Hey there!
This is the 7th essay of my Baffin Island “mini-memoir” series. If you haven’t already, give the rest of the series a look before reading this one.
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-tom
As I cautiously step onto a patch of gravel between waterways of the Turner River, I sink to my hip in a swatch of unexpected quicksand. I yelp as I plummet into the depths of the beach, a trickster, and can only think of scenes from bad western TV shows of my youth. “Don’t move,” someone would say to the poor fool being swallowed by the Earth, “You’ll only sink quicker.” Quicksand was a thing to be feared in the 70s. As legitimate a threat as those murder hornets from a couple years ago.
But quicksand is real here. And as soon as I sink in, my sneaker fills with silt and water. I do the opposite of what I learned and flail immediately. Frantically shift my weight back and forth as I try to find solid ground, while also trying to keep the pit from claiming my shoe as its own.
A patch of hard sand behind me offers enough leverage to pull my leg out. And once I’m upright, I panic at the thought of more booby traps in this frighteningly wide river. “Fuck the Turner!” I shout. When it happens again a couple crossings later, I drop in even deeper. I scrape and flail to find purchase, and this time barely manage to heave myself to freedom. “There are so many ways to die out here,” I say, exasperated. Kent laughs and says he wishes he had caught it all on camera. “Fucking hell!” I say. I sorta wish he had, too.
Ten days is too much time for this 98k trail. If we keep going at our already tempered pace, we’ll be done in three days. We decide to cut our remaining daily distances in half in order to stay on target with our pickup scheduled five days from now. Our plan is works perfectly with the sudden shifts in the landscape that slow us down considerably. Moraines increase in both size and frequency, and also the views ahead transform the scenery into something unimaginable, like a different planet, which halts us every few minutes to bust out cameras and take photos that will surely do it little justice.
Breidablik Peak and its Weeping Glacier inspire daydreams about riding waterslides as a kid. That feeling of not wanting to go, but also really wanting to. Nearly crying in anticipation before absorbing a slight nudge from a white-nosed teenage worker then shooting down the silent tube suddenly less afraid, ending with a splash and a breathless shrug. Ho hum. They were never as scary, or as fun, as they looked.
Kent and I joke about which mountain glacier would be faster on a toboggan. “The Weeping looks gnarly,” Kent says. But the one just north of it, perhaps the Nerutusoq, is definitely a close second. We imagine a fantastical competition where we ride plastic sleds to our death—Kent on the Weeping and me on the Nerutusoq—to see who first reaches their literal and figurative end. My guess—it would be close.
And then there’s Thor Peak. The granite poster child for Auyuittuk National Park advertisements, and an unsung geographical marvel on our planet. Thor Peak features the Earth’s greatest vertical drop—4100 feet. That’s 1000 feet higher than Yosemite’s El Capitan. Thor’s massive face overhangs 15° from vertical, which makes it look like an otherworldly claw lunging skyward. Like it froze in the midst of an effort to escape hell.
Thor Peak, like the hammer-wielding god of war, demands attention. For two solid days we walk towards it like a beacon. We are Frodo and Sam, eating bits of stale bread as we pushpull toward the siren call of an arctic Mount Doom.
One morning, a thick haze of smoke from wildfires near Jasper, Alberta, some 5000k away, turns the sky orange, then yellow, then various shades of grey. Every photo I take looks old fashioned. Like a study of muted light. Which makes me think of my grandfather, a lifelong artist and photographer, who once told me the best black and white photos will make you see colors.
For most of this hike there’s been little evidence of humans besides the emergency shelters. We have come across a few random things: A rusty rescue harness, an aged spool of thick climbing rope, broken pieces of wooden qamutiiks (winter sleds). In every case I spotted these items from far away and eagerly sped up, sometimes making a slight detour, to identify them. But on this path there’s been none of the detritus I’ve grown used to on public hiking trails back home. No litter, no piles of dog crap, no inexplicably discarded articles of clothing, no stashes of used TP, no forgotten tent stakes.
There have, however, been a bunch of human footprints in the mud and wet sand, which temporarily validates our path but often leads us astray. Still, after six days we’ve only seen actual people from afar. There was a group of five northbounders we watched from a quarter mile away as we relaxed in camp. Their dramatic attempts to cross the Owl River—their backs and forth of obvious frustration—offered us a solid hour of entertainment at their expense. We later saw two hikers, also heading north, as we scaled a sketchy moraine en route to the Turner Glacier. Then two more as we rolled into the Thor Shelter area. But since Kent and I prefer to be solitary, we didn’t initiate contact with any of these people.
A large inuksuk—an Inuit word for, “that which acts in the capacity of a human,” catches my eye from far away. These anthropomorphic standing stones have become prevalent in the second half of the hike and are meant to guide us safely to the end. They are markers, waypoints, and always perfectly placed to draw the eye. Some of them are stacked impossibly, suggesting they are the work of an artist. They are similar to cairns, but extra large and fancy. I read that some are ancient, but my untrained eye can’t tell which ones predate the modern era.
I stop at one of the more impressive inuksuks—one that, until I am a few feet away, I swear is another hiker. I admire the handiwork as Kent approaches. We then take a pack-off break, and I quickly put on a layer to keep my sweaty body from catching a chill in the bitter wind. “Hey, I thought up a good idea for a short story,” I say. And this isn’t the first. There’s something about the repetitive cadence of walking, of being alone with thoughts and majestic views, sometimes cold and uncomfortable, that sends my creativity into overdrive.
My travel notes are riddled with story ideas. Most I’ll never write, but the joy of them appearing in my brain as I march through beautiful places is one of the journey’s delights. Kent says he's game to hear me out, but I know he’s just humoring me. “So this guy is planning to commit suicide by jumping off a cliff,” I say. “And the entire way up the very mountain from which he’ll leap to his death, he’s bitching and moaning about how hard the trail is.” I laugh alone at the ridiculousness of the premise. “Sounds like some sort of obscure Russian short story, doesn’t it?”
Our attention goes back to the inuksuk. Moss and lichen cover the joints where rocks meet. This must be one of the old ones. When the wind mellows and hordes of giant mosquitoes make themselves known, we put our packs back on and continue hiking.
We’ve gotten so close to Thor’s claw that it now looks like a tooth. A molar. We’re deep in the valley’s mouth and tonight we’ll camp at the massive mountain’s base, albeit on the opposite side of the river. We’re merely days away from finishing, yet I am just now finally getting settled in. Everything has suddenly become extra comfortable: the routine, the exertion, my stink, and best of all, my renewed friendship with Kent.
It always takes a handful of days to find a groove. And once I’m in it, life is seamless. A perfect repetition of walking, eating, sleeping, and repeating it all the next day. The simple existence makes a whole lot more sense than the confusion of home. The trail is the only place I consistently want to be.
I spend many of my waking hours thinking about how I can build a life around walking and writing. Because frankly, though I may be good at lots of other things, these two things—walking and writing—are what I live to do.
It’s ironic that as soon as we settle into this glorious pace of life on Akshayuk Pass, we also have to start thinking about getting out of it. I’m barely feral. Not even close to being ready to leave.
I really wanted one more hip-deep step into quicksand for the video!
Yeah. That should have been cool.