Baffin Island, Part 4
In range of polar bears
Hi folks!
I hope you’re enjoying this series of essays about my recent trip to the Canadian Arctic! I sure am having fun writing them! If you like it here, please take a moment to leave a comment and/or share my page with your people. I’m trying to grow my Substack audience and I sure do appreciate you helping me do it.
Keep an eye out for another essay every 2 days until the journey’s end. Big gratitude to you for following along!
-tom
Dusk has been filtering muted light into our room for hours. This may be our last night in a bed for a while so we prolong waking to savor a few extra minutes under the sheets our twin beds. It’s earlier than usual when we finally get up, and after making a couple Keurigs we immediately knock out our final backpack repacks.
Our collective wish is an unspoken one—that Billy will soon come knocking to tell us the boat’s ready and we’ll start our long awaited hike today. But when hours pass with no sign of him, we brace ourselves. The room gets smaller the longer we loiter, so we go outside for a change of scenery, and to see if yesterday’s icebergs have moved much.
Fluffy husky puppies yip and bark as we walk past. One charges Kent and drops on its back to demands rubs. Gusts of wind catch a neighbor’s curing polar bear pelt like a sail, causing it to sway heavily above a plywood shack. It’s barely 10:00 a.m. and the overcast sky is twinged with low light, illuminating soft yellows and blues, hints of pink, making it feel like a morning sunset.
Though I want to keep walking around town, I also don’t want to miss the chance of crossing paths with Billy. So I return to the Inn and, out of boredom, order a second breakfast. “We found some bread!” the chef announces cheerfully as I obsess over the time. I repeatedly check my phone even though there’s no wifi, and become increasingly irritated by our liminality. Come on Billy, damn, I think to myself.
To avoid a potential polar bear hazard the Akshayuk Pass map warns hikers to “not linger near the sea shore” at the drop off point and, “move inland 5+ kilometers as soon as possible.” There’s daylight until nearly 10:00 p.m., but we still have a 3 hour boat ride between us and the trail. As I pick at my ham and cheese omelette, I worry that today won’t be the day we start after all. Or, if it is, we’ll be racing sunlight as we retreat from polar bear territory. Will Billy hold off until tomorrow after more people roll in? I sit and stew, mildly irritated by our lack of a solid plan.
I clean my plate, sink into the bench, and close my eyes. I don’t want to be frustrated. I don’t want to feel resentment. Not towards Billy, or Kent, or the Arctic, or the crew of five flying in later. I want to be at peace. So rather than ponder things and drive myself nutty, I accept, right then, that we’re going to leave today. Right after lunch, in fact.
I whisper to myself, something akin to a prayer, that Billy will be here in 15 minutes to give us the scoop. I take a deep breath and say it all again. Then again. Ten minutes later an SUV pulls up. It’s Billy. He tells me to be ready to leave at 1:00, less than two hours from now. “The group’s flight is delayed,” he says. “Not sure when they’re going to finally get here, so let’s get you guys going.”
We load our heavy packs into the boat’s hold. Daisy, Billy’s wife and the mayor of Qikiqtarjuaq, says with a cheeky smile, “Please give me Billy’s money.” Kent and I each hand over $300.00 CAD and she folds the wad of bills into her pocket. “She’s my spicy wife,” Billy says with a smirk. “Every morning I wake up and tell her she’s beautiful.”
As the boat embarks, Daisy and Kent stand in the front next to Billy. I sit in the back where the chop will hopefully be less dramatic. Last time I was on a boat for an extended period was with Kent in the Gulf of Thailand. I got an epic case of seasickness and want to do all I could to avoid a redo today.
“We used to take a canoe out here when we were younger,” Billy says. “We’d go on dates out here.” Once he and Daisy canoed all the way to the Pass. “Took us six hours,” Billy says with a laugh. “One way!” It’ll take us two. “Or maybe three if the wind is as bad there as it is here,” Billy says.
The boat passes south from Broughton Island beyond the Kingnelling, Maktak, and Coronation Fiords. Past the islands of Iqarjuaq and Kukiirvik. Billy points to where he last saw a polar bear while Daisy shares stories of hunting narwhals, or nar-whales as she calls them. “I’m a good spotter,” she says. “I know where they are and can see them from far away.”
Daisy says she’s terrified of polar bears. “My father told me that in order to get over my fear I needed to kill one.” But she’s killed a few and still afraid. “I’m so afraid, in fact, that I always have three loaded guns with me,” she says. “Everyone should carry two, but I like to have three, just in case.”
Billy overhears our conversation and says that when he was a kid there were no polar bears in Qikiqtarjuaq. “They were all up north,” he says. “Back then, talking to the people up there about bears was like speaking to people in a different language.” The polar bears have since moved south, and Billy blames climate change. “But it’s been a long time since anyone has seen one in the park,” he says. Music to my ears.
The fjord walls loom above us like sentries as we motor past icebergs of various sizes, all far from their Greenland origin. The largest one inspires Billy to cut the engine and pull out his camera. Together we snap photos of its reaching peak, its blue veins, its dappled ice pockets. As Billy restarts the engine, the sun suddenly peeks out from behind a roof of clouds. “The next fjord is yours,” Daisy says. “The sky always gets bluer as we get closer to it.”
Billy and Daisy drop us off on the southeast side of North Pangnirtung Fiord, about one kilometer away from the Pass’s first emergency shelter. “Don’t forget your trekking poles,” Billy says as we step onto the land. “The last hiker left them behind.” We do a quick inventory check, then wave goodbye to Billy and Daisy as the boat backs up. We watch as they become a speck on the calm water. Their wake glints like a million sapphires as engine hum is buried in silence.
Just like that, we’re alone. In a place where polar bears roam. I scan the land, hoping not to see anything white. We both remove layers that kept us warm on the boat and apply a little SPF to protect us from the Arctic sun. “Let’s get moving,” I say as Kent cinched down his straps. We heave on our packs and take a second to allow our bodies absorb the load at its heaviest. Then Kent turns to me and says, “Welcome to the Arctic, Griffen.” Holy cow. Welcome, indeed. We take our first steps south.
I’ve read about tussocks, but never before have I seen them in real life. I understand them to be a kind of landscape undulation, sort of like moguls. One blog I read mentioned how readily they can slow a hiker’s pace to a crawl. But until I actually step on these raised areas of solid vegetation peppered within dense marshes and bogs, I can’t imagine my hiking pace dropping to less than two miles per hour. But it immediately does. And now I understand why.
With each footstrike my foot sinks into the mossy ground laden with goose droppings. In some spots my foot plummets a few inches, in others it virtually vanishes and I’m calf-deep before steadying. Every step is a wet and sucking chore. It’s as much an effort to yank my shoe from the earth as it is to balance after finding purchase. Twice on this first day a greedy tussock tears one of my New Balance Fresh Foams from my foot. Navigating this section is slow going and kind of a grind.
Both Kent and I are used to an hour of walking amounting to three, if not four miles of progress. So, after a few hours we figure we’ll soon arrive at the Owl River emergency shelter, our first planned destination about ~15k from our drop-off point. “I’m sure it’s just ahead,” Kent hollers. “I've studied the map pretty well…it’s got to be just over that lip.” But the lip comes and there’s no sign of the shelter. Just more tussocks and bogs as far as we can see.
After multiple foiled predictions about where we are, Kent’s frustration is obvious. “What the hell!” he says. “I don’t get it! We should be there by now!” My dismissal doesn’t help things. All I care about is being out of polar bear range, which we are, or at least will be soon. “Who really cares,” I say. “We’ve got ten days to go sixty-one miles. I’m sure our pace is just fine.” We trudge in silence until we see an orange speck in the distance. “There it is,” one of us says. Our spirits rise.
For the next three hours we walk towards the shelter that seems to never get any closer. We cross our first tributary, alter our preferred trail between hard sand and lumpy tussocks, and garner the attention of a rough legged hawk who hovers above us for a half hour while screeching nonstop. Meanwhile, the orange shelter looms distant and elusive. Like a horror film’s stretching hallway.
Without any common reference cues—specifically the absence of tress or bushes—distances in the Arctic are deceiving. If the terrain hereafter is anything like today, we’ll need to rethink our expectations about speed and mileage. “Nothing is as close as it seems,” I say. “Yeah, and nothing is as far as away as it looks, either,” Kent replies.
Upon arrival we set up camp and I do a cold plunge in the milky white Owl River. We eat dinner in the shelter even though hikers are not supposed to linger there, then step outside as the last bits of sunlight set a nameless mountain peak aflame. “This is supposed to be the boring part of the trail,” Kent says. “The second half is what everyone raves about.” If this is boring, I have absolutely no context for what lies ahead.
The temperature sinks as the sun dips out of sight. We retire to our tents and soon we’re shouting back and forth in the various voices of our past’s countless caricatures. We giggle and hoot like pre-teens at a rowdy slumber party, interspersing our immature elation with old man farts and throat-crushing screams. I let go of my concerns about being “too adult” because, who am I kidding? Frankly, this sort of comfort is joyful and cathartic. And doing it with a friend who gets it—well, that’s divine.
I reach towards the glow on the roof of my tent. The sun is still up on the other side of the mountains and will be for a couple hours. Will it keep me up? I doubt it. I am pretty doggone exhausted.
By 8:00 we’ve retreated to silence. Settled in and ready for sleep. I am grateful we didn’t see any polar bears and I say a quiet prayer of thanks.
I am here, I think to myself. I am in the Arctic. The freaking Arctic! The thought makes me nuzzle, warm and content, deeper into my sleeping bag. A slight draft through the tent flaps brushes my face and reminds me how cold it is outside. But it doesn’t matter, because it’s super cozy in here.
Another nice essay Tom!
Thanks Tom for sharing your adventure in the Arctic. These are so many beautiful memories! Your essays are amazing and I can't wait to read the next ones. We miss you guys