The Snow Story
Temp: -10°C
Sunlight - 8.2 hours
The day started out later than I am used to for this type of adventure. That’s the Inuvik way. At about 11AM we joined a friend for brunch and by about 12:30PM we were on our way. Our friends Jenn and Eric shared a machine, as did Lorie and I. The leader of the trip, Julian loaned us his machine while he borrowed another machine. Here’s a picture of Lorie on Julian’s Polaris. She’s a great snowmobile driver by the way!
Our objective was to head to a camp (Julian’s camp actually) about 10 kilometres from Inuvik, and then to do some snowshoeing. It didn’t take too long to reach the camp. There were some nice straight-aways for me to reacquire my snowmobile piloting expertise. After all, it has been a year or more since I’ve been on a machine. It’s like riding a bike, though and it didn’t take long to get back into the game.
There was some beautiful scenery along the way. The sun is still very low in the sky and that can make for some really great visuals. For most of the day, the sun burns through the scant standing timber. The result is an interesting array of shadows as seen in the picture below.
The snow is very sugary; very granular, and it picks up the low sunlight in a spectacular way. If you look at the right angle, you can see hundreds of tiny rainbows. Turn your head a degree or two and you see a billion crystalline structures glinting sunlight at you. When the sun is so low in the sky, the light seems more extreme, more powerful, more able to create phenomena like these.
Snowshoeing is hard work. Normally the party exchanges the lead shoer, like geese in a flight pattern. The lead person “blazes” the trail and makes the walking a little easier for the second person. The second person “makes” the trail and the walking is easier for the third person. So goes the process, until finally the subsequent walkers break the trail completely. Here’s a shot of a blazed trail. Truth known, I was so tired having snowshoed this far that I had to take a break…and a picture.
Inuvik is essentially on a river delta. The Mackenzie flays out into any number of lakes, and this makes for great snowmobiling since one gets a good mix of tight trail driving and wide open screams across the lakes. You couldn’t ask for more.
Even a short trip into the Delta requires some supplies, and the easiest way to do that is with a sled. The sled shown in the picture below is a good specimen of the ones you’ll see around here. Light, functional and efficient.
All in all, we snowshoed about seven kilometres and snowmobiled about twenty kilometres. It was a good day!
Cheers!
Sunlight - 8.2 hours
The day started out later than I am used to for this type of adventure. That’s the Inuvik way. At about 11AM we joined a friend for brunch and by about 12:30PM we were on our way. Our friends Jenn and Eric shared a machine, as did Lorie and I. The leader of the trip, Julian loaned us his machine while he borrowed another machine. Here’s a picture of Lorie on Julian’s Polaris. She’s a great snowmobile driver by the way!
Our objective was to head to a camp (Julian’s camp actually) about 10 kilometres from Inuvik, and then to do some snowshoeing. It didn’t take too long to reach the camp. There were some nice straight-aways for me to reacquire my snowmobile piloting expertise. After all, it has been a year or more since I’ve been on a machine. It’s like riding a bike, though and it didn’t take long to get back into the game.
There was some beautiful scenery along the way. The sun is still very low in the sky and that can make for some really great visuals. For most of the day, the sun burns through the scant standing timber. The result is an interesting array of shadows as seen in the picture below.
The snow is very sugary; very granular, and it picks up the low sunlight in a spectacular way. If you look at the right angle, you can see hundreds of tiny rainbows. Turn your head a degree or two and you see a billion crystalline structures glinting sunlight at you. When the sun is so low in the sky, the light seems more extreme, more powerful, more able to create phenomena like these.
Snowshoeing is hard work. Normally the party exchanges the lead shoer, like geese in a flight pattern. The lead person “blazes” the trail and makes the walking a little easier for the second person. The second person “makes” the trail and the walking is easier for the third person. So goes the process, until finally the subsequent walkers break the trail completely. Here’s a shot of a blazed trail. Truth known, I was so tired having snowshoed this far that I had to take a break…and a picture.
Inuvik is essentially on a river delta. The Mackenzie flays out into any number of lakes, and this makes for great snowmobiling since one gets a good mix of tight trail driving and wide open screams across the lakes. You couldn’t ask for more.
Even a short trip into the Delta requires some supplies, and the easiest way to do that is with a sled. The sled shown in the picture below is a good specimen of the ones you’ll see around here. Light, functional and efficient.
All in all, we snowshoed about seven kilometres and snowmobiled about twenty kilometres. It was a good day!
Cheers!
posted by Lorne at
11:48 PM
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