Life in Inuvik, Northwest Territories

There’s a lot of ice fog this morning. You can barely see down the street because everything is so white.

The weather service says it’s -40 celcius, but with the fog it’s supposed to feel like -47 below freezing.

Canada’s football league is the CFL and the top team are the BC Lions. Three players visited the high school this week. They spoke about the many challenges which they had to overcome on their way to achieving their dream of playing pro football: Obstacles like not having fathers at home, being raised in poverty, even serving time in a young offenders’ facility.

It was an inspiring event and everyone had a great time.

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.