Churchill! (posted from the Thompson library)
(this post covers 13-17 August, 2007)
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Friday, 17 August-
Our overnight went pretty well this time. Though our makeshift ‘beds’ were uncomfortable, we split up and each took a four-seat section and were able to lie down a little more. We each got three or four hours sleep though I still was up around dawn at 0430. Again, a hearty breakfast fixed all and we felt a lot better today than we had at this point on the way up.
Our trip to Thompson was even longer this time but we didn’t mind. This time it was a 23-hour trip. We saw two bald eagles and a hawk on the way back. We had a wonderful time talking even more with Marilyn and Linda and then had a curious coincidence. At lunch time there were only two seats available when we entered the dining car so we sat with a couple we had seen going up, around town, and now on the way back to Thompson. The gent had a tee-shirt with the logo of the Sam Waller Museum in The Pas, a favorite of ours. I asked if he had enjoyed the museum (figuring the answer was yes if he had bought the tee shirt!) and he cagily asked, ‘well, what did YOU think?”. I said we liked it a lot, to which he replied with a big grin, “Good… because I’d the director of it!” To which I replied (also with a smile): “Then how about answering my email?” Incredibly, the one person I had sent an email to in Canada (after we had left The Pas and were in Thompson trying to find out more about Bert Huffman) was sitting across from me. Ron Scott and his wife Patty were a delight. Ron’s quite a canoeist and when we pulled out a map of Northern Manitoba, he pointed to an ad and asked ‘recognize anyone?’. It was Ron in his canoeing duds on the ad for The Pas. We had a wonderful hour or so chatting, all about the museum, Sam Waller, and “The Northland” poem. And get this: Ron is planning a canoeing trip next summer—a 30-40 day wilderness canoe trip to York Factory. Now THAT’s a canoe trip.
The day went pretty quickly but by late afternoon I was ready to get off the train. Unfortunately, it was about that time we pulled off to a siding to shut down for an hour while three freight trains worked they way toward and by us. We finally rolled into the station about 22:00 (scheduled for 11:00 this morning!!!). We grabbed our gear and went to the appointed pickup spot only to be left wondering. I went inside and called only to get a message telling me Colleen’s voice mailbox was full. Labashi went in to try a few minutes later, at which point Colleen showed up, giving us her apologies and saying she had had to go pick up her husband from the bar— he had called and said he was probably too drunk to safely drive home (Canada’s a wonderfully-different place, isn’t it?).
We were very happy to find Mocha Joe all safe and sound and went to bed for a long and blissful sleep.
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Thursday, 16 August-
We woke early for having been up last night and Labashi couldn’t wait to get back on the road to look for polar bears (I, on the other hand, was ready for breakfast).
Labashi won this one and we drove out as far as the twin golf balls but saw nothing new. We then drove to Cape Merry and took the walking tour with our delightful guide, a young aboriginal woman named Adelia Spence. I got a kick out of Adelia dressed up in her green Parks Canada uniform and red mittens, wearing stylish white-framed sunglasses and carrying a Remington 870 Marine stainless-steel riot shotgun. Adelia told us she had the bangers and Carolyn, the other ranger, had the slugs today. Carolyn went out ahead of us and surveyed the rocks by binocular with her shotgun slung over her shoulder, then signaled that it was okay for Adelia to bring us out to tour the gun ramparts, powder magazine, and cairn which make up the park. Adelia did a great job of giving us the history of the area and introducing us to buffalo berries (Canadian soapberries), gooseberries, Arctic cotton, and lichens (there are three types—orange, green, and black. The black you can eat but Adelia says she has tasted it and it’s almost tasteless and was used only in the starving times).
As we took our tour we talked about the ship lying offshore and Adelia said it’s a grain freighter awaiting dock space. This, of course, is prime grain-shipping season and is critically important to Churchill’s economy. We turned away for a few minutes and when we looked back the ship was gone—as if picked up by an alien spaceship or something. It took us a few minutes to realize a fog bank had swallowed the ship and was headed toward us. In another ten minutes we were in fog and the rain started coming down. Time for breakfast at Gypsy’s!
After our late breakfast (actually at lunch time) we called for an appointment at the Northern Studies Centre and got one for 1300. We rolled out there and took a nice little tour for $5 each. I had thought the centre had been developed as a teaching site but its mission is actually one of logistics support for researchers. They make all the arrangements, house and equip researchers (include rental shotguns) and fly them by helicopter, generally to Wapusk National Park a critical polar bear habitat east of the centre.
We then decided we had better get busy—we had to have the rental truck back by 1530. We loaded up the coordinates of Churchill’s two geocaches and smiled when we found one was only a half-mile from the centre. We found it (“Rusty Bear”) in short order and then blasted out to Cape Merry to find “Chilly Churchill”. That left us 15 minutes to gas up and return the rental truck but we made it. The rental truck had cost me $75 to rent but $49 to fill up with gas. We did 162 miles in an area where the longest road (we took) is only 12 miles long.
After returning the truck we packed up for our departure this evening and called for the taxi to pick us up at 1900 for our 2000 depature. The taxi didn’t show and it wasn’t until we called to check that we learned the train was delayed to 2230. That time seemed to fly and we were soon aboard and departing.
As we pulled out of the station we said the only thing we wished we had seen were the northern lights. Labashi looked out the window and there they were—the best we’ve seen yet. We watched them for an hour before clouds moved in.
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Wednesday, 15 August-
We awoke greatly refreshed in our comfortable Blue Sky comfortable beds—what a change from last night! We went to breakfast at Gypsy’s on this rainy, 50-degree day with Marilyn and Linda, our breakfast tab being picked up by the B&B (nice!)
The rain just got harder as we drove to the tour office and boarded the bus to our boat. As we crowded around the outdoor table to get ponchos, the rain came down harder yet and the wind blew it sideways. We had decent rain jackets but no rain pants and our pant-legs were soon soaked. The regular briefing about the belugas was cut short and we boarded, with some surprise, an open tour boat for a quick ride across the bay to Prince of Wales Fort.
Our tour guide, Bob, gave us a good tour of the Fort, which today consists of little more than massive stone walls, 35 feet thick in some places. The northeast corner is sagging a bit and under re-construction. I loved seeing a dozen-or-so big cannons lying along the wall like so many logs, each a masterpiece of power capable of throwing the ball a thousand yards and each damaged in some way. The damage had been done by the French, who took the fort in 1782 (that was a while ago, eh?). (A brief description is at http://thecanadianencyclopedia.com/index.cfm?PgNm=TCE&Params=A1ARTA0006487)
Upon disembarking the boat to tour the fort we had been introduced to the realities of life in the Churchill area. There are polar bears in the area and Parks Canada has two shotgun-wielding rangers on the island for our protection. Both were carrying Remington 870 12-gauge riot guns, one loaded with ‘bangers’ and one with slugs, we’re told. (I’d be willing to bet the guy with bangers also has slugs). The ‘bangers’ are to scare away the bears (hopefully) and the slugs are there in case a bear refuses to go and presents a danger in which tragedy can only be avoided by killing the bear.
We had strict instructions to stay in a group and of course we ‘adults’ told the older children we were going to trip them if a bear appeared and we needed to beat them back to the boat.
With that in mind, it was a surprise to us when we found ourselves separated from the group (though behind the gates of the fort). We had been taking photos on the ramparts and had been asked to take a photo of one of the other tourists. When we turned around the group below was gone and the gates shut. But one of the rangers was nearby and when we passed he scolded us (gently!) for being separated from our group. But it only took a minute to catch up and we realized that the head count back at the boat would have caught our absence before the boat’s departure (and of course the rangers were still there). Still, we thought it a bit careless on Bob’s part to have departed the Fort without all of his little duckies all in a row. (We looked like little duckies, all dressed in our identical red ponchos).
We then boarded the boat and headed back across the Churchill River mouth. We immediately saw belugas, in fact, dozens of them traveling in small groups (see http://www.seanorthtours.com/morepics2table2.html ) We spent the next two hours drifting or slowly idling among them. We could also hear them. The mate put a pair of hydrophones over the side when we stopped and they easily picked up the incredible array of sounds. Labashi even saw several of the belugas mouthing the mikes. Karaoke fans, I suppose. We learned that the belugas were called ‘sea canaries’ because their sounds could be heard through the wooden hulls of explorer ships.
At one point we thought we might be in for an experience. The captain had shut down the engines and when he went to move the boat away from one of the channel buoys about to attack us, the engines wouldn’t start. We were lucky and the wind prevented us from drifting into the buoy (the boat was small enough that we could have pushed off) but it took a few minutes to resolve the problem and get the engines going. I noticed the captain didn’t shut down again. I asked the mate what she had been doing in going below decks with a bucket. She had drained a water trap in the fuel line but there wasn’t enough water to worry about. Interestingly, she said she had to take the fuel-tainted water below and take it ashore for proper disposal. Even that small amount of diesel fuel couldn’t go overboard.
After our beluga adventure we had lunch at the Seaport Inn before touring the excellent Eskimo museum. This museum was started in 1946 by the rector of the Catholic Church and still today is owned by the church. It has case-after-case of interesting and beautiful stone, bone, and antler carvings and the world-class collection includes a rather innocuous chair which, upon further investigation, turns out to have come from one of Roald Amundsen’s ships of exploration.
Later that afternoon we rented a pickup from Tamarack Rentals ($75 per day) and began touring the area on our own. We drove east of town past the airport (where the road changes to dirt) and began our search for polar bears. The bears, it turns out, like the rocky coast and hang out among the rocks. What you DON’T want to do is go walking out there without a shotgun-wielding guide. But we could drive the road from Churchill out to the rocket range, some 12 miles away. The problem is there aren’t many places where you can see the water’s edge and it would be easy to miss a polar bear in the area. We drove to the ‘twin golf balls’, now-abandoned radomes which used to house sixteen-foot radar dishes used to track sounding rockets at the nearby rocket range. The rocket range was established in 1959 (remember the ‘International Geophysical Year’?) and was used to launch over 3500 rockets into the high atmosphere for research on weather and the northern lights. In the mid-Nineties, the range was leased by a private company and re-named ‘Spaceport Canada’ but the venture failed when the market for commercial space launches tanked in the late Nineties.
After the twin golf balls and an attempt to get closer to Bird Cove didn’t find a polar bear (one had been sighted there the day before), we drove to the Churchill Northern Studies Centre, hoping to take a tour. But we arrived there too late in the day for today so planned one for the next day and continued exploring side roads, hoping to see a bear. Off in the distance we could see the tour helicopter circling a peninsula of land jutting into the Bay so we knew they were seeing bears but we couldn’t get closer. The helicopter company promises you will see a polar bear or you will get a free ride out to see one until you do. Then again, the ride is $250 a person for a half-hour ride, three-person minimum. And we had no interest in seeing bears in a noisy helicopter.
We continued to check off the roads we were permitted to drive (the others had too many soft areas and if you got stuck, it could be an interesting night. Cell phones don’t work here and you wouldn’t want to try to walk out, particularly late in the day or at night).
Our travels took us down the Goose Creek Road to the Marina. We later learned that the Churchill River had been partially diverted into the Nelson to raise its water level for the hydro turbines. This change in river level had been devastating to Churchill and it took seven years to determine that a weir could be put in the river to raise levels to acceptable levels. The many-million-dollar project included development of a small marina above the weir and a water-pumping station to assure the supply of fresh water to Churchill and avoid salt-water encroachment from Hudson’s Bay. We read a superlative book on the subject back at our home base at Blue Sky, one of the many advantages of going the B&B route.
Afterwards we cruised back toward the rocket range and it happened: as we drove down a section of road heading straight for the bay and approached a 90-degree turn, there at the turn was a polar bear. You could almost read its body language. “Rats,” it thought, “just as I have to cross an open area where I can be seen, these guys drive by.” The bear didn’t run but it did amble purposefully down over the rocks and started walking along the water’s edge. We were extremely lucky to have a good viewpoint over the area just 50 yards back. We sat there with our binoculars watching every move for the next half-hour. The bear soon came to a small inlet and instead of going around, it just walked through the water. Shortly thereafter, it went for a swim. We watched it intently as it swam in a leisurely but surprisingly-efficient manner, fading from view as the daylight died. The last we saw him he was swimming out away from land. What an incredible sight!
That evening we were so excited that it took a while to calm down and go to bed. But before we did we decided we’d get up and check for the Northern lights later in the night. At 0200 I heard Labashi stirring and she came back a few minutes later to tell me she was seeing something. We half-dressed and went out to the truck (checking carefully for polar bears lurking nearby since we had seen a photo of polar bear prints taken in the front yard of our B&B) and headed out of town toward the rocket range. We could indeed see strange light, but unfortunately it was behind the clouds. Oddly enough, the clouds would break here and there but we’d not see the lights behind (they must have been higher or lower) and in short order the break would close up. After an hour we headed home but we loved the wild feeling of listening to the brisk wind whistle by our lonely pickup out on the polar-bear-infested tundra east of Churchill. We will long remember it.
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Tuesday, 14 August-
Our train was originally scheduled in to Churchill at 0830 but we had left more than two hours late. The schedule showed a 14-and-a-half hour journey for the 342 mile trip but our conductor told us it would take 19 hours as we departed Thompson. It actually took 22 hours. As we started out, something didn’t seem right about the timetable as I counted off the seconds between kilometer-markers and figured we were doing about 30 miles per hour. What I hadn’t anticipated was the muskeg. The train to Churchill was at onetime known as the ‘Muskeg Express’ and we soon left the boreal forest behind and began crossing the muskeg. In this area the ground is soft and the track forever in need of maintenance. The train slows to ten-to-fifteen miles per hour and sometimes it just very slowly creeps across a narrow roadbed above swampy land on both sides. At one point I heard someone nearby say a bee was flying alongside the train and was considerably faster than us. We would occasionally come to a more solid area and speed up again, but only occasionally—or so it seemed, anyway.
I gave up trying to sleep as the sky lightened around 0400. By 0600 I had to get up and fortunately breakfast started at 0630. A hearty breakfast revived us quite a bit and we enjoyed sitting in the dining car’s seats and watching the sun rise into the sky.
We spent most of the trip looking out the windows and were surprised to see virtually no wildlife. We’d see an occasional duck or raven but only once did we see a pair of sandhill cranes and we saw no four-legged animals at all. We asked about wildlife sightings and heard they see an occasional moose or muskrat, but not very often.
As we rode along we couldn’t help but wonder about how difficult it would be to try to walk through this area. There are many stops identified along the track but the great majority of them are nothing more than a sign and no visible trail leading in any direction. We did have two major stops for the native Canadians at Pik and Ilford and then the hydro town (i.e., the location of a major hydro dam) of Gillam.
We did see a very intriguing sight along the way. Well above Gillam we saw a survival lean-to and it appeared to have been used fairly recently. The lean-two was obviously sited close to the track and in an obvious clearing so it could be easily seen. It looked like something built by “Survivorman” Les Stroud or Bear Grylls of ‘Man vs. Wild’ (tv ‘reality’ shows about survival skills). It was a lean-to of tamarack or spruce poles covered with spruce boughs, most of it still in place. The fire ring was black with soot and didn’t appear to have any recent growth coming up through it, giving the impression of recent use. We have to wonder who built it and why. Was it someone waiting for the train to come through to rescue them? It doesn’t seem you’d have a survival shelter and a fire for a routine stop and you’d think travelers through the area would have a tent so who could it have been and what was their story?
After our long, slow ride to Churchill we arrived, as I said earlier, at 1600. Our luggage bags have backpack straps which can be pulled out of a zippered compartment to turn them into backpacks so we chose to forego the taxi (though it was only $7 for a taxi) and walked the ten-minute walk to our B&B.
Our B&B was ‘Blue Sky Bed and Sled’, run by Jenifor Ollander and Gerald Azure. We had the unusual privilege at staying there even though Gerald and Jenifor had just left on vacation. The original plan had been for them to greet us before leaving later that day but then their schedule was moved up a day (and we would have missed them anyway because of the late arrival of the train). Their home is on Button Street at the edge of town and their back yard abuts the tundra--- polar bear territory!
After settling in we walked back into town and had dinner at Gypsy’s restaurant. After a bit of walking around we returned to our home for the next few days and met Marilyn and Linda, two incredible women who had been staying at the B&B and had extended their stay for a few days and had taken the role of our ‘lead dogs’, i.e., someone to help us understand how things work in Churchill.
Marilyn and Linda are retired nurses and veteran travelers. Marilyn is from a farming family in Petaluma, CA and Linda a former Navy nurse now living in southwest Georgia. They were planning to take the same beluga-and-fort tour the next day and had a rental truck so could give us a ride to breakfast and the tour office — lucky us!
We chatted a bit but were pretty tired so called a night by 2200 and slept like babes.
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Monday, 13 August-
Today we spent the day hanging out and awaiting our departure for Churchill that evening. We slept in and took our showers, then took our good-old time packing. We dropped in again at the Visitor’s Center and talked some more with Carol (just chatting) before spending the entire afternoon in the library. I spent an hour or so on the web but then spent most of the afternoon reading ‘Canadian Geographic’, ‘The Beaver’ (Canada’s history magazine), ‘Canadian Aviation’, and ‘Canadian Woodworker’ magazines while Labashi perused two books about the building of the Hudson Bay Railway and another about Churchill. Early that evening we had a fantastic “gourmet pizza” at Boston Pizza. If you want to try the second-best pizza sauce ever (almost as good as Pontillo’s), get some of Boson Pizza’s ‘signature sauce’ on the side for one of their gourmet pizzas.
Our train was supposed to depart at 1755 but we had talked with Colleen Smook (owner of McGreedy Campgrounds) about shuttling us to the train station and she said it wouldn’t go until at least 1930. We were anxious to get to the station so shuttled out there around 1830 but didn’t depart until 2000. But we enjoyed talking with two young fisheries biologists who were headed to Churchill to scuba dive to obtain water samples to establish a baseline for future water studies.
The boarding process went easily and we settled in to our seats for the long ride, turning around the two seats in front of us to provide a nice little four-seat sort-of-private area for us and our carry-on gear. At the Winnipeg train station we had been told our carry-on was limited in size but the divers were carrying giant gear-bags aboard and it became apparent that the only limit is how much you can carry.
By 2300 people most people around us were stretching out across the seats and their leg supports as makeshift (but very uncomfortable) beds. The leg support brackets of the opposing seats could be swung under their padded areas to make a flat place to span the distance between seats but the problem was they ended up about an inch higher than the seats. We could lean our seats back a little more than an airplane’s seats and slump down a bit with our feet on the far seat but the leg-support platforms made it uncomfortable. Through the night Labashi managed to fall asleep for a half-hour here and there but I don’t think I got more than ten minutes sleep at a time and only a total of maybe an hour and a half for the night.
(this post covers 13-17 August, 2007)
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Friday, 17 August-
Our overnight went pretty well this time. Though our makeshift ‘beds’ were uncomfortable, we split up and each took a four-seat section and were able to lie down a little more. We each got three or four hours sleep though I still was up around dawn at 0430. Again, a hearty breakfast fixed all and we felt a lot better today than we had at this point on the way up.
Our trip to Thompson was even longer this time but we didn’t mind. This time it was a 23-hour trip. We saw two bald eagles and a hawk on the way back. We had a wonderful time talking even more with Marilyn and Linda and then had a curious coincidence. At lunch time there were only two seats available when we entered the dining car so we sat with a couple we had seen going up, around town, and now on the way back to Thompson. The gent had a tee-shirt with the logo of the Sam Waller Museum in The Pas, a favorite of ours. I asked if he had enjoyed the museum (figuring the answer was yes if he had bought the tee shirt!) and he cagily asked, ‘well, what did YOU think?”. I said we liked it a lot, to which he replied with a big grin, “Good… because I’d the director of it!” To which I replied (also with a smile): “Then how about answering my email?” Incredibly, the one person I had sent an email to in Canada (after we had left The Pas and were in Thompson trying to find out more about Bert Huffman) was sitting across from me. Ron Scott and his wife Patty were a delight. Ron’s quite a canoeist and when we pulled out a map of Northern Manitoba, he pointed to an ad and asked ‘recognize anyone?’. It was Ron in his canoeing duds on the ad for The Pas. We had a wonderful hour or so chatting, all about the museum, Sam Waller, and “The Northland” poem. And get this: Ron is planning a canoeing trip next summer—a 30-40 day wilderness canoe trip to York Factory. Now THAT’s a canoe trip.
The day went pretty quickly but by late afternoon I was ready to get off the train. Unfortunately, it was about that time we pulled off to a siding to shut down for an hour while three freight trains worked they way toward and by us. We finally rolled into the station about 22:00 (scheduled for 11:00 this morning!!!). We grabbed our gear and went to the appointed pickup spot only to be left wondering. I went inside and called only to get a message telling me Colleen’s voice mailbox was full. Labashi went in to try a few minutes later, at which point Colleen showed up, giving us her apologies and saying she had had to go pick up her husband from the bar— he had called and said he was probably too drunk to safely drive home (Canada’s a wonderfully-different place, isn’t it?).
We were very happy to find Mocha Joe all safe and sound and went to bed for a long and blissful sleep.
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Thursday, 16 August-
We woke early for having been up last night and Labashi couldn’t wait to get back on the road to look for polar bears (I, on the other hand, was ready for breakfast).
Labashi won this one and we drove out as far as the twin golf balls but saw nothing new. We then drove to Cape Merry and took the walking tour with our delightful guide, a young aboriginal woman named Adelia Spence. I got a kick out of Adelia dressed up in her green Parks Canada uniform and red mittens, wearing stylish white-framed sunglasses and carrying a Remington 870 Marine stainless-steel riot shotgun. Adelia told us she had the bangers and Carolyn, the other ranger, had the slugs today. Carolyn went out ahead of us and surveyed the rocks by binocular with her shotgun slung over her shoulder, then signaled that it was okay for Adelia to bring us out to tour the gun ramparts, powder magazine, and cairn which make up the park. Adelia did a great job of giving us the history of the area and introducing us to buffalo berries (Canadian soapberries), gooseberries, Arctic cotton, and lichens (there are three types—orange, green, and black. The black you can eat but Adelia says she has tasted it and it’s almost tasteless and was used only in the starving times).
As we took our tour we talked about the ship lying offshore and Adelia said it’s a grain freighter awaiting dock space. This, of course, is prime grain-shipping season and is critically important to Churchill’s economy. We turned away for a few minutes and when we looked back the ship was gone—as if picked up by an alien spaceship or something. It took us a few minutes to realize a fog bank had swallowed the ship and was headed toward us. In another ten minutes we were in fog and the rain started coming down. Time for breakfast at Gypsy’s!
After our late breakfast (actually at lunch time) we called for an appointment at the Northern Studies Centre and got one for 1300. We rolled out there and took a nice little tour for $5 each. I had thought the centre had been developed as a teaching site but its mission is actually one of logistics support for researchers. They make all the arrangements, house and equip researchers (include rental shotguns) and fly them by helicopter, generally to Wapusk National Park a critical polar bear habitat east of the centre.
We then decided we had better get busy—we had to have the rental truck back by 1530. We loaded up the coordinates of Churchill’s two geocaches and smiled when we found one was only a half-mile from the centre. We found it (“Rusty Bear”) in short order and then blasted out to Cape Merry to find “Chilly Churchill”. That left us 15 minutes to gas up and return the rental truck but we made it. The rental truck had cost me $75 to rent but $49 to fill up with gas. We did 162 miles in an area where the longest road (we took) is only 12 miles long.
After returning the truck we packed up for our departure this evening and called for the taxi to pick us up at 1900 for our 2000 depature. The taxi didn’t show and it wasn’t until we called to check that we learned the train was delayed to 2230. That time seemed to fly and we were soon aboard and departing.
As we pulled out of the station we said the only thing we wished we had seen were the northern lights. Labashi looked out the window and there they were—the best we’ve seen yet. We watched them for an hour before clouds moved in.
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Wednesday, 15 August-
We awoke greatly refreshed in our comfortable Blue Sky comfortable beds—what a change from last night! We went to breakfast at Gypsy’s on this rainy, 50-degree day with Marilyn and Linda, our breakfast tab being picked up by the B&B (nice!)
The rain just got harder as we drove to the tour office and boarded the bus to our boat. As we crowded around the outdoor table to get ponchos, the rain came down harder yet and the wind blew it sideways. We had decent rain jackets but no rain pants and our pant-legs were soon soaked. The regular briefing about the belugas was cut short and we boarded, with some surprise, an open tour boat for a quick ride across the bay to Prince of Wales Fort.
Our tour guide, Bob, gave us a good tour of the Fort, which today consists of little more than massive stone walls, 35 feet thick in some places. The northeast corner is sagging a bit and under re-construction. I loved seeing a dozen-or-so big cannons lying along the wall like so many logs, each a masterpiece of power capable of throwing the ball a thousand yards and each damaged in some way. The damage had been done by the French, who took the fort in 1782 (that was a while ago, eh?). (A brief description is at http://thecanadianencyclopedia.com/index.cfm?PgNm=TCE&Params=A1ARTA0006487)
Upon disembarking the boat to tour the fort we had been introduced to the realities of life in the Churchill area. There are polar bears in the area and Parks Canada has two shotgun-wielding rangers on the island for our protection. Both were carrying Remington 870 12-gauge riot guns, one loaded with ‘bangers’ and one with slugs, we’re told. (I’d be willing to bet the guy with bangers also has slugs). The ‘bangers’ are to scare away the bears (hopefully) and the slugs are there in case a bear refuses to go and presents a danger in which tragedy can only be avoided by killing the bear.
We had strict instructions to stay in a group and of course we ‘adults’ told the older children we were going to trip them if a bear appeared and we needed to beat them back to the boat.
With that in mind, it was a surprise to us when we found ourselves separated from the group (though behind the gates of the fort). We had been taking photos on the ramparts and had been asked to take a photo of one of the other tourists. When we turned around the group below was gone and the gates shut. But one of the rangers was nearby and when we passed he scolded us (gently!) for being separated from our group. But it only took a minute to catch up and we realized that the head count back at the boat would have caught our absence before the boat’s departure (and of course the rangers were still there). Still, we thought it a bit careless on Bob’s part to have departed the Fort without all of his little duckies all in a row. (We looked like little duckies, all dressed in our identical red ponchos).
We then boarded the boat and headed back across the Churchill River mouth. We immediately saw belugas, in fact, dozens of them traveling in small groups (see http://www.seanorthtours.com/morepics2table2.html ) We spent the next two hours drifting or slowly idling among them. We could also hear them. The mate put a pair of hydrophones over the side when we stopped and they easily picked up the incredible array of sounds. Labashi even saw several of the belugas mouthing the mikes. Karaoke fans, I suppose. We learned that the belugas were called ‘sea canaries’ because their sounds could be heard through the wooden hulls of explorer ships.
At one point we thought we might be in for an experience. The captain had shut down the engines and when he went to move the boat away from one of the channel buoys about to attack us, the engines wouldn’t start. We were lucky and the wind prevented us from drifting into the buoy (the boat was small enough that we could have pushed off) but it took a few minutes to resolve the problem and get the engines going. I noticed the captain didn’t shut down again. I asked the mate what she had been doing in going below decks with a bucket. She had drained a water trap in the fuel line but there wasn’t enough water to worry about. Interestingly, she said she had to take the fuel-tainted water below and take it ashore for proper disposal. Even that small amount of diesel fuel couldn’t go overboard.
After our beluga adventure we had lunch at the Seaport Inn before touring the excellent Eskimo museum. This museum was started in 1946 by the rector of the Catholic Church and still today is owned by the church. It has case-after-case of interesting and beautiful stone, bone, and antler carvings and the world-class collection includes a rather innocuous chair which, upon further investigation, turns out to have come from one of Roald Amundsen’s ships of exploration.
Later that afternoon we rented a pickup from Tamarack Rentals ($75 per day) and began touring the area on our own. We drove east of town past the airport (where the road changes to dirt) and began our search for polar bears. The bears, it turns out, like the rocky coast and hang out among the rocks. What you DON’T want to do is go walking out there without a shotgun-wielding guide. But we could drive the road from Churchill out to the rocket range, some 12 miles away. The problem is there aren’t many places where you can see the water’s edge and it would be easy to miss a polar bear in the area. We drove to the ‘twin golf balls’, now-abandoned radomes which used to house sixteen-foot radar dishes used to track sounding rockets at the nearby rocket range. The rocket range was established in 1959 (remember the ‘International Geophysical Year’?) and was used to launch over 3500 rockets into the high atmosphere for research on weather and the northern lights. In the mid-Nineties, the range was leased by a private company and re-named ‘Spaceport Canada’ but the venture failed when the market for commercial space launches tanked in the late Nineties.
After the twin golf balls and an attempt to get closer to Bird Cove didn’t find a polar bear (one had been sighted there the day before), we drove to the Churchill Northern Studies Centre, hoping to take a tour. But we arrived there too late in the day for today so planned one for the next day and continued exploring side roads, hoping to see a bear. Off in the distance we could see the tour helicopter circling a peninsula of land jutting into the Bay so we knew they were seeing bears but we couldn’t get closer. The helicopter company promises you will see a polar bear or you will get a free ride out to see one until you do. Then again, the ride is $250 a person for a half-hour ride, three-person minimum. And we had no interest in seeing bears in a noisy helicopter.
We continued to check off the roads we were permitted to drive (the others had too many soft areas and if you got stuck, it could be an interesting night. Cell phones don’t work here and you wouldn’t want to try to walk out, particularly late in the day or at night).
Our travels took us down the Goose Creek Road to the Marina. We later learned that the Churchill River had been partially diverted into the Nelson to raise its water level for the hydro turbines. This change in river level had been devastating to Churchill and it took seven years to determine that a weir could be put in the river to raise levels to acceptable levels. The many-million-dollar project included development of a small marina above the weir and a water-pumping station to assure the supply of fresh water to Churchill and avoid salt-water encroachment from Hudson’s Bay. We read a superlative book on the subject back at our home base at Blue Sky, one of the many advantages of going the B&B route.
Afterwards we cruised back toward the rocket range and it happened: as we drove down a section of road heading straight for the bay and approached a 90-degree turn, there at the turn was a polar bear. You could almost read its body language. “Rats,” it thought, “just as I have to cross an open area where I can be seen, these guys drive by.” The bear didn’t run but it did amble purposefully down over the rocks and started walking along the water’s edge. We were extremely lucky to have a good viewpoint over the area just 50 yards back. We sat there with our binoculars watching every move for the next half-hour. The bear soon came to a small inlet and instead of going around, it just walked through the water. Shortly thereafter, it went for a swim. We watched it intently as it swam in a leisurely but surprisingly-efficient manner, fading from view as the daylight died. The last we saw him he was swimming out away from land. What an incredible sight!
That evening we were so excited that it took a while to calm down and go to bed. But before we did we decided we’d get up and check for the Northern lights later in the night. At 0200 I heard Labashi stirring and she came back a few minutes later to tell me she was seeing something. We half-dressed and went out to the truck (checking carefully for polar bears lurking nearby since we had seen a photo of polar bear prints taken in the front yard of our B&B) and headed out of town toward the rocket range. We could indeed see strange light, but unfortunately it was behind the clouds. Oddly enough, the clouds would break here and there but we’d not see the lights behind (they must have been higher or lower) and in short order the break would close up. After an hour we headed home but we loved the wild feeling of listening to the brisk wind whistle by our lonely pickup out on the polar-bear-infested tundra east of Churchill. We will long remember it.
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Tuesday, 14 August-
Our train was originally scheduled in to Churchill at 0830 but we had left more than two hours late. The schedule showed a 14-and-a-half hour journey for the 342 mile trip but our conductor told us it would take 19 hours as we departed Thompson. It actually took 22 hours. As we started out, something didn’t seem right about the timetable as I counted off the seconds between kilometer-markers and figured we were doing about 30 miles per hour. What I hadn’t anticipated was the muskeg. The train to Churchill was at onetime known as the ‘Muskeg Express’ and we soon left the boreal forest behind and began crossing the muskeg. In this area the ground is soft and the track forever in need of maintenance. The train slows to ten-to-fifteen miles per hour and sometimes it just very slowly creeps across a narrow roadbed above swampy land on both sides. At one point I heard someone nearby say a bee was flying alongside the train and was considerably faster than us. We would occasionally come to a more solid area and speed up again, but only occasionally—or so it seemed, anyway.
I gave up trying to sleep as the sky lightened around 0400. By 0600 I had to get up and fortunately breakfast started at 0630. A hearty breakfast revived us quite a bit and we enjoyed sitting in the dining car’s seats and watching the sun rise into the sky.
We spent most of the trip looking out the windows and were surprised to see virtually no wildlife. We’d see an occasional duck or raven but only once did we see a pair of sandhill cranes and we saw no four-legged animals at all. We asked about wildlife sightings and heard they see an occasional moose or muskrat, but not very often.
As we rode along we couldn’t help but wonder about how difficult it would be to try to walk through this area. There are many stops identified along the track but the great majority of them are nothing more than a sign and no visible trail leading in any direction. We did have two major stops for the native Canadians at Pik and Ilford and then the hydro town (i.e., the location of a major hydro dam) of Gillam.
We did see a very intriguing sight along the way. Well above Gillam we saw a survival lean-to and it appeared to have been used fairly recently. The lean-two was obviously sited close to the track and in an obvious clearing so it could be easily seen. It looked like something built by “Survivorman” Les Stroud or Bear Grylls of ‘Man vs. Wild’ (tv ‘reality’ shows about survival skills). It was a lean-to of tamarack or spruce poles covered with spruce boughs, most of it still in place. The fire ring was black with soot and didn’t appear to have any recent growth coming up through it, giving the impression of recent use. We have to wonder who built it and why. Was it someone waiting for the train to come through to rescue them? It doesn’t seem you’d have a survival shelter and a fire for a routine stop and you’d think travelers through the area would have a tent so who could it have been and what was their story?
After our long, slow ride to Churchill we arrived, as I said earlier, at 1600. Our luggage bags have backpack straps which can be pulled out of a zippered compartment to turn them into backpacks so we chose to forego the taxi (though it was only $7 for a taxi) and walked the ten-minute walk to our B&B.
Our B&B was ‘Blue Sky Bed and Sled’, run by Jenifor Ollander and Gerald Azure. We had the unusual privilege at staying there even though Gerald and Jenifor had just left on vacation. The original plan had been for them to greet us before leaving later that day but then their schedule was moved up a day (and we would have missed them anyway because of the late arrival of the train). Their home is on Button Street at the edge of town and their back yard abuts the tundra--- polar bear territory!
After settling in we walked back into town and had dinner at Gypsy’s restaurant. After a bit of walking around we returned to our home for the next few days and met Marilyn and Linda, two incredible women who had been staying at the B&B and had extended their stay for a few days and had taken the role of our ‘lead dogs’, i.e., someone to help us understand how things work in Churchill.
Marilyn and Linda are retired nurses and veteran travelers. Marilyn is from a farming family in Petaluma, CA and Linda a former Navy nurse now living in southwest Georgia. They were planning to take the same beluga-and-fort tour the next day and had a rental truck so could give us a ride to breakfast and the tour office — lucky us!
We chatted a bit but were pretty tired so called a night by 2200 and slept like babes.
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Monday, 13 August-
Today we spent the day hanging out and awaiting our departure for Churchill that evening. We slept in and took our showers, then took our good-old time packing. We dropped in again at the Visitor’s Center and talked some more with Carol (just chatting) before spending the entire afternoon in the library. I spent an hour or so on the web but then spent most of the afternoon reading ‘Canadian Geographic’, ‘The Beaver’ (Canada’s history magazine), ‘Canadian Aviation’, and ‘Canadian Woodworker’ magazines while Labashi perused two books about the building of the Hudson Bay Railway and another about Churchill. Early that evening we had a fantastic “gourmet pizza” at Boston Pizza. If you want to try the second-best pizza sauce ever (almost as good as Pontillo’s), get some of Boson Pizza’s ‘signature sauce’ on the side for one of their gourmet pizzas.
Our train was supposed to depart at 1755 but we had talked with Colleen Smook (owner of McGreedy Campgrounds) about shuttling us to the train station and she said it wouldn’t go until at least 1930. We were anxious to get to the station so shuttled out there around 1830 but didn’t depart until 2000. But we enjoyed talking with two young fisheries biologists who were headed to Churchill to scuba dive to obtain water samples to establish a baseline for future water studies.
The boarding process went easily and we settled in to our seats for the long ride, turning around the two seats in front of us to provide a nice little four-seat sort-of-private area for us and our carry-on gear. At the Winnipeg train station we had been told our carry-on was limited in size but the divers were carrying giant gear-bags aboard and it became apparent that the only limit is how much you can carry.
By 2300 people most people around us were stretching out across the seats and their leg supports as makeshift (but very uncomfortable) beds. The leg support brackets of the opposing seats could be swung under their padded areas to make a flat place to span the distance between seats but the problem was they ended up about an inch higher than the seats. We could lean our seats back a little more than an airplane’s seats and slump down a bit with our feet on the far seat but the leg-support platforms made it uncomfortable. Through the night Labashi managed to fall asleep for a half-hour here and there but I don’t think I got more than ten minutes sleep at a time and only a total of maybe an hour and a half for the night.
posted by Bezabor&Labashi | 23:59
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