Out of the Northwest Passage
Dundas Harbour – 19 September 2016
Weather: Fog, cloud, snow, rain, ice pellets, -4 to +2
I was up at 7:30 and it was obvious from the map that we were nowhere near our next stop, Dundas Harbour.
There was more ice in the strait than the ice maps had shown. Apparently the large flat ice doesn’t show up as ice when there is cloud between it and the satellite.
So, the afternoon itinerary became the morning itinerary and vice versa. Latonia Hartery gave us a talk about Knud Rasmussen, a Greenlandic explorer and anthropologist who explored Greenland and the Arctic after the turn of the 20th century. Known as the father of “Eskimology,” he was the first European to cross the Northwest Passage on dog sled and over the course of a half dozen expeditions, he compiled a massive amount of information on the people of Greenland and the Canadian Arctic.
I also attended a question and answer period presented by our Inuk staff members as well as others who had lived in the north. They answered questions on education, the cost of living, economic opportunities and more. One interesting point was that the Inuit don’t suffer from Seasonal Affective Disorder (SAD). I wondered if it might be from a diet rich in seafood but they didn’t think so. They suspected that it was an evolutionary adaptation, and noted that until recently, the concept of measuring time was meaningless to the Inuit. Rather than regimenting their days by hours and minutes, they would react to how they felt. If they were sleepy, they slept. If they were hungry, they ate.
As the session ended, we approached Devon Island, the largest uninhabited island in the world. We got a call that there were musk ox on the shore.
Or as we called them, musk dots.
We are informed during lunch that we would be landing in Dundas Harbour after lunch but that there was too much snow to do the long hike (black trail), so we’d just be visiting the RCMP post (the red trail on the right).
The post was established in 1924 as part of an initiative to assert Canadian sovereignty over the Arctic islands and combat foreign whaling among other things. In 1951, the post was permanently closed and moved to Craig Harbour on Ellesmere Island.
The bay was pretty calm in comparison to other landings.
It took me about an hour or so to walk the entire site and visit the cemetery.
There are two RCMP officers buried there. Cst Maisonneuve committed suicide in 1926 and Cst Stephens died from a gunshot wound while hunting walrus in 1927. The RCMP maintains the cemetery, one of the most northerly cemeteries in the world.
The buildings were not maintained like at Fort Ross but were in remarkable condition for their age.
Even the outhouse was standing.
Someone left behind a Buck Rogers’ novel from the 70s.
On the way back, I paid a visit to a cairn.
When I got back to the zodiac, I found the crew had built a massive six foot high snowman next to the landing site.
A pretty amazing feat to accomplish in a bit more than an hour.
We all gathered at six for our recap, and as expected, our landing at Grise Fiord was not possible due to ice. So, our destination tomorrow is Greenland. We hope to land in Qaanaaq at two in the afternoon. The good news was that there wasn’t any ice between us and Greenland. It was all floating around among the islands to the west and doesn’t encroach very far into Baffin Bay due to the warm water current. The whole coast of Greenland appeared to be free of sea ice.
However, it wasn’t free of wind.
Go to The Storms: Part Two
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