As volunteers and workshop participants at the ten day, “26th Annual Great Northern Arts Festival” in Inuvik (in-NEW-vik), we enjoyed making friends, sharing meals and learning new art techniques from the generous, mostly Inuit artists from the Western and Eastern Arctic. Due to their traditions working with ALL parts of the animals they hunt, there were art pieces made from sealskin, tusks, fur and hides, antlers, and muskox undercoat, the warmest fiber on earth by weight, and workshops to make knives, soapstone sculpture, whale bone jewelry and warm Arctic clothing.

Spontaneous games and musical events erupted in the middle of the art gallery, this one a guessing game like rock-paper-scissors, except with over 50 gestures, and at high speed to keep up with the beat of the drummers!

With only 2800 residents and the most northern stoplight in the world, the town can boast a wealth of modern amenities, beyond most Arctic towns of this size, due to the efforts of the Inuvialuit (in-NEW-vee-ah-LOO-it) Regional Corporation. The Inuvialuit Settlement Land treaties and agreements with the Governement were resolved in the Inuit’s favor many years ago. Given the wealth generated by gas/oil/mineral rights in their settlement lands, they have tremendous political clout. They own the tallest building in town, and have persuaded the Federal Government to build a great aquatic and fitness center, with squash courts, curling and ice hockey arenas, a large community greenhouse (you can imagine how large vegetables can grow with 24 hours of sun every day!), new tennis courts we enjoyed daily, and a baseball field. With warmer weather than San Francisco, and bright sun at midnight, it feels like a summer afternoon in California, and baseball goes on all night during tournaments.

The annual fashion show is one of the hits of the week, as models strut the runway in floor length seal coats and other Arctic wearable art. The other is the throat singers from Nunavuut who improvise very percussive singing making breathy percussion and singing on both the in and out breaths. Tanya Tagaq is a famous throat singer who performs with the Kronos Quartet. Check it out on your itunes.

In comparison, the Gwiitch’n First Nation people who live on the Peel River in the Yukon Territory, are still negotiating use and management treaties of their settlement lands, and last week brought suit against the Territorial and Canadian Governments in the Trial Courts in Whitehorse YT on far weaker terms than has already been established by the well-organized Inuvialuits. “Protect The Peel” is the most common bumper sticker in town as the Inuvialuit are hoping that the Peel River watershed is protected; it flows into the Mackenzie River that Inuvik relies on for food, water, and cultural traditions as it flows to the Arctic.

Appropriately, the theme of the week long Circumpolar Northern Games is, “Ukiuqtaqtumi Hivuniptingun…One Arctic, One Future”. Above, James and DangDang exhibit an agility game; starting from a seated position and holding one foot, competitors must launch upwards to kick a ball…that keeps being raised with each successful kick. In the feature photo, they exhibit a full body arm wresting contest. The Northern Games have 800 participants from as far as Greenland and Russia. The Sami people of Scandinavia and the Yamia people of Russia are traditional Arctic hunters and share the same games designed to keep hunters’ skills honed. The categories are endurance, strength, tolerance of pain, agility, and…social games often based on animal mimicry (below, Sally screeches like a monkey, sniffs his face, and picking pretend picks (and eats) nits off of James, with a goal of getting him to smile…it worked).

Living in Inuvik, sitting on top of permafrost thousands of years old, makes construction in the town unusual to us; every building must be built on piers on top of the ground, even the two large hotels built in the last two years. The delivery of water and removal of sewage must also be done above ground…and well insulated for -40 F. winter temperatures. The system pictured is a large central insulated Utilidoor running among a cluster of buildings, with Utilidettes running to each residence. Every building in town relies on this system. A year’s worth of diesel for home heating is brought in by two barges once a year before freeze up occurs on the Mackenzie River.

Finally, besides our friendships with Inuvit locals and visiting Arctic artists, we introduce you to the best landscape photographer at the Festival. Gawain Jones is starting a 12 year migration through the Arctic, living within Inuit communities a year at a time. His photo looks like the view of the Mackenzie Delta from our campground (with my reflection in it!); it does not do him justice, so please check him out at gawain.jones@gmail.com.

July in the Arctic….each day brings more warmth, more humidity as the bogs heat up, and more bugs. They are also the biggest mosquitoes and horseflies we have ever seen….actual size shown below…Ha!

Our least favorite weapon is a deterrent: DEET, which works but is sticky and smelly. We have read independent research indicating that a 20% lemon and eucalyptus spray, made by OFF, works as well as 20% Deet. No such thing available in the Arctic of course. So, another great tool of deterrence is a bug jacket that includes a head and hat cover. Unfortunately, it also needs a pesticide as they can sting through it, but it at least keeps the slow and stupid horseflies from continually smashing into your face.

Meet our favorite find: the bug racket. It is very useful in our travel rig as 6-8 skeeters always seem to fly in with any egress, no matter how speedy we are. It looks like a squash racket but the strings are electrified with AA batteries. It is a very effective weapon of mass mosquito destruction, with a satisfying snap, spark, and smoke. It also has a fried meat smell after the kill….very satisfying! Kill! Kill!…not very Buddhist of us. Sometimes deterrence is not enough….note the size of the victim above.

We have had no problem with bears although we are always armed with a canister of mace that shoots 20 feet. That is still way too close for us as hikers so we also carry “Bear Blasters”. These must be loaded with a bullet like cartridge, pointed skyward, cocked and fired, shooting a blank, that explodes with noise at its apex. Some say it is completely effective. Some say the bears now associate it with hunters shooting caribou….and come running to grab the wounded game. We hope never to test it, but must carry it, even on the local 4 hole golf course exhibiting a warning reading, “Grizzlies on the golf course”, this week in Inuvik, NT. It is the Western Arctic, after all, and a grizzly can only act like a grizzly…

You must cross two rivers, the Peel and the Arctic Red by ferry, and take a boat or flight from Inuvik, out the Mackenzie Delta to reach the far northern town of Tuktoyaktuk on the Arctic Ocean in the Northwest Territories. The land is predominantly settlement lands that have been the homes and hunting grounds of the Gwiich’n and Inuvialuit First Nation people for thousands of years. These two rivers (crossed by ferry in summer) freeze up and become the only passable road in winter. No passage to the far north is possible, except by air, during “Break Up” (during late spring as the ice on the river melts too much to carry vehicle weight and there is too much ice to allow the ferries on the river), and during “Freeze Up” (before the ice is thick enough to support vehicles.

 We took a boat trip from Inuvik to Tuk as there is no road in summer…until completion of a highly controversial, “year round road” in 2016 (see photo above over the tundra at the Arctic Ocean, from our air flight out of Tuk). Other than serving gas/oil interests who want a deep port at Tuk for oil exportation to Asia, and the Canadian Government who wants a road that goes all the way to SOME Northern Canadian border, only 300 people live in Tuk, 8 feet above tideline, to enjoy it. Many predict it will be the longest pier in the world, as Tuk is slated to be underwater within 30 years from the effects of global warming. While Canada and the NT government are laying fiber optic cable between Inuvik and Yellowknife (the NT capital where 90% of Territory residents live), seems a logical time to build a road that would be well used, no one seems to be discussing a road from the capital to the North. The only access now is by air, the Mckenzie River, or by roads so convoluted that little is shipped and nobody travels by road from the capital. Hmmm….politics.

 On the way to Tuk by boat, we not only enjoyed many of the byways of the second largest delta in Canada, at a pee stop I finally got to see Arctic Tern up close, as I stumbled into a nesting area and got dive bombed until I left the area. They are very aggressive and agile birds and we enjoyed watching them hover and dive as they hunted.

At our guide’s Aunt Clara’s whaling camp in the bush, we arrived after her family had caught one of the three beluga whales they hunt each year. The harpoon seems too primitive to snare a 13 foot long beluga whale but it is effective as we saw another small boat bringing one into another whale camp nearby.

We ate Muktuk (blubber and skin, eaten raw or boiled), dried whale meat (above), herring, and caribou (from one who wandered into camp the week before). The entire extended family lives off these meats during the winter.

We couldn’t resist naked immersion in the Arctic Ocean; there is no need to torture you with a naked picture as we got a certificate for proof!

We visited the community Ice House by climbing 30 feet down a frozen slippery ladder into the permafrost (mud frozen solid for more than two years continuously) into a community meat locker still used for storing large kills year round. So beautiful, the layered permafrost covered with oddly square ice crystals.

We also hiked up a “Pingo” which is a tundra covered tall mound. It is filled with permafrost and created when a lake empties out suddenly with a breach, allowing the outside to freeze solid like a donut around unfrozen water which can only expand upward as it freezes. There are more than 1300 of these in the Western Arctic and we could see new ones forming as we flew over the Arctic tundra.

We really appreciated the warmth and hospitality of this Inuit family. They are so tough, and so family oriented, creative, and quick to laugh. It would require all those things to survive a month trying to work in the bush with these voracious mosquitoes. Here’s a scary picture of Steven’s toque covered with about 150 mosquitoes.

….OF DIRT AND GRAVEL ROADWAY. Specifically, that would be 467 miles North, and 467 miles South, crossing 2 mountain ranges, 2 river ferry crossings, the Continental Divide and the Arctic Circle, and requiring 25-35 mph maximum driving speeds at all times. We feel lucky to have only 2 rock chips in our wind screen; almost all cars in Inuvik at the end of the road have severely cracked windshields, and had to use their spare tires on route.

Something about the sun still being above the horizon at 2 AM makes it easy to stop frequently for bird identification, short hikes (the bugs are voracious), naps….and more driving. Our first day yielded a molting fox, a nesting Say’s Phoebe just 3 feet over our heads…and a Tea Party to celebrate Canada Day at the Tombstone Provincial Park. The Staff foraged for last year’s sweet wild cranberries (sweet from freezing all winter and ripening further in their second summer on the bush) for cake, and a tea made from 3 plants: Labrador Tea, Spruce tips, and Coltsfoot.  Tasted like eating/drinking Xmas trees!

On a ranger led hike up the Goldenside Trail in the Ogilvie Mountains, to a harem of marmots (not just a group identifier like a ‘murder of crows’, marmots live in female harems), we spotted a white crowned sparrow in the sub-arctic tundra, at the upper boundary of the tree zone.

Speaking of birds, here’s our list so far: American Raven (everywhere, horrible beggars), Say’s Phoebe, Yellow Warbler, Small Eared Owl (sited at the Arctic Circle, hunting in daylight since there is no darkness), Willow Ptarmigan, Bald Eagles including an immature, Gyrfalcon, and our favorite sighting, a Red Crossbill, noteworthy for its top and bottom beak criss-crossed. We are still hoping for an arctic tern sighting, the longest migrator of them all, and a bird that hovers like a hummingbird before it dives for food, eg. we might be able to get a picture! As beginning birders we mostly are paging through our book looking for “grayish, brownish little birds” who all look alike to us. Often, females and these little songbirds are described as, “Confusing”. We wonder if our birding pal Judith secretly intended to drive us crazy with the gorgeous Northern bird identification book. We like it better when she just points out and identifies birds for us on walks. No confusion.

If we were smart we would instead be working on our lichen identification skills as there are so many beautiful lichen (1500) and the variety is amazing in the Arctic; this lovely Caribou Lichen stays still and smiles for our pictures. The First Nation people here take it partially digested from a caribou stomach after a fresh kill, mix it with fish eggs, and eat it as a dessert called, “Stomach Ice Cream”. Here’s a test: Would you try that frothy white concoction?

Our sightings of Tundra Moose (the largest moose on the planet), snowshoe hare, bison and calves, and black bear and cubs were lovely but, like birds, too far away or too fast for good pictures…so we like landscapes…that stay in place.