Monthly Archives: February 2012

How’s this for a cool job: Mark Robinson hosts a show on the Weather Network and travels across Canada and the U.S. looking for extreme weather.

Mark and his teammate recently stopped in Inuvik to gather material for his series. The on-camera challenges included sleeping in a car at Eagle Plains to test how a candle can keep a person warm overnight.

Here’s his website. If only he had been in town for the recent blizzard with 100km-winds!

Saturday night, a week ago: Inuvik’s northern lights were the brightest I have ever seen. The lights move in the sky and are bright green.

A good idea when you see northern lights is to walk away from the light of town. There’s no comparison to seeing the northern lights and the stars on a clear evening.

Times like these, you look around and think ”what a wonderful place to live.”

Firefighters were called to this house on Saturday after it caught fire.

No one was injured, but the building suffered a lot of damage.

The dry climate here means that fires are a real danger, even in winter.

This is Tuktoyaktuk’s ”St.Vincent de Paul” community store, which allows people to donate and salvage items. It’s also a cozy place for people to take shelter from the cold.

The churches in Tuktoyaktuk and especially the Catholic Church with resident sister Faye Trombley are very active in Tuktoyaktuk.

Here is Sister Faye (left) plucking geese with a girl from the community, on the front steps of the Catholic building called Father’s House.

Here’s the bay in Tuktoyaktuk which is the beginning of the ice road. In the distane are a pingo and the beginnings of a tee-pee shape.

Tuktoyaktuk is a community of about 900 people which can be reached by ice road a few months of the year.

As you can see from the last picture, someone there has a St.Bernard.

Many of the buildings are getting quite old.

Driving to Tuktyaktuk, the sun is diffused by ”ice fog.”

A pingo can be seen in the first picture.

Here’s a truck maintaining the ice road on the way to Tuktoyaktuk.

The Arctic Winter Games are coming up and they include arctic sports. Games like the one-foot high kick, two-foot high kick, Alaskan high-kick, the airplane, etc.

These photos were taken at the recent tryouts held in Inuvik at Sie Alexandre Mackenzie School.

A blanket of snow covers the trees and trails (and even half of one unused building.)

This time of year is very nice as the sunlight returns.

Inuvik has a television channel which is nothing but a Powerpoint presentation. It loops 24 hours a day and allows for advertising of town events, jobs, notices, happy birthday messages, etc.

It’s an extremely useful service, which people call ”the rolling channel.”

Inuvik, at night, is a small illuminated patch surrounded by darkness.

A Monday night walk under the northern lights, in early February.

A raven enjoys the sunset around 5:30 in the afternoon, before flying away.

The days are now getting longer.

The day after the house fire, the house was covered in icicles: This is the water pumped by firefighters.

No heat left here.

A house caught fire this week. It was -35 degrees and the firefighters had to struggle with frozen pipes for a few minutes.

Thankfully there was no wind, the fire was contained to one building.

Inuvik has volunteer firefighters. They keep cell-phones or radios on them during their day jobs, and can rush out in case of emergency.

The dry climate makes buildings prone to fires.