Lots of people say they'd jump at a chance to go to another planet, some say they want to get away from it all, grab some peace and quiet and some just say they need a little space to themselves. unTravelogue II is Qausuittuq, and easily one of the closest terrestrial places where you can get so near to all three.

It's 74.7 degrees year-round in Qausuittuq, but that's not Fahrenheit, that's North Latitude. In longitude, which doesn't matter nearly so much, it's 94.9 degrees West from Greenwich, but I wouldn't bother computing your timezone unless you're phoning friends back home.

Welcome to Resolute Bay

When I was still in grade school, my father flew freight runs into the arctic; I remember the soft feel of the winter coats, gloves and overalls, the warm snugness of the hand-me-downs we'd get to wear as we got older, and, and I'll bet my mother remembers this too, I remember the sweet syrop smell of crude oil that just seemed to fill everything about the basement when Dad was home.

We'd hear the names of these places, Rankin Inlet, Great Bear Lake, Resolute Bay -- we'd occasionally have a taste of arctic char too, but those worlds remained remote, lands of only imagination.

Resolute Bay is the most northerly place to which you can buy a commercial ticket, it's the end of the white-man's line, the boundary edge between our world and theirs. Set on Cornwallis Island, ruins around the beach area date back as far as 1200AD and used as a hunting camp while Europe was just beginning to embark on the Renaissance, but politically this is a new place. A first Euro-incarnation was as the last resting place for Franklin's brutal obsession with the Great West Passage followed by decades of adventurers and guides hoping to find out where he'd went, and then reborn again in 1947 by arrangemen of the government as a base for weather stations and the Cold War monitoring ..

The Canadian government took people from Nunavik in the Northern Quebec and Pond inlet on Baffin Island and sent them up by a ship to resolute bay. Resolute was the name of the ship they were sent up with. Ever since then those people still live here with their families it has been over forty-five years.
(project page at Qarmartalik School)

The population back in 1981 was 168. Today the census tells us it is 171. Call it net growth, call it sustainable development ...

climate and customs

two-thirds of your neighbours out here are Inuit, but English is widely spoken; every indication hints that you might expect fiddle music, drums, throat-singing, and "dancing until dawn" which doesn't mean really anything to anyone here, or can mean way too much. Depends on the time of year.

Average annual precipitation: 5.3 cm rainfall, 84 cm snowfall, 13.0 cm total precipitation. July mean high 6.8 °C, low 1.4°C. January mean high -28.4 °C, low -35.7 °C. Winds N-NW at 21.5 km/h.

Maybe nobody has much money up there, the average income is about the same as it is here on the Bruce, but the average bag of groceries will run some 68% higher than the same goods in 'nearby' Yellowknife, but maybe out here on the perimeter there's not much you'd want to buy and less still that you could afford. Everything that doesn't come out of the ocean (see 'things to do' below) had to get here by air transport, and it's a fair distance to anywhere close to where anything even close to cornflakes are being made.

Forget what you saw in Insomnia, this is The Place With No Dawn: The sun shines 24 hours a day from about April 29 to August 13 each year. For various reasons of the lay of the land, the skies are apparently not often blue in Resolute. Cold and high-pressure dominate the tundra beyond the island, but Resolute is not just the boundary between cultural lands and the sheer stress of our lower-mainland climate against the edge of the ice-cap puts Qausuittuq into clouds and storm.

getting there

Directions are really easy: From just about anywhere, go North. Once you pass the tree line, keep going a few more days hike, and then just ask anyone. If you get as close as their dog-leg shaped airport, walk south, you can't miss it.

Conversely, you can take the afternoon flight via FirstAir from Ottawa and get into Resolute NU in about 10 hours.

things to do

You're kidding me, right? Things to do? Of course there's things to do here, and it's not just the parties on the beach or fiddlers until the fingers bleed. There's basic survival, that's one, and a favourite one at htat -- you're standing next to a a sea-o-plenty, but coaxing what you need out of those waters will prove a little challenging I'm sure. For local attractions, there's the usual that goes with oil and gas exploration, but there's also the sort you won't see many places outside of the Discovery Channel, the Ringed Seal, Harp Seal, Bearded Seal, Beluga, Narwhal, Walrus, Arctic Fox, Wolf, Polar Bear, and Muskox ... bring your camera!

But that's only the stereo-typical northland. If you want their take on it, I dare you to run this little flash intro and from there I'm sure you'll see some slick reasons why this place is on my must-see list of your untravelled places. Think narwhals and aurora and most of all, think endless infinity of unbounded space, which some will even brave as a walk (North is only 1000 miles from here)

Or think science -- archeaology, geology, geospace and climatology, meteorphilia, anthropology ...

However you cut it, top of the world.