Trapped in Inuvik

After spending the first day in Tuk, walking around the village and seeing the sights, we slept in our tent right along the shore of the Arctic Ocean.

It was a bit of a zoo, as the “Overland” crowd has made Tuk a YouTube sensation since it is the only public road to the Arctic Ocean in North America (The Dalton Highway in Alaska stops short of the Arctic Ocean and is only accessed by an Oil Company Tour Bus).

There were cool overland rigs from all over the world, so, plenty of eye candy for those who like awesome 4X4 trucks designed for going long distances and then camping.

Our 2008 Landcruiser is pretty cool if I do say so myself.

Early the next morning, I awoke to nature calling, so I got up and walked to the latrine toilet. After I finished with that task, I was walking back to the tent when I looked out onto Kittigazuit Bay.

It was a calm morning and the sea was tranquil. Far out in the bay, I saw a flicker of a white back in the morning sun. Then two or three more long white backs appeared at the surface and then disappeared into the sea.

It was a pod of Beluga Whales!

The girls often grumbled if I woke them up too early, but when I told them that there were Belugas out on the bay, they were all up in a flash.

We stood and watched the pod of whales, porpoising toward the horizon. There were probably between 8-12 individuals and we even saw a young one along with its mother. Baby Belugas are gray, not white and at least two of us saw the gray one swimming alongside a white one.

I had gotten the binoculars out of the truck and we watched the pod for about 20 – 25 minutes before they disappeared over the horizon.

It was an amazing sight in the morning calm. I joked that we didn’t want to point excitedly too much or the Inuvialuit hunters would head out to kill the whales. No hunters caught up with “our pod.”

I tried to get some photos and video with my phone to share with you here, but the whales were quite a ways out to sea. Oh, well, we know what we saw. Maybe the good video camera caught something and I’ll be able to use it in our coming documentary.

After we watched the whales, we broke camp and drove back to Pingo Canadian Landmark. We launched the canoe and paddled out to a boardwalk out near the Pingos.

It was great to paddle on the Arctic Ocean. This was a convoluted and protected area of the coastline, so even though the wind was up a bit, we had easy paddling out to the dock marking the landing for the boardwalk.

We pulled our canoe up next to the dock and set off up the boardwalk.

We hiked up the boardwalk and had a great view of several Pingos. While we were on the boardwalk, a group of elders from the Inuvialuit community came out to walk the boardwalk. We had seen a flyer about an Elder Day in the park. We were just finishing our lunch when the elders arrived.

I struck up a conversation with Robbie who was the bear guard for the group. He was wearing a reflective traffic vest and carrying a stainless steel bolt-action rifle.

Many of the elders who had come, left the boardwalk and ranged out over the land in search of berries. Robbie was looking in all directions to make sure no bears were in the area.

Robbie said there weren’t too many bears in this area, but he was there just in case. We talked about hunting and fishing. Robbie mentioned that it had been a good year for Beluga this year.

We also listened to some stories from the elders about time out on the land and then we headed back to our canoe. The paddle back to the landing was a bit harder as we were paddling against the wind, but we saw loons and other waterfowl in the protected waters of the Landmark.

After we finished our paddle, we loaded the canoe back onto the truck and we headed for Inuvik. We needed reliable phone and internet to determine how and when to proceed back down the Dempster Highway with the closures for the fires that had started after we drove up.

We drove back down to Inuvik and stayed at Jak Territorial Park. When we arrived at the park and set up camp, we learned that the Dempster was now closed from the Northwest Territories border down to Tombstone Territorial Park, which was most of the Dempster Highway.

I suspected it was more for people management, as Eagle Plains was the halfway point and had limited resources to deal with the back-up of travelers that had to be building up.

Within minutes of arriving at Jak, the girls had made friends with Amaris and Keira, who were local girls camped in a camper at the park.

All the girls bonded instantly, so Olive and Petra stayed over in their camper for the night. It was hot and they appreciated the air-conditioning for the night.

After spending the first night, it was clear that the Dempster would not open early the next day. We determined to stay another night at Jak.

Toward the afternoon of day two at Jak Territorial Park in Inuvik, we learned that the Dempster had been opened, but there were two fires that threatened additional closures.

We decided to head down the Dempster very early the next day and feel our way south to Rock River Territorial Park, just inside the Yukon border, but still a bit further North of the fires at Eagle Plains and the Ogilvie River. We planned to camp at Rock River for one night.

Then, on our second day of driving south, we would try to get through the fire areas early in the morning. We had learned that the fires were usually diminished in the calm, damp morning air, so passing the fire areas earlier in the morning was better than later in the day.

Stay tuned to learn if our plan worked out in future posts!

~ Umingmaq