Northern Adventure: The Land

Hi everyone, so a lot has happened in the last 2 weeks that we should have wrote 2 blogs about but it’s all in one giant big one. First off I’m going to educate you all on some Inuktitut which is the language spoken by the elders of the town. Inuktitut is not a language that can be easily translated because it’s not based on words its based on feelings and I honestly don’t know how to spell them correctly so I’m going to type them the way I say them ok.. here goes.

Huvan- what’s up!

Daimah- that’s all

Mutna- thank you

Goenook – means eskimo kiss which is rubbing your nose with someone

Huna- what/pardon

Ookalook – telephone

Gookgook- candy

Mine Trip

Last week Mike went out to the Agnico Eagle Gold Mine (called Meadowbank Camp) for a tour of the kitchen facilities and such. The Meadowbank Camp is located about 110 kilometres northwest-ish of Baker Lake, which doesn’t seem like such a far drive, but when you consider that the roads are all gravel and not very smooth, it ends up being around a three hour drive each way.

Mike and James, who works with Mike in the Camps department, hitched a ride out to the camp with Peter’s Expediting, who are the company who delivers all of the groceries to the camp, for what they thought would be a quick trip.

They left the store at 12:30, and didn’t make it back home until 9:30 that night. So much for having a short trip.

The scenery was unbelievable! It seemed as though that every ten kilometers the scenery changed. There were a bunch of random little lakes and ponds all over the place, which they were told by their driver Solomon that when the snow and ice melts, it all goes to the low points, which is how all of the water bodies are formed on the land.

After finally making it to the camp in a “record breaking” 3.5 hours, they helped to unload the truck and then got the tour from Keith Mackey, who is the Kitchen Manager at the camp. After seeing some of the rooms and the kitchen facilities, which pictures will be posted of sometime this week as James has them on his camera, they were able to eat a meal prepared with the food that they sell.

Now, for those of you that thought that the people who work at the mines are “roughing” it, you couldn’t be any more wrong! On the night that they were there, the dinner menu consisted of:

- Spaghetti with meat sauce

- Ham

- Mashed Potatoes

- Homemade mac and cheese

- Mixed vegetables

- Full salad bar

- A Cheese bar (at least four kinds of cheese)

- Eight different kinds of deserts

- Eight different kinds of juice on tap

And according to Keith, this was a mediocre night for the people at the camp. Once a week they have a steak night, which they could only imagine what that is like.

Below there will be some pictures posted of the scenery of the land between town and the camp. Camp pictures will be posted later this week.

The Honda trip!

Last Thursday Mike and I took a walk down by the water to see the new barge that arrived. This barge was full of construction equipment. These large barges all come in around the end of July and continue to come in until the end of September. That’s the ONLY time they come because if they come in after that they get stuck here for the winter, like the one that has been in previous blog pictures. Anyway, they call this sealift and our company uses it to get mass amounts of product up here. We will be receiving sealift 3 times before the end of the summer and once we get it I will explain in more detail how it works and what it looks like because right now I have no idea other than large barges come in and we pull 12 hour days unloading the stuff.

So anyway the Honda part of the blog… after walking down to the water to check the barge out we quickly retreated because OH MY GOD bugs! Yes we have bug jackets but wow! We have some pictures at the bottom of Mike being swarmed. So once we got back to the four-plex Jim came back on his Honda and we talked about wanting to go out on the Honda so he offered up his. Now we are supposed to have helmets to go out but Jim told us to take the back road out and we would be ok. So… we jumped on the Honda and took a little trip to the land.

I didn’t get to go out to see the camp so this was my first experience of scenery outside of town and wow it’s just gorgeous and so peaceful. On our little drive we were driving up hill so once we got to a certain point we actually got a great view of the sun setting as well as Baker Lake from a distance. On our drive we came across a small grave yard.

Now up here, since the ground is all tundra and rock, you can’t bury people in the ground so they bury them above ground and cover the simple plywood casket with big chunks of rock. We also came across the dump, which is just a fenced in area with smoke and chunks of metal because they have to burn the garbage as soon as they get it or people will actually try and go through it. The way the garbage is done up here is very simple, you have big metal cans placed outside your house and whenever you have garbage you put it in the can and they usually pick it up in the same day.. It’s pretty simple, except that the only down side it that there is no recycling. Anyway it was a great experience and I’ve posted pictures at the bottom of the scenery.

Well that’s all we have for this post but if anyone has any random questions let me know and I’d be glad to answer them.

Ciaoz Grace!

PS: Last Tuesday we saw the moon for the first time since we’ve moved up here!

me and mike on the honda!

the sun setting..so beautiful

that is a small family graveyard.

thats the green monster barge thats in a bunch of pictures from previous posts, they had to move it to the middle of the lake so new barges come in, so it's stuck there until a big enough tug boat can come in and push it home.