11 July 2004

Joined: 23 Mar 2004 Posts: 23

What a day! 12 hours in the car to go from Dawson City to Inuvik. The day started with seeing a fox running with a cell phone and ended with Caribou burgers at midnight. We are exhausted but happy to have arrived with such a nice trip.

We ran into more forest fires and smoke along the way, created a crust of mud on the truck and saw an amazing red skyline where the clouds had trapped the smoke and optimized on the sun...quite beautiful.
We saw tons of ptarmigans, moms with babies, and I nearly hit a few...oops! We also saw several snowshoe hares, and fox. We think we saw a few moose in a small lake but could not get a good view of them. We also saw a Snowy Owl and several birds called jaegers.

After passing through Eagle we crossed the Arctic Circle and headed for Inuvik.

These first two days with Ina and Ronnie have been great. The are extremely nice people and we have had lots of fun. Sometimes the laughter got so bad I had to stop the truck to get the tears out of my eyes. Luckily you can do that when you travel 20 miles between each vehicle!

Tomorrow brings the rest of the researchers and our last day in civilization! On Tuesday, We will fly to Sax Harbor on Banks Island to get fuel then on out to Mould Bay. I am sure it will be a long day with a lot of work to set up camp.