At the Edge of the World - Westworld Magazine - July 2005
Ivvavik, the Yukon: The Land of the Midnight Sun is in flames, the view choked by the smoke of 150 forest fires. It feels more like the Brazilian outback than the Yukon. This Canada Day we are pushing the country’s limits in Ivvavik National Park in the northern corner of the Yukon Territory – the largest Canadian park no one has ever heard of. If the smoke clears, we’ll find the Firth River and raft what might be the oldest running navigable waterway in the country. Three days, five flights and five degrees above the Arctic Circle, Ivavvik and the Firth are a long way from anywhere.
At the Finto Motor Inn in Inuvik, I meet up with the Canadian River Expeditions gang; the 15 humans, including three superhuman guides, with whom I will spend the next 10 days navigating 130 kilometres of the Firth to the Beaufort Sea. Over Chilkoot lager (beer worth freezing for . . .) and caribou burgers, we introduce ourselves and study what lies ahead. Everyone marvels at the late-night sunlight flowing through the pub windows. I wonder on the karmic repercussions of eating caribou burgers on the animals’ home turf.
Only first names are needed up here. Jack, Rich, Saint, John, Chris, Anita and Allie discuss bear bangers and compare the Deet content of their mosquito repellents. For the next two weeks they will not be cardiologists, oncologists, gastroenterologists, bankers or telephone linemen. Somehow they’ve managed to hack their way out of the concrete jungles of New York and Toronto, chart their way north, and are now sitting a long way from anywhere in the middle of nowhere, ready to go somewhere.
We’ve come to Ivvavik for the wild things – grizzly bears, moose, wolves, birds – and especially the migration of the Porcupine caribou herd. For it’s this ancient ritual that gave Ivvavik its name (Ivvavik is the Inuvialaktun word for “birthplace.”) Each year, 130,000 of the bizarre-looking ungulates plod north through the massive park to the tasty green tundra and windy, less-buggy sanctuary of the coastal calving grounds. Often compared to the famed Serengeti wildebeest migration, the Porcupine caribou rite is also the most compelling argument for preserving the neighbouring – and apparently oil-rich – Arctic National Wildlife Reserve. Add Arctic fox, Dall’s sheep and wolverines, and Ivvavik promises us a full year’s kitchen calendar worth of wild animals. We sleep that night with muskox on our minds.
Next morning, a break in the smoke and a pilot afraid of heights grants us a stunning 200-km flight from Inuvik into Ivvavik. Bob brings his Twin Otter low across the Mackenzie River delta, its braided canals of muddy water snaking through rich green tundra, wrapping around a thousand mirrored ponds. He barnstorms the smooth rolling valleys of the British Mountain foothills, stirring stomachs and spontaneous laughter. We bank sharply over Margaret Lake, spotting the Firth and the three baby-blue rubber rafts that will float us back to the Arctic Ocean.
It’s a spectacular and unique landscape. Some 18,000 years ago, give or take a few thousand, the massive glaciers of the Wisconsin Ice Age missed this part of the continent, a glacial refugium once called Beringia. It’s a land artfully eroded by millennia of ice and snow, water, wind and gravity while the rest of the continent was being scraped clean and crunched by glaciation. We’re lucky we’ve got a rock guy on board. Jens, a former child model and geologist, recently turned banker, lectures us on Ivvavik’s conical peaks, V-shaped valleys and stegosaurus-looking rock ridges called tors. Up here, rocks are definitely more relevant than mutual funds.
The weather in Ivvavik can change before the camp coffee perks, and we’re lucky to put-in on a perfect summer day. But it’s not long before the wildfire smoke finds us, clogging our views and dulling the light of the circling sun. It’s pretty thick, but no one seems too bothered. We can still see the good fishing spots. A thick Arctic char strikes my lure.
Buck knives are sharpened. Beautiful blonde Anita swims naked – and very quickly – in the icy river. I’m so happy it’s not a beer commercial.
After only 10 minutes on the river our guides become heroes. Our leader, Jim, has been running the Firth since saber-toothed tigers walked its banks, and his younger crewmates, Dave and Andy, were born with silver Leatherman multi-tools on their hips. These three guys drive the rafts, make gallons of coffee and tandoori chicken, and sweet-talk Mother Nature with big smiles and such seemingly little effort that we hardly notice death – or the mosquitoes – lurking around each bend in the river. (And on the eve of Jens and Anita’s engagement, Andy will bake a Black Forest cake so good, it would distract even the most rugged German from his bear watching.)
It takes only two days for our newly nomadic life to find its own structure. Tents go up and down. Boats are loaded and unloaded and loaded again. Dishes are dirtied and done. Routines we use to mask the unpredictability of the wilderness. If I thought river rafting was about rock ‘n’ roll whitewater and shooters of adrenaline, I soon realize that a trip like this is more Leonard Cohen than Led Zeppelin. The Firth is a liquid highway, carving through sharp rock canyons, past synclines and anticlines – folded rock blankets from a million years ago. (Thanks, Jens.)
It’s also constant movement; a slow, dramatic change in landscape every day, as the jagged walls smooth out into rounded grassy foothills that flatten and stretch into the ice sheets of the delta. At Joe Creek, we camp on gravel-covered ice hummocks, and I see why NASA researchers compare parts of the Arctic to the moon or Mars. Ivvavik is otherworldly.
But there are a few bumps all right. We have to jump ship to ramble along the riverbank and scout Class IV rapids called things like Wrap and Ram Rock and Big Bend Rollercoaster. It’s big water that ultimately soaks our underwear and gets our hearts pumping faster than the camp coffee. And it’s Sluice Box Rapid, a.k.a., Slice Box‚ that lives up to its reputation and strikes a gash that puts Andy’s boat into dry dock the next day.
We’ve always got one dry eye open for the caribou. But the herd is missing, maybe lost in all the smoke. Jim calls Parks Canada on the sat-phone, but their Internet server is down so they can’t locate the dozen tagged by a satellite “collar project.” It’s not until a rainy hike in the Red Hills that we finally see caribou. Or rather, one: a lone sentry on a ridge, maybe a scout, sent by the herd to learn the location of our little human gang. We’re heartened. The sighting only further emphasizes the hugeness of this country – you need a lot of space to hide 130,000 caribou.
After five days of eternal smoky sunshine, I’ve finally stopped trying to remember what day it is – a step past removing my wristwatch. It’s a freeing feeling. Summer above the Arctic Circle is timeless, and it’s as if the trip so far has been one long day. Moving in a perpetual circle above us, the sun never once dips beyond the horizon. We take midnight hikes because we can. As I climb into my tent to rest, I wonder how many words the Inuvialuit people must have for “nap.” I’d like to ask one, but there aren’t many Inuvialuit people here – there aren’t many people here, period. Only about 150 humans pass through Ivvavik each year, and the nearest community is hundreds of kilometres away. So it’s a bit of a shock when we encounter another tribe of rafters camped ahead of us. As we float past, they flock to the riverbank to take a look. After only a week together in the wild, we’re all curious to see some other humans.
Near the river delta, the mountains finally smooth out, and we pull in at Engigstciak‚ a dramatic rock outcrop that juts out of the plain. People have always stopped here. For the past 10,000 years, the lone 90-metre tussock has been the meet-and-eat place for Dorset and Thule, Eskimo and Inuvialuit hunters. And like those before us, we climb it to take one last long look over the massive plain for the caribou. Not an antler in sight. To the north we can see the Arctic Ocean and the end of our trip; behind us we leave the smoke-filled British Mountains, and any chance of seeing the caribou herd.
It seems the bears and wolves and muskox have gone missing too. But despite the lack of wildlife and the smoke-choked vistas, I’m impressed by the lack of disappointment among my fellow rafters. We know there’s more to this trip than Kodak moments. It was a few days earlier at Joe Creek camp that we hiked to a cliff point overlooking the Firth River valley and sat around an ancient tent circle, a dozen flat stones dating back hundreds, maybe thousands of years. There we rested alongside generations of other humans, talking the same talk of weather, food and the route ahead. It was conversation that might have passed for small talk back in our regular world, but up here, under a huge hazy sky, it was mostly all that mattered.
In Ivvavik, evidence of our fragile humanity is everywhere. Returning to the raft in the rain, we slide down a steep creek bed; John falls and cracks his head open on a rock. Rolling through the Big Bend rapid, I get a clear understanding that a life jacket is actually a life jacket. And there’s nothing like carrying your own shit to make you realize you’re alive. Three solid metal containers strapped to Andy’s raft house the precious cargo. (Both Canadian River Expeditions and Parks Canada are adamant that no trace of our new-found humanity be left behind.)
Ten regular life days – or one long 240-hour Arctic summer day – and our rafts are finally torpedoed out into a shallow lagoon of the Beaufort Sea. The Arctic Ocean, gripped by ice eight months of the year, has melted enough to let us in, and our little tribe celebrates with an authentic polar bear swim off Nunaluk Spit. A ringed seal bobbing among the ice chunks watches our coldwater baptism as the guides, understanding the need for ceremony, gladly and madly work our dozen cameras to record the event.
Suddenly we are off the river, returning to the realm of man, our two-week breakaway from our own migrating herd over. Passing back through the motels of Inuvik and Whitehorse, I am acutely aware of the comforts that shield us from the unpredictability of nature (I especially appreciate the pillows and hot showers). A postcard rack in the airport gift shop overflows with the wildlife we didn’t see, but there are no regrets. The caribou would have been a bonus.
Somewhere over northern British Columbia, the smoke finally dissipates and I can see clearly. We were the wildlife on this trip. We had come a long way to spot ourselves.
JT