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.