombstone Mountain in the background from Two Moose Lake further down the road.

While at the campground, a group of 4 older teens came up to Paul and ask if he could help them with their car. They said it was making a strange noise driving in from the Klondike River Lodge. He said “sure” and went with them to their campsite a couple spaces down from us. He checked over their engine and found rather quickly that they had NO oil left. He asked them if they had checked their oil at Klondike River Lodge before getting on the highway, and they said it was their dad’s car and they didn’t know anything about checking the oil. They borrowed it to have an adventure driving to Inuvik. Uh-oh.

Paul came back to our RV and got out 2 quarts of oil from our stock, took it back to their camp and put it in their car. We always carry extra oil, hoses, belts and other things like that, which might need replacing in the wild with no auto parts stores around. He ran their engine for a few minutes to make sure it wasn’t leaking oil anywhere, and they all agreed the engine sounded fine after the addition of oil. He explained how that needed to be checked regularly, showed them how to put more oil into it got low, and also how to check their radiator water and a few other basic mechanical maintenance things. He told them to check it again at Eagle Plaines and again when they got up to Inuvik. They could buy more oil at both of those places if they needed some. They tried to give him money for the oil but Paul wouldn’t take it. He told them to help someone else out sometime and that would be payback enough.

We came to an interesting area called Engineer Creek. It looked very different from the crystal-clear waters we had been seeing along the way.

The water is this red color from iron oxide eroding into it from nearby iron-rich hills and a nearby sulphur spring contributes to the strong smell in the area.

The country along the Dempster was nothing like we imagined it would be. After traveling all the way up to Prudhoe Bay, we thought we knew what the Arctic looked like. Not!! Here, it was 84 degrees, windy, and sunny. Beautiful blue skies dotted by the occasional white, puffy cloud. It was covered by a mixture of tiaga of black and white spruce. Only the height of the trees changed the further north you got. It was dense stuff dotted by crystal-clear lakes gouged out by glaciers over millenniums. The rivers are cold and also crystal-clear and inhabited by arctic char, grayling, burbot, and trout. Grayling are the true barometer for the health of a lake or river and area. They ONLY thrive in pure, icy cold water free of chemicals and pollution. They used to be plentiful in many of the northern United State’s lakes and rivers. The town of Grayling, Michigan, was named for these fantastic fish but Michigan hasn’t seen any grayling in well over 100 years.

The view in this photo is of the Tintina Trench. We saw this informational sign that explained that it is a major plate boundary between continents. Wow. Where else could you see such a geologic feature from your car window!

It is very, VERY dry in this arctic country. We learned from a posted medical bulletin in Prudhoe Bay, that the biggest medical problem in the arctic was dehydration. The arctic is really just like a huge desert. They only get a few inches of precipitation each year. It fools you though, because the permafrost layer under the tundra keeps any moisture that falls from seeping into the ground. Instead, it sits on top in little lakes and wetland areas which give the impression that it is very wet in the arctic.

The few hospitals that are in the arctic treat more people for dehydration than anything else. They said to be sure to drink a lot of water on a schedule, because with ‘arctic dehydration syndrome,’ the first thing that fails is your body’s thirst mechanism. The worse off you get, the less your body feels thirsty prompting you to drink water, which is different from dehydration in other climates, where people feel desperately thirsty.

We stopped in Eagle Plaines for a break and to check our rig over before we continued on. We planned to go another few hours north before we stopped in a camping area for the night.

37 km or 23 miles north of Eagle Plaines, we again crossed the Arctic Circle in Canada.

Then, further north by 58 km or 36 miles, we crossed into the Northwest territories – the farthest north Canadian Province.

We then felt like we were truly ‘way up north.’ The time zone also changes here from the Pacific zone we have been on for a couple months, to Mountain Time. In fact, When you get to the border of the Northwest territories – a regular Canadian AAA Map ends. You need to order a separate map, altogether, to have NW Territories included. So it kind of feels like you are driving off the edge of the known world somehow.

We traveled on to a small campground near Fort McPherson called Rock River Campground. The campsites were all nestled deep in thick tiaga next to a creek. As we were getting out of the truck to get into our RV, I could hear the rear truck tire making a sort of hisssssing sound like air was leaking out of it. Bad. Also, the mosquitoes were the worst I had ever encountered anywhere in our life! We rushed into the RV and slammed the door, and killed a lot of mosquitoes that had stuck to us during the few seconds it took to get into the RV.

There was no choice but for Paul to change the truck tire while I fixed our dinner. He put on coveralls, gloves, a head net, heavy sox with thick gaiters around his ankles, and leather ankle-high hiking boots. He looked completely covered, however, there was an area across his shoulders where mosquitoes worked their way under his head net and down his back inside his clothing! Horrid, vampire mosquitoes! When he finished and came back inside and stripped down, I counted 68 bites across his back where the mosquitoes had wormed their way inside his clothing. Ugh!! Itchy, itchy! It took us a while to kill all the mosquitoes that came inside with him on and inside his clothes.

We vowed to never stop in deep woods like that but only in windy, open areas where the wind kept the mosquitoes at bay. We jumped in the truck the next morning and drove on to a pull-out area on the road where we made our breakfast, walked the dog, and got ready for the day in a warm windy area.

We took a small cable-ferry across the Peel River just 5 miles south of Fort McPherson, where we planned to stop for a tire repair.

There are not many bridges up there but lots of small ferries across rivers. We continued on to Fort McPherson after exiting the ferry.

The tire repair guy showed Paul where a sharp stone had penetrated through the outer layers of the tire but not all the way inside yet. Thus, the hissing sound without an outright failure. He had to pound the rock the rest of the way through in order to get it out so he could make the repair.

We had one more ferry crossing north of Fort McPherson to get across the Mackenzie River which separated us from Inuvik.

This was the biggest ferry we had encountered yet. It was quite large and could carry several automobiles, truck, and RVs at the same time. The Arctic Red River flows into the Mackenzie River at this point, and flows onward to the Arctic Ocean. It is nearly as wide as the Mississippi River where the ferry is located.

We were almost to our goal of reaching Inuvik! Yay!!! The next chapter will be about exploring the interesting town of Inuvik.