Today started with absolutely gorgeous weather when I woke up around 9:00am. But unfortunately an elder of the community around the age of 50 had a heart attack overnight while he was out hunting, so the dog sled races were cancelled for today. However our host family Andy and his wife Melanie had something planned for Dalen and I. Andy was suppose to go the flow edge to go kayaking with some hunters but it was to windy at 7:00am so he didn’t go. The flow edge is where the unfrozen sea meets the frozen section and is an extremely dangerous area because the ice can move without you even knowing it and polar bears are quite common there because of the seal population. Andy said that you can be out on the ice for 6 hours and start to return and the piece of ice that was once connected is no longer connected and next thing you know you have 10 kilometers of water between you and the land. So instead he (Andy) was going to take Dalen and I out on cross-country skis to look at the land and build an igloo, but the weather decided to be cruel once again and became really cloudy and windy so the plan was shattered. After contemplating whether or not to go we decided to just go on a walk with his dog Tuni around the town.
While we were out on our walk Andy gave us a lot of information about the land and how the ice freezes. Up here the rivers freeze before the seas do because of the wind, which keeps the sea quite violent and makes it very difficult for it to freeze, so it could be -35 and it could still be in its liquid stage. If the wind dies down though it will freeze rapidly. It could freeze up to a foot just over night! While we walked across the rivers we noticed chunks of ice that were jutted up above the land so Andy explained that underneath of the ice there are rocks that in the river and the open water splashes over the rock and freezes, so this continues for a while and eventually it will look like a little ice mountain and it will pop open in the center so it looks like an ice volcano. This here is one of the many ice mountains/volcanoes we saw while on our walk.
We then went onto the ice and we had a chance to stop at the dog pens and see all of the communities' dogs. We stopped at one pen and a mom and her pups came out with a warm visit and I made a few new friends!
We also noticed lots of seal and narwhal carcasses out in the pens, those two foods are what the dogs eat while out on the ice.
We also noticed lots of seal and narwhal carcasses out in the pens, those two foods are what the dogs eat while out on the ice. 
5 comments:
this the the ape man typing to you.(joe) you know who it is.i would have to say that you made some new friends.it kind of looks like you are having a good time there.i want to hear all about it when you get home so you.dalan and jeff are going to have to come home and tell me all about it.so that dead thing that you were holding tell me what that was.well you all stay warm and dont float away(ha ha ha).later all scott
Where did you guys get the seal?
it was a seal carcass note: there is no head where my right hand is! and Amy they leave them out in the dog pens so they (the dog owners) don't have to haul the carcasses out everytime and they will just cut a chunk off and feed it to the dogs!
Thats really cool. And I was actually wondering where the head was but I just decided not to ask lol. But very neat.
Do you think you guys will get to go seal hunting at all? Or is it not the right season?
You can hunt seal all year around there is no "wrong" time to do so, and there is always a possibility to watch someone go hunting, but since we don't have a license or anything we aren't allowed to actually do the hunting.
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