Baffin Island 2010 Afterthoughts

300km.

3 weeks of hauling 25-30kg packs through bog, tundra, moraines and over glaciers. My ankles, knees and hips didn’t appreciate any of this but the scenery was incredible and I gained a much deeper understanding of the Inuit culture.

The Inuit people are fantastic, we lived with them for 5 days.  We ate seal meat and raw, dried and boiled char (very like salmon)…although I wouldn’t recommend the fish eyes – too chewy and they burst in your mouth *bleurgh*.

We watches Bowhead whales swimming amongst the remainder of the sea ice in the bay and the small community of Qikitarjuaq (500 people) buzzed with excitement/fear as a polar bear was spotted on the outskirts of the hamlet.

A 3 hour boat ride took us to the end of the fjord as seals swum playfully in the water.  Once in the pass the peaks stretched a vertical kilometre from the valley floor and almost every day we saw chunks of rock the size of family cars…the size of houses, plunge down the frost shattered peaks and explode into pieces.

We saw tundra alive with colour, arctic poppies, blueberries, lemming scurrying down burrows, wolf spiders, arctic hare (glaringly obvious in their white coats against the summer rock and tundra), geese honking as they launched into flight, ravens shrilly crying as they swooped through the sky, snowy owls and polar bears (luckily from a distance).

We climbed steep terminal moraines over 50 metres high, crossed rivers carrying vast quantities of silt and the occasional chunk of ice as they powerfully eroded their banks. In the afternoon they rose with the melting of the ice, so high and fast they were uncrossable and boulders could be heard rolling in the river bed.

On the glacier we saw vast chasms carved by the melt water, picked our way carefully between the crevasses which enticed us to gaze into their deep blue gashes. Medial moraines stretched as long brown streaks down the glacier.

As we slept in our tents, pinned down by ice screws ad rocks that we had gathered from the glacier surface, the glacier groaned and moved beneath us, it shuddered and creaked and the rivers roared like jet engines throughout the night!

Listen to Katie’s afterthoughts on Baffin:

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