Our little float plane - call name Golf, Bravo, Delta Whiskey - skips across the Arctic Ocean and launches enthusiastically into the sky. “Ah … nothing takes off like a Beaver,” Eoin Mowat crows with unabashed affection into the headphones. Hunched at the controls wearing a battered leather jacket and ball cap, Mowat looks the part of the classic bush pilot. But 15 years ago he was a corporate suit-’n'-tie guy in Toronto watching float planes landing below him on Lake Ontario from his office atop a skyscraper. That was when he heard the aviation god’s call and took to the skies. Now, at 57, Mowat is based in Cambridge Bay, Nunavut, population 1,477, flying a Northern icon, a 1956 deHavilland Beaver.
To find Cambridge Bay on a map trace your finger from Edmonton, Alberta, up past Yellowknife. Keep going until you fall off the northernmost edge of North America. Skip across to Victoria Island. This is serious Outback Canada - plains of brown and green tundra polka-dotted with pot-hole lakes in surreal colors from chartreuse to sky blue; there are lakes with orange shores and rivers with magenta banks. Mowat tips a wing to point out an Inuit fishing camp just as a line of white snow geese passes below like a string of pearls.
After 25 minutes, Mowat circles over our destination, a huddle of red buildings on a slope overlooking an inlet in the middle of nowhere, the wilderness camp of Elu Inlet Lodge. He guides GBDW toward the water, which it kisses so smoothly I hardly know we’ve landed. “Hovers like an angel, but no one ever applauds a perfect float-plane landing,” Mowat mopes. I applaud.
The Inuit-governed territory of Nunavut is the size of a small European country - as big as Alaska and California combined. I’ve come way up here to play in Canada’s great, big backyard by the light of the Midnight Sun, to ride around in old flying workhorses and stalk Arctic critters with my camera. I love places of profound silence where people are outnumbered by musk ox and caribou by thousands to one. And where, among those few people, 95 percent are Inuit and 5 percent are quirky characters and misfits from around the globe.
To reach Elu Lodge you have to pass through Cambridge Bay - Cam Bay - and I stayed there several days. The community flourished in 1955 as a Cold War radar post, a joint Canada/US DEW line (Distant Early Warning) site to detect incoming USSR bombers. These days it’s a typical no-frills Arctic community. There’s one basic hotel, two all-purpose grocery stores selling everything from disposable diapers to ammunition, a Royal Canadian Mounted Police station and the aptly named Many Pebbles Golf Course. Snowmobiles and ATVs kick up the dusty streets where Inuit women carry babies in their amoutiq parkas, caribou antlers are stacked outside carvers’ homes and polar bear pelts cure over balcony railings.
I stopped off here to do a story on one of the last of the legendary old-time Arctic bush pilots, German-born Willy Laserich. Willy came north in the 1950s and never left. I had just landed in Cam Bay and was out for a stroll when he pulled up beside me in his pick-up truck. “Vee have to pick-up some schtuff out at Perry River,” he said in his thick German accent. “Get in.” Twenty minutes later I was strapped into the back of a Twin Otter along with five drums of fuel headed for a former Hudson’s Bay Company Post. We stashed the barrels and picked up gear left by ornithologists after a summer studying the impact of global warming on migrating geese.
Willy has flown the equivalent of 800 trips around the globe in some of the most brutal weather on earth. Over the next few days we drank coffee and pored over charts in his hangar while he told tales of hauling his planes from axle-deep mud and surviving winter nights on the tundra after emergency landings. Willy has tracked and rescued lost trappers, injured hunters and downed pilots. He hauled musk ox and whale meat to community feasts, carried corpses to funerals and handcuffed prisoners to jail. But it is for medical evacuations that he is a household name in the Arctic, where many communities are manned by only a pair of nurses.
While Willy was off flying I “did” Cambridge Bay. I rented an ATV and scooted over to the ruins of a stone church built in 1954 using seal oil and sand as mortar. Nearby was the partially submerged and remarkably well preserved wreck of Norwegian explorer Roald Amundson’s Maud, the first ship to navigate the Northwest Passage. Then I climbed Mount Pelly - an hour away by ATV if you’re not held up by a musk ox herd meandering across the track.
On my last night I visited a friend, Tanya Tagaq, briefly home after touring Europe. Tanya whisked traditional northern throat-singing out of obscurity and imbued it with her own gutsy, sexy style that caught Bjork’s ear a few years back. She toured with the Icelandic legend and was featured on several of her albums; more recently she was on the road with the Kronos Quartet of San Francisco with whom she played Carnegie Hall. We sprawled on her parents’ living room floor drinking qunquliq juice her Inuit mother made from mountain sorrel she picked and flipping through her baby pictures, agreeing that we both needed stints in the North to keep our brains on track.
Martina Kapolak greets me on the dock of Elu Inlet Lodge. Like most Inuit she is quiet, wasting few words. She and her husband, Peter, run this small out-there retreat in the Nunavut wilderness for those who love hiking, paddling, fishing and exploring archaeological sites. It’s unusual to find lodgings in the north run by an Inuit, so this is a unique chance to gain insight into their culture, way of thinking and wicked sense of humor.
My cabin is a spotless, cozy and comfortable two bedrooms with a shared shower and bathroom built on stilts above the permafrost. Though rustic - all knotty pine with clothes hangers that are caribou antlers mounted on the wall - it is luxurious by Arctic wilderness standards. All the building materials were brought the 50 miles from Cambridge Bay over 7-foot-thick sea ice in the spring of 1999 with a Caterpillar “cat-train.”
The aroma of freshly baked bread fills the dining room, which is Martina’s domain. Peter is the professional guide and I first meet him with a pair of barbecue tongs in his hand. He asks me a question I’ve never heard north of 60: “How would you like your steak done?” Over a white tablecloth and a killer appetizer of smoked Arctic char (a red, cold water fish similar to salmon) I meet the other guests. There are two Johns from Manitoba, both keen wildlife photographers. My cabin-mates are Elvira and her jolly husband Hans from Germany, Canada-philes on their 28th summer in the country and also members of the long-lens club. After coffee and Martina’s fresh apple-berry crumble I head for my cabin. The stars are so bright I could read a newspaper. A wolf howls, then silence so profoundly deafening it feels like pressure on my eardrums. The kind you want to clear by yawning. I sleep like the dead.
It is a sunny morning as we set off by motorboat through a labyrinth of islands and inlets in turquoise waters until we land on a blindingly white shell beach. It all seems strangely Caribbean if it wasn’t for the average summer air temperature of 50 degrees and water that could flash-freeze your toes. The shell beaches, left behind by retreating seas tens of thousands of years ago, are so vast they look like snow on Landsat photos. We have a picnic lunch on the beach and suntan. Ring seals bark from the shallows and an Arctic fox lopes along on a distant hillside.
We set off for a hike across the tundra. There are no trails and we trek through a knee-high bonsai forest of miniature willows and wildflowers. The grassy hummocks feel as if you’re walking on a spongy meadow of feather pillows interrupted by stones painted with filigree, Technicolor lichen. Hans thinks he spots a musk ox. Wrong. John chimes in with another false alarm. Peter just smiles. “Musk rocks,” he says, “very common.”
When Peter finally whispers “Musk ox,” we squint to spot them as we grapple with telephoto lenses and tripods. Sneaking up a hillside behind Peter we peer over the edge at a herd of musk ox munching on tundra and snoozing in beds of shells. “I count 33,” says a very excited Hans. Like carpetbags on legs, they are scruffy with quivit, a fluffy under-fur used by the Inuit for clothing. There is the occasional testosterone-fueled head butting and snorting; Peter moves us closer, keeping an eye on the alpha male. “There are going to memory card issues,” moans one of the Johns as he wields a lens the size of a small cannon. When they finally pack up and trot away a couple of hours later they kick up showers of shells with their hooves.
Days are long and busy. We climb to the 500-foot-high tabletop of Mount Elu, where stone inukshuks - man-shaped Arctic trail markers - stand guard. Peter points out fox traps that could be 10,000 years old and we spot an Arctic wolf and a distant grizzly. On other days we kayak and canoe. I try my luck at fishing for char. We motor to nesting colonies of seabirds perched on a sea-cliff condo. I spend an entire afternoon picking tundra blueberries outside my cabin watching hyper-active Arctic ground squirrels - “sik siks” - bouncing across the tundra. Dinners are a delicious parade of Arctic char chowder and fresh bannock bread, caribou stew and roast musk ox. And afterward I grab a towel and head for a gazebo out the back of the lodge to soak in Canada’s northernmost hot tub at 68.32 N.
On our last night, a half-dozen relatives arrive from Cambridge Bay for the weekend. Chelsea and Nathan, the Kapolaks’ niece and nephew, have brought their traditional Inuit clothing. While Peter tunes his guitar, Nathan shows off traditional drum dancing. Winter nights can be long in an igloo, so the Inuit have all manner of skill games made from bone and string including Cat’s Cradle, an Inuit original. Then the boys rig up Inuit games in the living room. The toughest is the high kick, a deceptively brutal and exhausting competitive sport in which you try to bring both feet up together to kick a ball suspended from the ceiling to chin-height. Bruised butts ensued.
In the Arctic, weather is the boss, shifting from sunny to blizzard within an hour, any month of the year. The morning of our departure the weather is bossy enough to keep Eoin grounded in Cambridge Bay. Martina whips up lunch. “Guess I’ll have to do some more hot-tub time,” I say, happy to have an extra day in the wild. “Not me,” says John, “I’m going to follow that grizzly bear around this afternoon.” We all laugh, then look out the window. Five jaws drop simultaneously at the sight of an adolescent barren-ground grizzly, shaggy blonde hair and all, strolling 50 feet away. We scramble - road runner-style - for our lenses as Peter grabs his gun and the rest of the day we follow his every adolescent move from sitting feet-out in a blueberry patch filling his face to chasing sik siks and standing up on his hind legs to sniff the breeze.
We collapse, exhausted, after a late dinner as Chelsea clears the table. The giddy conversation includes dreaming up new Arctic cuisine including lemming meringue pie and such when Chelsea says softly from the kitchen window - “There’s a bunch of musk ox out there.” They move like ghosts, dozens of them, through the last smudges of dusk, a column of prehistoric-looking beasts marching silently across the tundra. After following them for an hour something spooks them. They canter off, grunting up a hill, the thundering of their hooves echoing across the valley as the Northern Lights shimmy green and red across the sky like nature’s multi media extravaganza.
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