Up Here Magazine

Up Here is the flagship magazine of Canada's North, exploring and examining the Yukon, Northwest Territories, Nunavut and related Northern areas.

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The other natural resource

The Lutsel K’e Dene aim to prove they can make a business out of protecting the land. By Tim Edwards

A two-week in, two-week out fly-in shift for Northerners usually means 14 days of long hours drilling, hauling or cleaning, followed by two weeks of relaxation, where you can get out on the water and maybe cast some lines. Imagine if your two weeks in consisted of being out on the land doing what you love, and what very few southerners are more capable of doing than you. For one thing, we’d probably have a lot more local employment.

For the 300-person Dene community of Lutsel K’e, the proposed Thaidene Nene park, covering part of Great Slave Lake, is an experimental combination of sustainable local industry and lifelong employment, environmental protection, social program and cultural revival. It promises to be more reliable than the mines that come and go, boom and bust, and typically bring the territory’s economy up and down with them. As Steve Nitah, one of Lutsel K’e’s negotiators for the park, puts it: “Thaidene Nene is worth more than one diamond mine over its lifetime.”

The East Arm of Great Slave Lake has all the makings of a wilderness tourism destination: clear waters in which you can see the trout and whitefish swimming before you catch them; plenty of islands to camp on, or to shelter behind when the winds pick up while you’re boating; magnificent north-facing cliffs; hiking trails inland; the rolling Lockhart River and the legendary Old Lady of the Falls, a beautiful 20-foot waterfall with ancient cultural significance. And this beauty not only stands out; it’s accessible—you can canoe, kayak or motorboat there from Yellowknife or take a 45-minute, $250 flight from the city to Lutsel K’e, which is nestled right inside the arm and whose people’s traditional land encompasses it.

Jean Chretien visited the community in the 1960s, as minister of Indian and Northern Affairs Canada, to pitch the idea of a park, and it was thoroughly shot down. “The leadership at the time did not like the idea of a national park,” says Nitah, who’s also a former chief. “It would have been another Wood Buffalo,” he says, citing the gigantic national park on the southern border of the NWT. Never one to mince his words, territorial environment minister Michael Miltenberger describes Wood Buffalo, near his hometown of Fort Smith, thusly: “It’s controlled and run as a federal fiefdom, basically, of Parks [Canada]. They have their own way of doing business. In the past, they excluded the Métis, for example, [from exercising aboriginal rights in the park.]” As far as the NWT is concerned, Wood Buffalo is no longer part of it.

A few things have happened since the 1960s to open the door for Thaidene Nene: mainly, the constitution, passed in 1982, enshrined aboriginal rights and trumped the Canada National Parks Act. This includes subsistence hunting rights in parks created after 1982. As mineral staking interest grew in the area during the ’90s diamond rush, elders in Lutsel K’e figured it was time to revisit the idea of a park, but it had to be based on their relationship with the land. “That’s got to be respected,” says Nitah, as must their treaty. With that, the community began researching its options, speaking to other aboriginal groups who’ve dealt with Parks Canada—even looking at how aboriginal groups in other countries deal with their post-colonial governments. Lutsel K’e didn’t just want to protect its land; the business opportunities for having such a tourism product on its doorstep were manifold, and the band wanted its membership to be the ones cashing in. Now it just had to convince the federal government that not only were they the ones who should be in control of the park, but there were no better people for the job.

My Skype interview with Patrick O’Leary is delayed by 15 minutes while he waits for animal control to take away a kangaroo with a broken leg lying in his front yard. I’d first met O’Leary, manager of conservation partnerships in Australia with the Pew Environmental Group, last fall in Yellowknife after he returned from a trip to Lutsel K’e. He and his delegation had been exchanging information about how Australia’s Indigenous Protected Areas (IPAs) work, and how Thaidene Nene is intended to roll out. It’s odd to think there might be many parallels with Australia, which is about as far away from the NWT as you can get on Earth; whose hot and humid climate rarely produces the snow that utterly dominates Canada’s North. But the parallels are there.

“We [at Pew] concentrate on most of Australia, which is the Outback,” says O’Leary. “It’s not unlike the Canadian North ... in that it occupies this huge part of our continent but most Australians live on the east coast, a bit like most Canadians live on the southern border.” The Outback is populated mainly by aboriginal people who live in remote communities and are largely at a socio-economic disadvantage, even when a mine temporarily picks things up.

The first IPA in Australia was established in 1998. The government had set aside money that groups could access for conservation programs, and the IPA was the culmination of years of figuring out how aboriginal groups could use these funding streams to not only protect the land but employ their people to do it. So the government created a voluntary process, initiated by aboriginal groups (who also decide when consultation is finished), after which they can access funding and support from the government to manage the land. There are requirements for a management plan, and for reporting on finances and management actions, but “within that, there’s quite a degree of flexibility,” says O’Leary.

The idea caught on. There are now 51 IPAs across Australia, managing 36 million hectares of land (nearly five per cent of the country). “From what I’ve seen in Australia, we can have as high or higher quality management than national parks. Because of the local commitment, if you get the right funding in place, if you get the cultural management that’s overlaid, you can have really, really strong and high quality environmental management.”

Conservation is a huge part of Thaidene Nene, too, but Lutsel K’e is banking on a big upsurge in tourism once the park is established. In 2013, the Lutsel K’e Dene First Nation released its business case for the park. In direct employment by the park, the report anticipates 18 year-round positions, at least five of which would be full time. Most of these would be through the Ni Hat’ni Dene program, which is already training people for the jobs—spending time on the land, monitoring use of the area, talking to visitors on the lake, monitoring fish numbers and quality through partnerships with universities. But the spin-off benefits look to be more lucrative.

With its proximity to Yellowknife, and cheap, scheduled flights to the community (compared to the rest of the NWT), Lutsel K’e considers itself in a better position to get traffic than most other Northern parks. The East Arm gets at least 500 sport fishers per year, according to a report prepared by tourism consultancy Pure North Canada Ltd. With branding and tourist infrastructure, the Thaidene business case estimates the area could host more than 1,000 visitors per year (the Nahanni National Park Reserve’s average). With Lutsel K’e right in the heart of the area, that sort of visitation could be lucrative for the community. The report envisions an ecolodge, in-town lodging and food service, interpretive guiding and outfitting, arts and crafts sales, transportation and general recreation services. If this level of infrastructure comes to be, the report guesses it could result in at least 20 year-round and 30 seasonal jobs, as well as helping support other general businesses around town—such as maintenance agencies or contractors.

Yellowknife could also benefit from Thaidene Nene, says Stephen Ellis, another Lutsel K’e negotiator, adding there’s potential to link the steady Yellowknife tourist industry with its upstart neighbour across the lake. “For every night that a tourist spends in Lutsel K’e, they’ll probably spend two nights in Yellowknife ... so partnering with Yellowknife operators makes sense.” He mentions Aurora Village, which hosts upwards of 12,000 Japanese tourists per year who trek to Yellowknife to see the Northern Lights. Visitors could take a short flight to Lutsel K’e to experience its Dene culture and get out for quick, scenic trips on the lake, then return to Yellowknife.

While most of the conversation revolves around “the park,” the East Arm might end up being a conglomeration of various land designations. Since the NWT’s devolution in April 2014—when it took jurisdiction over most of the territory’s public land, waterways and resources from the federal government—the Government of the Northwest Territories has kickstarted its own negotiations with Lutsel K’e, and compressed what might otherwise have taken years to just about half a year of talks. (Everyone wants to see this finalized before this fall’s federal and territorial elections.)

As the GNWT took over the land from the federal government, it would have to give some back for it to become a national park—and the government isn’t keen to give much of it away. It’s wary of designating the whole area as federal and relinquishing rights to manage the wildlife and ecology, and to lock away areas high in mineral potential from further development. “The more we give away to the feds, locked up permanently under a huge park, we lose access to that,” says Miltenberger.

Right now, 33,000 square kilometres are in land withdrawal while the three parties work on borders and designations. Miltenberger says the area could contain a small federal park, a territorial park, wilderness and conservation areas, as well as areas left open for mineral development. The same geological trend as the Gahcho Kue and Snap Lake diamond areas continues in the northwest, inland away from the lake. That area could also host uranium and gold. “Everybody thinks there might be some potential there,” says Miltenberger. “We want to make sure that we don’t lock it away before we know that.”

Both Ellis and Nitah say Lutsel K’e is on board to have the GNWT involved, as long as the territorial park designation is similar to what they’ve been working on with Parks Canada. Miltenberger says having Lutsel K’e manage the park is “very consistent with the approach that we are taking in a whole number of areas.” Lutsel K’e also hopes any money that the federal government would otherwise commit would be picked up by the territory. “The last thing that we’d want to do is take federal dollars out of the territory that otherwise would be spent here,” says Ellis. Lutsel K’e has been building up a $30 million trust fund for the park.

And Lutsel K’e’s position on leaving some areas open for mineral development? Nitah says the community is open to it, citing the community’s four impact benefit agreements currently in place with local projects. He hopes the park will act as a counterweight for the mining industry’s booms and busts. “It stabilizes the economy in this region so we’re not so totally dependent on the mining extraction. Lutsel K’e can have its cake and eat it too in these circumstances.”

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The Guru

Commodities forecaster extraordinaire Patricia Mohr says the storm clouds aren’t leaving just yet by Herb Mathisen

Patricia Mohr is something of a celebrity at the Nunavut Mining Symposium. It’s standing-room-only when the Scotiabank vice-president and commodity market specialist delivers her keynote address. And some attendees even spill in to an adjacent room—where her speech is being broadcast—to hear what’s in store for the prices of the precious and bulk metals their multi-million dollar projects hinge on. The forecast’s been gloomy for a while now, but are the clouds beginning to recede? We asked Mohr just that in an early-March interview.

What’s the general outlook right now? Obviously global economic conditions at the moment are very lackluster. More than anything, this is the reason commodity prices are generally on the weak side. We really need to see much better economic growth to have a major pick-up, particularly for the base metals. We’ve been caught in an environment since 2012 where economic growth around the world is not much more than three per cent per annum. While that doesn’t sound like a low number, it’s not what it was in the previous decade and it’s not high enough to generate any real steam underneath commodity prices.

What’s driving the iron ore price and how’s that affecting Baffinland? There’s been a tremendous expansion by the world’s lowest cost [iron ore] producers in Western Australia and Brazil, during a period of very lackluster economic growth. That of course has led to quite a downdraft in prices for iron ore. The thing that has underpinned the profitability of Mary River and kept the project going is the fact that the ore is very rich and the project is therefore able to obtain premium prices for its very rich iron ore. That’s the thing that keeps that kind of project underway, otherwise there would have no doubt been a slowdown there, as there has been for a great number of projects in Labrador and Northern Quebec. You have to have rich iron ore these days really to compete with extremely low-cost iron ore coming out of Western Australia and Brazil.

How does the gold price move in relation to other commodities? Does gold play by its own rules? I think I understand gold quite well, but that doesn’t mean that we always get the forecast exactly right. It’s more of a monetary commodity than some of the others that are really industrial. Gold prices are important for Nunavut because they’ve got a producing mine and probably will have another producing mine in the next while. Gold prices are only modestly profitable, trading today at just around the US$1,200 per ounce mark. I think the factor that has constrained gold prices this year is a very strong U.S. dollar. Ultimately, the real safe haven around the world continues to be U.S. dollar treasury securities. Gold had a little bit of a lift earlier in the year because of volatility in some of the emerging market currencies and currencies like the Russian ruble. That kind of gave a renewed safe haven bid to gold.  There’s still fairly good underlying physical demand for gold, but investment demand has been held back by the strength of the U.S. dollar.

The Canadian dollar has weakened relative to the U.S. dollar. That must be good news for Canadian miners, right? The depreciation of the Canadian dollar provides a cushion to Canadian mining companies, because most of their receipts, particularly in the exports markets, are all in U.S. dollars. They get a bit of a currency translation gain into Canadian dollars. If you look at their costs domestically in Canada, they have moved down quite markedly in U.S. dollar terms, so it improves competitiveness. The thing is, there are many other currencies that have also depreciated quite markedly, for example many of the currencies in Latin America. So it’s all relative, right?

How do lower oil prices affect the mining industry? The weaker oil prices are a positive, because diesel prices are often very important in overall mine costs: they can be as much as 30 per cent of cash costs at a mine. [The decline] was not something anyone would have quite fathomed. I did realize for some time that the huge growth in the production of light crude from the U.S. shales was excessive and ultimately it proved to actually destabilize world oil markets. But to actually think the price would go from US$107 per barrel to US$44—it was really something that was quite difficult.

Could that price drop spur economic growth? It will be a slight positive for world economic growth, but the problem is that there are many countries in the world, like Russia, where the oil industry looms very large. When you have prices that are essentially below production costs, it becomes destabilizing. It’s not all positive. It’s probably a small net-positive, but I don’t think it’s as big of a positive as many observers would expect.

So will you be bringing good news to Nunavut? I think it will be a little bit mixed, but we hope for a better recovery within several years. I don’t want to be more specific than that because I’ll be talking about this more at the symposium. I have to have something to talk about, right?

(This interview was edited and condensed.)

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Agnico Eagle’s Big Bet

CEO Sean Boyd’s Nunavut ambitions are decades long by Herb Mathisen

Agnico Eagle’s taken a $1 billion loss on Meadowbank, Nunavut’s lone operating gold mine, which opened in June 2010. And with the mine slated to close in 2017, some might see it as a big mistake.

But don’t tell that to CEO Sean Boyd. Meadowbank’s given Agnico a base in the region, he says, allowing it to build local expertise and relationships as it continues to explore the Kivalliq. This year alone, the company is prepared to spend up to $130 million on its two most promising Nunavut ventures: the encouraging Amaruq deposit, just 50 kilometres north of Meadowbank, and the Meliadine project near Rankin Inlet. All this at a time when many companies aren’t exactly rushing to fund exploration programs.

Right now, Agnico’s trying to find out just what exactly it has at Amaruq, which might one day supply ore to the Meadowbank plant. If initial results are good, the company could spend up to $50 million this year to drill at Amaruq. And then there’s Meliadine. Recently approved by the federal government, Agnico could spend up to $80 million there this year to better understand the complex deposit, as it decides whether the $1 billion project should be built. It’s safe to say Agnico’s betting big on Nunavut in 2015: as the drills started turning at Amaruq, a month before the Nunavut Mining Symposium in April, I talked to Boyd to find out why.

Let’s start with Meadowbank. You had record production there last year. What’s it looking like this year? The best year was 2014 and we’re looking at another solid year in 2015, but as we see it now, it is set to close in Q3 2017. We’re looking at ways that we can extend it. There is a possibility that we can extend mining in the Vault Pit and that’s largely because the Canadian dollar exchange rate has improved and the diesel price has gone down. The second phase [of the extension would] need a higher commodity price in Canadian dollars than the first. The second pushback means moving more waste: if you move more waste, it means it’s a lot more money. We don’t want to lose money moving that rock. If we can break even or generate some cash and keep the mine running, that’s probably what we’re going to do. Meadowbank has done a really good job getting their costs down. There’s a really good skillset there. We clearly want to continue to utilize that skillset in Nunavut. The best opportunity to do that is Amaruq.

Tell me about Amaruq. It’s a satellite deposit. The only way that it can work, based on what we know now, is to truck the material to Meadowbank. It’s still early, but it has the potential to continue our business at Meadowbank, to preserve all those jobs, to continue to use all those skills and allow us to use a lot of that Meadowbank equipment because it fits the type of mine that would begin potentially at Amaruq, a larger open pit. We couldn’t use any of the things at Meadowbank for Meliadine, because Meliadine is going to start as an underground mine. We have our best people focused on trying to find opportunities in the North. Amaruq looks good because my experience tells me if that team and the leaders of that group—Alain Blackburn and Guy Gosselin—are excited, then we should be excited. Our biggest dilemma now is, if we follow the general timeline of getting things moving in Nunavut, we’re going to have a production gap. That’s no good. What we’re trying to do is work at it from the Meadowbank end and see if we can extend the life maybe a year. There are no guarantees; we have to do the analysis. Then we’ll need everybody to really focus on Amaruq as an opportunity so that we don’t get bogged down and create this large gap, because we don’t want people to not have employment there. We want people to seamlessly move from one to the other because that’s going to benefit everybody.

Is that projected gap based on Meadowbank’s 2017 end of mine life? Even if we pushed it 12 months, there’s still a potential gap.

How much are you spending at Amaruq this year? Our plan is to spend $20 million there, but we have the ability to more than double that based on results. If we get the results we hope to get in March, April and May, we would look to increase that budget because we want to know what we have this year so we can start the process of trying to make it dovetail with the end of Meadowbank. Essentially, we’ve pulled out all the stops here. We have the potential to have eight or nine drills turning on Amaruq. Last year we had three. This is the largest single component of Agnico’s exploration budget. If we do spend $40 million or $50 million, it will be our largest annual exploration budget ever. Our founder, Paul Penna, used to always say, “If the gold isn’t there, we can’t put it there. But if it’s there, we’re going to find it.” If the gold is there, we have the budgets and the experience to find it and that’s what we’re focused on doing. Because the sooner we know what it is, the sooner we can start moving and work with stakeholders, communities, the Government of Nunavut and the federal government so we don’t have a gap in production.

The Nunavut Impact Review Board, the territory’s regulatory agency, has been public about its funding shortages. An increase in its core funding is pending. Is that something you’d like to see? That would be great. We have no complaints with that whole process, but when you have a situation potentially like Meadowbank and Amaruq, it shines a spotlight on the process, that maybe it takes too long. Really, what we would be asking for at Amaruq is no different than what we’ve already done there in the region: we’d be looking at building a road and we’d be looking at building an open pit. We’re not complaining about the process, we’re not complaining about the level of standards that are expected of us. We’re prepared to do all that. We’re just saying that the process could move faster because we see it move faster in other jurisdictions, and I think it can move faster if we apply more resources and give the people that are doing the review more resources to do it. Because it’s not just us, and the groups tend to get overwhelmed with a lot of things coming their way. Our biggest question is, whether it’s to the federal government, the Government of Nunavut, or any of the review boards, if you need resources, let’s talk about that and let’s get the resources in place so we can get things looked at on a timely basis.

And what about Meliadine? We’ve been working really hard. Meliadine isn’t easy: there’s a lot of gold, but it’s a very complex deposit. We spent $50 million there last year. We’re going to spend $70 million there this year—maybe $80 million—so we’re still making a major commitment without having made the big decision yet. We still haven’t said we’re going to spend $1 billion to build Meliadine. We haven’t even brought that to the board yet, because what we’re still doing is trying to put all the pieces together. There’s an 80-kilometre structure that we’ve only drilled 10 per cent of. And on 10 per cent, we’ve got a reserve of 3.3 million ounces and a resource of 6.8 million ounces. But the challenge is that the deposit underground is complex, so it’s very costly to build. We’re hopeful we can put numbers together that will allow us to build a project to get a production base established, and then over time scale it up, because we firmly believe that there’s more gold to be found there. If we were thinking that there’s a problem with this thing, we wouldn’t have spent $50 million last year and we wouldn’t be spending $70 million this year. The only reason we’re spending those dollars is to complete our analysis, to really allow us to open up the underground ramp system so we can get a better feel of the complexity of the deposit.

With the early staffing issues at Meadowbank, do you anticipate problems being able to operate two mines in the region at once? We’ve got a great base already at Meadowbank. We still don’t know how big Amaruq is. That will determine how many people are required there. But we think there’s more than enough people if Amaruq and Meliadine are going together. It’s going to take some work though for training, but I think one of the things that Agnico has done well is we didn’t just focus on Baker Lake when we built Meadowbank; we reached out to other communities and got them involved. We see the positive impact Meadowbank’s had not just to [provide people with] a job, but the potential career opportunities young people see there. We have trades schools, but we think it’s important to have another alternative for people that want to go to university so that they don’t have to move away from Nunavut. It’s a passion of our chairman, Jim Nasso. He’s spent some time in Nunavut and he said early on, “They’re missing a university,” a place that, as younger kids go through school, they can say, “Hey, I can go to university and I don’t have to move far from home. I can actually do it here.” Jim’s been very public on saying Agnico’s prepared to put up $5 million to get that ball rolling. We don’t have any details on where that’s headed, except to say we’d love to see it happen.

How do you make a billion-dollar decision when the gold price can swing over the course of an afternoon? It’s tough to plan! That’s why it’s risky. People say, “Meliadine is looking better.” Yeah, the reserve grew, the resource grew, but you’re asking us to make a commitment for $1 billion when no one can tell us what that gold price looks like five years from now. We have to be hopeful that, if the gold price does go down, the opportunity is so robust—maybe through future exploration success—that we can maybe find higher grades that improve our economics. We weigh and measure all of that. The biggest single driver of what the resource business looks like five or 10 years from now in Nunavut is the Canadian dollar gold price. Not the U.S. dollar gold price—but what it is in Canadian dollars.

How’s Nunavut as a mining jurisdiction? If governments are able to invest in training, ports, roads, power, then it just opens up that area. And if we’re successful in an environment where not a lot of that stuff is in place, then a lot of other investors are going to take a look at it as more infrastructure comes in, largely because of the exploration potential. The last thing you want is an industry where it’s good for five years and then it’s non-existent for five years, because that’s not helping the communities or workers. It’s not helping small businesses or the government either. We’ve been in Quebec for almost 50 years. We expect to be in Finland, north of the Arctic Circle, for 40 years. We’ve got a business in Mexico that also looks like it’s multi-decade. What we’re trying to do now is determine whether Nunavut for us is one of those platforms that could be multi-decade. We believe it is, but we’ve still got a bunch of work to do.

Has Agnico spurred new businesses, local entrepreneurship in the Kivalliq? I would say it’s still developing. That’s why Amaruq is timely from so many perspectives, because you can’t develop a business by stopping and starting all the time, particularly in Nunavut. It’s pretty hard for a small businessman, when he’s looking at Meadowbank, to say, “Boy, they’re telling me it’s going to end by 2017. They say they may extend it a year. They’re hopeful about this new discovery. We don’t know much about it.” That creates uncertainty, and we’re asking people to make commitments. I think the more certainty we get around Meliadine and Amaruq, then that will give people some more confidence to start up their own businesses.

What will Agnico’s legacy in Nunavut be? If you actually take a snapshot of Meadowbank right now, Agnico Eagle’s lost $1 billion. We went for $1 billion, so we can’t afford to lose $1 billion on another project. For us, the Meadowbank story—there’s no final chapter yet until we understand Amaruq, but it’s good because it’s shown that Meadowbank is spawning other opportunities. I think that’s going to be the case in Nunavut for decades. You need companies that have a production base up there doing quality exploration. We’re the only producer up there. There are lots of juniors, but juniors have a hard time getting funding, getting the broad range of technical skills you need to manage in Nunavut. We have it all. What we’re seeing is really telling us from a strategic point of view that Nunavut should be a big part of our business going forward. Why? The gold industry is struggling to find parts of the world that have mineral wealth that you’re also able to do business in. That’s why we’re prepared to continue to make investments there. But we have to do it smartly, because we have a business to run.We’re operating in other parts of the world, we have a lot of requests for capital from other parts of our business. The story’s not finished yet. We haven’t left. As long as we haven’t left, you should measure us five years from now, 10 years from now. Why don’t you measure us 20 years from now, and then tell us whether Meadowbank was a success? Because Meadowbank is the shepherd of everything else up there that we’re doing. Without Meadowbank, Agnico’s not up there. It may not look great at the moment, but who knows, Amaruq may be bigger than Meadowbank. Wouldn’t that be something?

(This interview was edited and condensed.)

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Frozen Globes 2015: Take it from the top

Business advice and real talk from past Frozen Globes winners Story by Laura Busch and Herb Mathisen

The Frozen Globes are back! Our annual celebration of the territories' brightest business stars takes over Iqaluit on April 30. And while the votes get tallied and the finalists are named, we thought we'd check in with some of our past Frozen Globes winners, to hear first-hand what they've learned about running a successful enterprise in the—at times—harsh Northern business climate. The leaders on the following pages share a sense of adventure, a tolerance for risk and a willingness to learn from their mistakes. And the biggest thing you'll find these stories have in common: these people love what they do and they're not in it for the money.

Air North: 2013 Best Marketed Company Christopher Griffiths, 34 Marketing coordinator Whitehorse, YT Since joining Air North full-time in late-2012, Chris has transformed the airline from social media dinosaur to one of the funniest, most honest northern-savvy businesses on Twitter, Facebook and Instagram.

I’ve always been an airline nerd. I love planes and the idea of working for an airline directly is incredibly  appealing, and it means that I get to stretch myself. I’m not just a designer here: I do many, many more things than that, which lets me actually exercise some of my other passions that I wouldn’t be able to just working from home. Everyone is fundamentally offering the same thing. Every airline is offering you a chance to go from Point A to Point B on an airplane that has seats in it. So what you need to do is find the areas which allow you to stand apart from the pack. Otherwise, it just exclusively becomes about price. There was a real fear of social media when I was first hired. For what it is, it’s relatively misunderstood—or at least it was. I don’t think that the power that it has was clearly understood, so it was just seen as something that would kind of be a never-ending pit of time consumption. Social media is not a marketing channel. It’s not an advertising tool; it’s a customer service thing first and foremost. So I really don’t see it as a place where it would replace too much of the advertising that we do. To be honest, the volume of stuff isn’t overwhelming. In terms of my daily workload, social media take up maybe 20 per cent. It’s not an all-consuming thing, which really is thanks to our size. If we were the size of our much larger competitors, there’s no way that I could keep up, even if I was doing it full time. There are instances where customers need some type of support and our centre’s not open. Social media give us an opportunity to address questions, issues and concerns immediately, which is an incredibly powerful thing to be able to do. Oh boy, there are some people who say some truly bizarre, bizarre things sometimes, and there’s times where I will respond somewhat in kind because I think it’s a great thing for the company to have a sense of humour. It’s not about trying to mimic anyone else or trying to force any one thing—it’s not about trying to make everything into a joke. It’s about being willing to poke a little bit of fun at ourselves and, you know, tease the president of the company from time to time. I think I’ve annoyed my family and my girlfriend by going, “Oh no, I have to answer this. It’s a tweet from someone and they’re in trouble.” I think I mostly get away with it. To anyone who’s using social media for their business: don’t be afraid of showing a little bit of personality. Don’t be afraid of letting people in and being willing to be human, because the moment it starts to sound like everything has been crafted down to the perfect word by a marketing team or a PR person, the more likely people are to tune out.

I Like Cake: 2014 Best New Company Sadie Vincent-Wolfe, 30 Owner Iqaluit, NU Having recently celebrated the second birthday of her bakery, Sadie tells us how she makes do with the monumental challenge of staffing in the North—and how it sometimes means she has to bake 18 cakes a day on her own.

At first, I was doing the business out of my home. It was growing and growing and growing. My husband said he missed cooking dinner at home, so I told him to build me a bakery. And he did. When I first opened up, I was still working another job full-time and trying to juggle both jobs because it was really hard to let go of a paycheque with all of the uncertainty and not knowing how it was going to go. Then I moved to part-time, but we were just so busy I couldn’t handle both so I jumped off and did this full-time. It was scary, but it’s been so worth it. I may not get a paycheque every two weeks like I used to, but it doesn’t feel like I’m going to work every day. My kids come here for lunch. Frankie, my youngest daughter, is here with me during the day. I don’t feel like I’m missing out. We do soup and sandwiches during the week and pizza on Fridays. Our catering has picked up a lot. We do a lot of country foods for different companies, for meetings and training courses. I was worried it would be quiet for January and February, but we’ve been busier than ever. Sometimes when we can get enough country food, we’ll make a stir-fry or stew. When there are people from out of town who have never been here before, they really like to try things like the seal soup and caribou and mattaaq. We do simple preparations of it, just so people can have the experience. We’re still doing a lot of out of town orders for cakes. People pick them up at the shop and either bring them on the plane or send them through cargo. And online, it’s from the smaller communities where they might not have somebody to do customized birthday cakes. I’ve even sent cakes to Ottawa. The biggest cake I’ve done was for the city on Canada Day. It was a lot of cake. It was so heavy. It was enough for 500 people. We had to take it on the back of a truck. Once people saw it, they started lining up even though they weren’t serving cake for another hour-and-a-half or so. It’s so hard to keep staff. I usually have one person in, but it’s been so hard keeping one person. We’re feeding like 40 people a day for lunch, plus taking orders, plus people are coming in during breaks or for last-minute birthdays. My door’s been closed a little bit more—when I’m running to the store, dropping off catering—but people are still coming, so it’s really good. Saturday is usually my busiest day—it’s usually around five cakes every Saturday. But the last holiday was so busy with birthdays and Valentine’s orders, I did 18 in one day. Keep on top of your books. It’s so hard to catch up once you get behind.

Canoe North Adventures: 2014 Entrepreneur of the Year Al Pace, 56 Lin Ward, 64 Owners/Operators/Guides Norman Wells, NT Al and Lin paddled northern rivers well before they officially started their guiding company in 1987.

Lin Ward: In the beginning, I wasn’t a paddler. Going on my first trip, I was very uncertain. Then, the moment I got out there, I knew I’d found what I wanted to do. People tend to think the only people who come up here are those who paddle often, with all the right clothes, and all the right paddle strokes. That’s so far from the truth. Very ordinary people paddle with us. We really enjoy them because they come so wide-eyed. AL Pace: We really believe there’s a sense of urgency about going to these wild places. We’ve seen quite a bit of change in the North over 30 seasons. The effects of global warming, the fires last summer were just devastating. When people come up for the first time, they’re shaking with excitement. It’s really transformative. For so many years, we thought we were just taking people to the wild places and didn’t really understand that we were taking them through huge transformative life changes. There’s a different degree of wilderness in the North. It goes deeper into your soul. We meet many people who say “One of these years, we’re going to come on one of those trips.” We look them in the eye and there’s no spark there. We know they’re not coming.

Northern Vision Development: 2014 Best Marketed Company Adam Gerle, 45 Vice-president marketing and sales Whitehorse, YT Get people up to the Yukon, and it’s good for everyone. That’s Adam’s motto when he hits the road to promote the territory for NVD, a burgeoning real estate empire that owns four Yukon hotels—including Dawson City’s Downtown Hotel, famous for its Sourtoe Cocktail. We caught up with Adam as he packed for a last-minute sales trip to Asia. Would he be bringing a fermented toe—the cocktail’s special ingredient—with him?

Noooo. Somebody requested it but there’s now way we’re going to try to navigate international borders trafficking human body parts. We don’t want to risk it to find out what the laws are over in Beijing. We only have one big toe left. So the big toe stays at the hotel all the time. When we take the toe on the road, we bring two generally—the second and third toes. They’re equally gross, just not as big. But we’re not allowed to take the big one. You pack it in a baggy full of salt. You look like a drug-dealer. The salt keeps it all mummified and dried out and safe, according to the Chief Medical Officer of the Yukon. I’m too busy generally serving the Sourtoe Cocktail to actually have much time to drink it. I’ve barely done it. But we brought it to Tête-à-Tête in Ottawa recently—it’s the best thing we go to every year to attract meetings and conferences. They had a special event, so we brought the toe and the can-can girls and it was a big hit. The biggest part of my job is promoting the Yukon as a destination. You can have the most amazing hotels in the world, but if nobody is coming to the Yukon, it doesn’t matter. Getting people here is the big thing. Those big conferences generally fill up our hotels and the Holland America hotels. So it’s not really that cutthroat—it’s getting the big groups to come here as opposed to Banff, or Winnipeg, or Yellowknife. We’re talking about people not knowing you exist, but if they do know you exist, they have these crazy misperceptions. Not everyone is really educated about just how easily accessible the North is. They think you live in igloos. They think it’s remote and desolate. They’ve heard horror stories about how much things cost—probably because places in Nunavut are very expensive. But Whitehorse is only a two-hour flight from Vancouver. People are amazed it’s that accessible. Our pitch is the North’s such a unique destination to go to. People are really interested in the North. It’s a part of Canada that really captures their imagination. It’s kind of exotic. It opens a lot of doors just being from the North. People really respond to you and they remember you. If I was an average marketing guy in Vancouver or Toronto, nobody’d remember me in a million years. But when I go to events, you really stand out. A lot of people call me “Mr. Yukon” because I’m the only person from the Yukon they’ve ever met.

Erasmus Apparel: 2013 People's Choice Sarah Erasmus, 28 Owner Yellowknife, NT Erasmus Apparel turned four in February. Since starting the business with her aunt and uncle at 25, Sarah's designs might now be more visible around Yellowknife than the iconic landmarks that inspired her.

I really love t-shirts. Basically, that’s the thing that started it. I love to have one-of-a-kind t-shirts, like at parties, and I would make my own or find really unique ones at vintage shops. When I finished school, I knew that I wanted to do something like this, so we basically decided—my aunt and uncle and I—let’s do this. Let’s try. For designs, I think of something that’s missing, that we don’t have, and then I do it. Everyone knows what the Giant mine headframe or Con mine is, or even a simple yellow knife on a t-shirt. And it’s like “God yes, I would wear that.” And so that’s just kind of how it took off—people just liked those familiar things and so I go off that. And it’s been working. It’s funny when people come in who used to work at Giant or at Con and they say, “Oh, I worked at Con, I’ll never wear a Giant mine shirt.” Or there are their kids who will come in and say, “My dad worked there, I’ve gotta get this stuff.” I don’t know if I could go back to having a boss. It would be very hard. The only thing that would be nice about an 8:30-to-5 job is that, at 5 o’clock I wouldn’t have to worry about anything, not one thing, until 8:30 the next morning. Sometimes I’m like, “I wish.” Still, my two other business partners, I do have to answer to them at times. And I do have to be here and be an example for the other employees. This one guy who taught me a lot about screen printing said the only time you’re ever going to get work done is between 6 a.m. and 8 a.m. I thought, “No, no, no. That can’t be. Why?” And he said, “It’s because no one is awake really in the business world yet and no one can bug you.” Oh God, he was right. He was totally right. Do I get up at 6 a.m. every day then? No, no. If anything, I stay later to get things done. I’m not a morning person. This guy speaking at a conference a year ago said, “An airplane’s never safe until you land.” That was the best realization: just because the company was three years old didn’t mean we couldn’t fail. We kind of outgrew our shop the moment we moved into it. But one thing at a time. Until we’re bursting at the seams, that’s when we’ll get out of here. If there's one thing I keep telling myself when I’ve wanted to quit it’s, “You’re going to get past this. It’s just shitty right now, but you’ve got to get through it and it’ll be okay eventually.” Because, I tell you, we probably hit everything that could happen: shipping-wise, accounting-wise, or just having to do certain things over again. Sometimes at three in the morning on a Friday night I’ll think, “I don’t want to be here anymore, what am I doing?” But then, I remember, it’s not always going to be like this. I would never work a job just strictly for the money. I did that one summer and I said never again. Looking back to before I started, I would probably have told myself to get a lot more sleep. Would I do this again? Yes. Probably. Most likely. Yeah. I wouldn’t not.

Arctic Circle Dental Services: 2014 People's Choice Steven Partyka, 44 Owner and Dentist Iqaluit, NU The typical career path doesn’t wind from New Jersey to Nunavut, but Steven isn’t the typical dentist. The exuberant, chatterbox owner of Arctic Circle Dental Services finds reciprocity in his work in the remote capital—the harder he works, the more smiles he gets to see.

I’m sure they warned you about me. People ask me all the time, “Why would you leave New Jersey? How could you leave right outside New York City for this?” People are great here. They need me. Go where the need is greatest. Honestly, I can work 14 hours a day without distraction, because I’m not worried about other things. It’s not like there’s a Broadway show around the corner or Meatloaf’s coming to town to say hi. I can focus on what I’m doing here and it’s kind of nice. I get here every morning at 8 a.m. and I work until 9 or 10 at night. But just six days a week. On Sundays, I only work about five or six hours. And I don’t stop for those lunch or dinner breaks, I don’t have time for that stuff. I’ll eat when I’m dead. Before this, I worked with Dr. Adam in Yellowknife. I had just gone back to New Jersey and I was looking to work for somebody and then the call came in for Iqaluit. I said, “Yeah, sure, let’s go and do it.” I came up here to fix things up and here I am, six years later, just fixing things up. What’s really nice about Iqaluit is the small-town vibe, the togetherness that you get. We all do kind of stick together. I’d go to hell and back for these people. I practice the George Bush philosophy: you don’t have to be great if you surround yourself with great people. My staff is a group of really great people, so they take care of a lot of the stuff for me so that I don’t have to, so I’m kind of lucky that way. I don’t think it’s the right thing to appeal to someone’s wallet. They’re people who are going to do it for the wrong reasons. I put out an ad for a receptionist and the number one question I get is, “Do you need to read or write?” We’re trying to shift the paradigm here from, “Oh shit, it’s broken. Let’s get in there and fix it” to a more preventative nature. That’s where we’ve been really successful. We’re trying to change the awareness and the focus on preventing disease as opposed to fixing symptoms. If someone comes to me and says, “I don’t have teeth.” Good, I’ll get you teeth. “I’m in pain.” I can get you out of pain. It’s so nice to actually take somebody who used to say, “I want all my teeth out because they hurt,” and just fix one problem so they’re out of pain. You wouldn’t believe how beautiful the smiles are afterwards. Job satisfaction is incredible. I don’t like drive-by dentistry. I get really disturbed when people come up here for two weeks and then they go back to wherever they’re from and they claim they’re saving dentistry and they’re helping people out. Meanwhile, we’re here in the trenches every day. It’s a little bit offensive to the few of us that are here and have been here for a long time. Government needs to step aside, because they’re competing with us. They need to let small business come in here and do the job because it will do a better job. There’s government-funded dental therapist things. This is some kind of weird creation, a weird abomination between a dental hygienist and a dentist. Instead of going to school for 12 years, they go to school for a year or two and they’re doing surgery on children. It seems odd to me that when there’s a dentist in town who has 10 years of experience and 12 years of training, why would you be going to somebody who has a year of training and let them operate on your children?   Nobody’s bouncing off the walls going, “Yes! Root canal for Christmas!” It’s unrealistic. But I had a little kid here just now, he was just adorable. I love it. These kids are bouncing off the walls, happy to come here. What more could you ask for? I have one lady that comes by to listen to 1960s music with me. One lady comes by so we can dance around the lobby. I started doing botox in Iqaluit. That was a first. I do everything from botox to broken jaws. I’m not a Facebook person or Internet person, so this was all word of mouth from people in Iqaluit and through friends and stuff like that. I’m not aware of what goes on that way. I’ve got my nose in people’s mouths. We’re looking at expanding into Rankin Inlet. We’re going to be expanding into the hygiene program out there, to bring a hygienist there and to see how that goes. If that works out well, maybe we’ll even look at expanding into more of a dental program. There are so many people that I know from Iqaluit that have moved there, so I figured let’s make it easier for them. I can just talk for hours, which is never good.

Yukon Brewing: 2014 Best Yukon Entrepeneur Bob Baxter, 58 Co-founder Whitehorse, YT Running your own brewery can be tons of fun, if you can keep a glass-half-full mentality.

About a year ago, we started making real ales; beer that’s a British style that has never seen artificial gas. Every Friday at noon, one of those firkins comes out and people can come into the brewery and fill up a vessel with it and take it home. Every single one’s different and that keeps it fresh for the customers. I wish that I was a little bit more aware of the fact that you will lose before you win. I think it’s pretty common for every enterprise, you lose money for a while and then that slows down. Then you stop losing money and maybe turn that around and actually go the other way. Or maybe you don’t. You never know that success is just around the corner or— worse—failure is. Since 2009 we’ve been barrelling whisky. We haven’t sold a drop of it, but we’re getting real close. It’s getting pretty tasty. It will become one of the few single-malt whiskys that aren’t from Scotland. Believe me, we’ve done our fair share of sampling of it as it’s come along, and it’s darned tasty. We’re too small to be consistent, but we will revel in our inconsistency. So, if you really like a batch, you may want to buy two bottles because you may never see it again. It’s Friday and I know that in half an hour, if I go down to our store, there’ll be a line-up of people and they’ll all be happy and smiling. It’s so nice to be involved with something that, just 20 years ago, was a hunk of land with weeds growing on it.

[upheremagazine]

My so-called job

What’s it like to wake up to stunning Arctic vistas, watch polar bears all day and hike across the tundra—and get paid for it? STORY AND PHOTOGRAPHY BY JIMMY THOMSON

Tony Beck is getting tired of Northern Fulmars. Holding up his binoculars on the ship’s bridge, surrounded by passengers in their cold-weather coats ready to run out to the deck at a moment’s notice, the kickboxing-champion-turned-naturalist stares out into the grey sea, its choppy surface ringed with a light fog, broken only by a few gliding birds.

“Have you been to the Antarctic?” He asks the passenger beside him.

She replies that she hasn’t. Still watching the lumpy waves, Tony completes the thought. “It looks a lot like this.”That very morning, midway through our Iqaluit-Resolute route along the east coast of Baffin Island, we had seen our first polar bear before breakfast. It sat on a pan of ice the size of a golf green, surrounded by other small chunks of rapidly decaying sea ice that seemed alive in the long-period swell, undulating in the morning light. It was instant pandemonium: bare feet were jammed into boots, jackets thrown on over pajamas, and cameras snatched off desks without batteries or memory cards.

The giant ship edged closer. The bear sat up, catching our scent, and turned around but stuck to its small raft, watching us over its shoulder. The clicking cameras crescendoed every time the cream-coloured bear moved, yawned, shook its coat like a dog or lay down. Gasps and laughter accompanied every step and roll, even amongst us guides. I’ve spent hundreds of hours watching bears year after year, and the same grateful feeling and uncontrollable smile still overcome me every time.

Behind the bear, the cliffs of southeast Baffin Island were lit up between low clouds, a view that nanuq notwithstanding would’ve been reason enough to step out to the deck on this cold morning. It was the view we woke up to, day after day: the midnight sun still low on the horizon, flooding the west-facing cliffs with light.

Minutes later, a mother and calf bowhead whale passed within a ship’s length of us, momentarily distracting our attention from the alert bear. The giant whales, the second-heaviest animals ever to live on Earth, are also some of the longest-lived. They were hunted to the brink of extinction for their blubber and long baleen plates, but today bowhead whaling is limited to a few Inuit hunts each year. An infant bowhead, just a few years into a life that would likely last until we were all long gone, was being cautiously shepherded by a mother whose memory could extend back to the era of industrial whaling in the Canadian Arctic.

All of this had happened only hours before, yet there we were that afternoon, desperately leaning against the windowsill of the bridge as if to will the ship forward towards our next adrenaline high.

My first job as a teenager was at a café in a sports facility, Calgary’s Talisman Centre. I was a cashier (and a lousy one), taking orders and mild abuse for seven and a half seemingly endless hours broken up by a furtive lunch break in the pool bleachers. At night, I would go home and dream that my customers from the day were in my house, complaining about my mom’s cooking and knocking on my bedroom door for more straws.

In a way, working as a guide on an expedition cruise ship is that nightmare, and I’ve lived it gladly for part of each year for five years. My “job” is an eccentric grab bag of duties ranging from driving Zodiacs to giving presentations on wildlife or Arctic sovereignty disputes to vacuuming the floor of the bar. I carry a firearm on tundra walks and I carry luggage off airport shuttles.

For two weeks at a time, twice or three times every summer, my workday starts at around 7 a.m. and usually wraps up by 10 p.m. There are no days off. I eat every meal with clients. There is no private space—I share my tiny cabin with another staff member—nor are there special staff-only spaces.

The other side of the coin is that I have no commute in the morning, I never have to wash dishes, and my day is planned for me.

But I only do this seasonally. My colleague, Nate Small, has been working as a kayak guide in the Arctic and Antarctic for three years, and doesn’t plan to settle anywhere anytime soon. “The first time you come for the adventure, the second time for the camaraderie, and the third time because no one else will have you,” he says, quoting a long-forgotten source. Between cruises, he does stints in Churchill, Manitoba for the polar bear season. He keeps most of his stuff in a few boxes at his parents’ home in Kenora, Ontario.

Many people in the industry live this way. My boss, Boris Wise, and his partner Eva Westerholm have been travelling together for years, sharing a cabin slightly smaller than Eva’s Volkswagen van she left in Whitehorse before boarding the ship for the summer.

For my part, I need some semblance of stability and at least one foot on solid ground, so for the past five years, I’ve taken only tentative dips into expedition life, feeding my Arctic curiosity. My parents, both Arctic experts who have been working on expedition ships for decades, first put me in touch with a company they knew was hiring. G Adventures (GAP then, before legal threats from the jeans purveyor) had a ship sink in the Antarctic, and lost many of their staff.

The staff didn’t drown; they just left for other opportunities while the company was replacing the Explorer—so, fresh out of a biology degree, I signed up for a season in Norway’s spectacular Svalbard archipelago.

I didn’t really know how to drive a Zodiac, fire a gun, or, in fact, how expeditions worked yet, so I cut my teeth in an unpaid three-week stretch in the British Isles, an internship of sorts with the now-defunct Polar Star Expeditions.

Then it was up to the Arctic, and over the next three months I saw my first polar bears (two play-fighting yearlings), and was followed through an abandoned Russian mining town by an Arctic fox. I drove a boat through my first Arctic storm, soaking everyone aboard in the process, and actually grew tired of seeing fin whales, with their predictable behaviour and low profile. I forgot that girls my own age existed. It was an exhilarating, exhausting three months that convinced me of two things: I could never do this full-time, and I could never fully do without it.

Unlike, say, a Caribbean cruise, you wouldn’t hop on an Arctic expedition just to relax and enjoy the nightly entertainment and all-you-can-eat buffet. One passenger tells me he’s there to check some Arctic birds off his life list; another woman in her 60s had “done Antarctica, done Spitzbergen,” and just wanted to see more of the polar world. An elderly couple from New Zealand tells me they had watched a documentary on sea ice, and were overtaken with the desire to get close to it.

Over breakfast after our bowhead whale sighting, an ebullient woman approaches my table wearing a whale-tail necklace, whale earrings, and a whale t-shirt, and makes the distressed-looking man across from me promise, promise, to come see the whales next year in Baja, California.

But for many, the highlight is going to town. Outside Pangnirtung’s community centre, a woman converses with an Inuk man for the first time while he sits astride his ATV, a freshly hunted walrus head mounted on the hood. Inside, European-descended tourists dance with the locals in familiar Highland reels, a legacy of the Scottish whalers who hunted bowhead whales in Cumberland Sound in the 19th century. Last year Inuit hunters from Pang caught a bowhead, and there are figurines carved from its baleen for sale.  

We’re sailing into ice. The ice charts that expedition leader Boris Wise posts next to the chart mapping our course begin to hem in our options. The ice chart colour coding runs from green (1-3/10ths of the ocean’s surface covered with ice) to red (9-10/10ths). Our destination, Resolute, is surrounded by red. Our robust research vessel, the Akademik Ioffe, can handle ice, but not that much. We might have to reroute.

The passengers are hardly fazed. Maybe having seen much of what they have come here to see—polar bears, bowhead whales, sea ice, Arctic communities—has already ticked enough boxes that reaching the far end of our journey doesn’t seem as important anymore.

My first year in the Canadian Arctic, our trip up the Labrador coast to Iqaluit was cut short by a solid red Frobisher Bay. The ice had packed in during the spring breakup and remained, blocking traffic in and out. Likewise, a trip in my second year required an icebreaker escort to make it through the Northwest Passage’s narrowest point, the Bellot Strait. We tucked in behind the Henry Larsen for two full days, following at full speed in its wake like a running back behind a burly offensive lineman.

Sure enough, a couple days later the decision is made to turn around and sail south to Iqaluit. The ice hasn’t budged, and even if it did it would have nowhere to go. Resolute Bay remains so packed with ice that getting ashore would be impossible. The passengers, having been assured at the outset that the trip was not a cruise but an expedition, take it in stride when Boris stands up in the dining room to deliver the bad news. Cruises are predictable; expeditions adapt.

There are two realms to the office of a staff member: the ship and the Arctic. The ship is chaotic. Early in the morning, I am woken up by an overhead announcement, and I proceed to the noisy dining room. The ship itself is vibrating from the engines, and tones and rhythms—clattering, clicking, rattling and ringing—emanate from every surface. The anchor chain drops with a sound like a hundred bowling balls funneling down a staircase. Passengers chat excitedly about the day’s landing or a wildlife sighting.

When it’s time to land, I exit the hot mud room to the brisk air outside and I hop in a Zodiac, motor rumbling, and accelerate until the drone of the engine and the hiss of the water beneath the boat are the only sounds.

Coming to land, I gradually enter the calm of the Arctic. I decelerate until individual waves are audible against the boat’s pontoons, and eventually cut the engine to glide noiselessly to shore. The shore here, like any beach, is a border. It separates the chaos of the ship from the silence of the land. I shoulder my firearm, and hike out to my lookout spot somewhere up above the landing site. I can hear the crunching of gravel and snow under my rubber boots, I can hear birds, and I can hear coffee swishing in my thermos.

This is the time when I’m technically in the most danger, and stories abound of guides stumbling across sleeping or hidden polar bears. So far I’ve only had a handful of close encounters with a bear, and the closest time I didn’t even know it until later.

I was standing guard at the time, waiting at the end point of the passengers’ hike. I noticed a heavy fog gathering around me. I couldn’t see more than a hundred feet, a distance that a motivated polar bear can cover in about three or four seconds. I called the expedition leader, who instructed the ship to blow its horn—time to go. Now. With the passengers loaded, the few staff remaining on shore hopped in the last Zodiac, and as we drove past the point where I had been standing just minutes before, we noticed a bear meandering along the beach. It paused to sniff my lookout point, then examined every inch of the small hut where the passengers had just been visiting.

That may be the story I frequently conjure up to convince unruly passengers to stay close to the firearm handler in charge of keeping them safe, but it’s not the norm. The norm is a spectacular hike, with just enough adrenaline to keep sharp.

It’s a long walk from the shore to the top of the nearby lookout point, but without trees for reference it’s nearly impossible to gauge how far. When I reach my station, I take my first real look around and everything is clean. The snow on the higher mountains is white like fresh linen, the glacier face creased like crumpled paper, and the tiny plants at my feet are too low to blow in the wind. They just sit defiantly in their phalanxes, protecting their remote real estate; their tiny corner of the vast Canadian Arctic. For a few moments, I have peace.

[upheremagazine]

Dead North: the vision

We chat with one of the founders of the grassroots horror film festival to find out what blood-spurting eyeballs can do for Northern talent. BY SAMIA MADWAR

DEAD NORTH 2015 from Dead North on Vimeo

Maybe it’s the way that blood stains snow, or the way the darkness gets in your bones. Whatever it is, in the dead of winter, the North is primed to give you hair-raising shivers. For the past three years, Dead North, a festival showcasing the goriest, creepiest films North of 60, has been hitting the screens every March, when Northerners begin to emerge after that long, dark, freezing season—but haven’t yet shaken it off.

Since its launch, Dead North has grown from four entries to 21, and from exclusively NWT filmmakers to a pan-territorial roster. But Yellowknife-based filmmaker and artist Pablo Saravanja, who’s been involved with the show from the beginning, dreams of Dead North growing even bigger.

Up Here: This is the first year that Dead North has opened up to sci-fi and fantasy entries as well as horror. Why did you decide to expand?

Pablo Saravanja: We wanted to open up the festival to other types of storytelling, for serious and fun reasons. Jay [Bulckaert, one of the festival co-founders] is a hardcore horror nut. That guy wants to bathe in blood. But we wanted to open it up to other forms of storytelling, because the North is full of legends, traditions, wonder, and spectacular backdrops. There’s so much beauty in the North. We don’t want to force anyone to be dark.

UH: And it looks like you’ve got celebrity judges this year.

PS: There’s the editor of VICE Canada, Raf Katigbak, and Mitch Davis, festival director of Fantasia, the biggest genre festival in the world. And there’s Matt Aebig, a professional SFX guy from Vancouver. All three will deliver workshops during the festival: some on festival strategy—you know, what do you do with a movie after you’ve submitted to Dead North; here’s a list of other festivals you should submit to. Matt’s going to talk about practical effects: how to have blood shoot out of your eye, how to make clay and silicone masks. Basically, a lot of brilliant non-computer generated work.

UH: According to the rules, Dead North could be even bigger—anyone North of 60 in any country can compete, right?

PS: It’s an open invitation. We’ve sent emails, letters, and postcards to anyone we can think of. We want to grow it into a circumpolar film festival, make it more international; to align ourselves with people who think, talk and act like us. Honestly, I’ve got more in common with a reindeer herder in Finland than with a filmmaker from Vancouver.

We’re building a stronger industry by focusing locally, rather than doing what’s been done in the past, which is to encourage film and television productions from outside to come here. This is a direct response to that. We want it to be grassroots, not those watered-down North of 60 type shows. We don’t want to portray the North in a cartoony way.

UH: Ideally, what direction would you see Dead North headed in?

PS: My goal in the next five years is to make a feature film. And we’re cultivating a culture of producers and artists that are all on each other’s radar. You’re going to see the best work from the best Northern talent. We’re going to let the world know we don’t have to regurgitate the same old stories. We have new stories, right here.

Catch the Dead North films at vimeo.com/deadnorth, and watch the premiere of the 2015 contestants at Yellowknife’s Snowking winter festival on March 18.

[upheremagazine]

Tanya [Tagaq] told me. I hadn’t seen her in a long time, and she’s a dear friend. I was texting with her while she was stuck in Maine because of a snowstorm and she was like, ‘Hey, we’re nominated for a Juno!’ I’d forgotten that they were going to announce the nominations that day … it had fallen off my radar. And I didn’t understand, I thought she was telling me that she was nominated, and then I was like, ‘My album, too?’ That was a really nice way to receive the news. I’ve always been really proud of her and really happy to stand with her and call her a colleague. A couple of years ago, in November 2013, we were both asked to share a showcase at Mundial Montréal with two other women. I went on second-last and Tanya closed the show. And people were just blown away at what kind of talent comes out of the North. That night, I won one of the music prizes for that festival and she won the other one, and I was like, ‘Northern women are taking over the world!'

Yellowknife-based Dene artist Leela Gilday on finding out about her Juno nomination for her 2014 album, Heart of the People. She won a Juno for her second album, Sedzé, in 2006. On Sunday, Tanya Tagaq nabbed the Juno award for Aboriginal Album of the Year for Animism, which also won the Polaris Prize last year.

[upheremagazine]

Dog days on the Mackenzie

Remembering an impossible friendship. BY DANIEL CAMPBELL

My hands slipped with sweat over my paddle as we came off the Mackenzie River at Wrigley, NWT, last summer. It was about 30C that day, and humid, so my canoe partner, Karen, and I paced ourselves as we ascended the steep, grassy banks towards the town of just over 100 to fill our water jugs. It was our first destination on a 1,000-kilometre, seven-week odyssey to Inuvik—we had a long way to go.

The town was quiet. A wood barbecue still smoked next to the Pehdzeh Ki band office, evidence of the afternoon’s Canada Day festivities. We wandered the dusty streets until we met a young couple sitting on their porch. The man, the town’s water truck driver, offered to fill our jug from the truck sitting in his driveway; his wife came out with chunks of ice in a Ziplock bag. I quickly dropped one in my mouth to cool off.

A grey-white hound approached us as we walked back down to our camp near the shore that evening. He was one of the many strays that roamed town, but he eyed us as we passed while the other dogs rambled by. He bowed his head when I looked at him—I made a “tsik tsik” noise with my tongue and crouched down. He was skittish at first, but eventually came over and got a cool piece of ice to chew on for his troubles.

Wrigley—what I imaginatively called him—wasn’t the prettiest dog. He had some lumps and sores and chew marks in his fur where the bulldogs (big flies) got him good. He chomped at the bulldogs that tried to land on me, so I let him hang around.

Of course I couldn’t feed him. He looked half-starved, but I didn’t want him getting dependent on me, since we were only staying in town for a few days and there was certainly no room for a dog in our canoe. Wrigley stuck around anyway. I’d hear him rustling outside our tent at night, see his shadow project across the wall as he patrolled our perimeter for bears or any other unwanted intruders, before he finally circled around to the ground, curling up, nose in tail.

One night, he snuck up behind me as I was eating my dinner and scarfed down a couple mouthfuls from my pot. I called him some names I won’t repeat here and kicked some rocks in his direction, hoping he’d learn to stay away. But he didn’t.

The day we left Wrigley, Wrigley was waiting by our canoe. The weather wasn’t good. Rain poured to start the day and wind whipped up the river from the north. I tried to ignore Wrigley’s whining from the rocky shore, as he watched us pack our canoe.

“Try not to look at him,” I told Karen. “It’ll just make it harder,” I said, although I didn’t know for whom.

We paddled hard against the wind and rain. Wrigley followed, crying and yelping along the shore, sometimes jumping into the water and swimming out to our canoe.

“Do you think we could take him?” Karen asked. I wasn’t sure if she was kidding, but a quick look at our gear spilling over the gunwales of our canoe put that thought out of our minds.

After nearly two hours of paddling against the wind, we pulled the canoe over, exhausted, only about 10 kilometres downriver.

And there was Wrigley, waiting for us on the shore, panting and exhausted too. As I’d do again and again throughout the summer, I napped the rainy, windy weather away. Wrigley sat upright beside me as I slept and maybe wondered if he could fit in our canoe too.

When the weather started to let up, we got ready to leave. The shoreline ahead gave way to granite cliff. I knew Wrigley couldn’t follow. Yet he tried, thrashing his way into the water. Unable to swim around the cliffs, he went back to the shore. He howled. Oh he howled.

I remember a tingling feeling in my nose, and those may not have been raindrops on my face. I heard a whimper out of Karen too.

We’d come into contact with a lot of dogs in communities along the river: there was the husky mix who would roll over for belly rubs from Karen in Tulita; or the months-old shepherd mix that wouldn’t stop nipping my hands in Norman Wells; and the shaggy terrier that quietly loitered outside the community centre in Fort Good Hope. They all seemed content, roaming in their packs around town.

But not Wrigley, who sniffed us out and followed us down river until he couldn’t any longer.

The howls got farther away. Eventually, we could no longer hear them.

[upheremagazine]

Cam Bay kimchi

Learning to love pickled cabbage. BY GLORIA SONG

“What exactly is kimchi?” a young woman asks, as she bounces her baby up and down in her amauti hood.

We expect questions like these, selling our homemade jars of kimchi and plates of kimbap—Korean-style maki sushi—at the annual Cambridge Bay Christmas Bazaar in the high school gym. Flanked by tables selling Arctic fox furs and sealskin mitts, we know this will be an introduction to Korean food for some.

“It’s a type of Korean pickled cabbage.”

“How would you eat it?”

That’s a tougher question to answer. Korean cuisine is conceptually different from the conventional North American plate arrangement. With Korean dining, you get your own bowl of rice, accompanied by many shared side dishes called banchan. Kimchi is one of many banchan that you’d find on a Korean supper table.

“It’s like a condiment,” I answer. “I find it goes really well with rice and barbecued beef. My husband once ate it on a hot dog, which is something different. It’s really delicious, if you like spicy things.”

“I love spicy things! I wonder if it would go with maktaaq?” the woman muses. “I’ll take a jar.” Well, there’s a first: Korean kimchi with whale blubber. I personally enjoy eating sashimi with soy sauce and a bit of kimchi, I tell her, so I bet maktaaq with soy sauce and kimchi might actually work well. As she walks away with a jar, another customer approaches. “What exactly is kimchi?”

Going into the bazaar, I wasn’t sure how receptive most folks in Cambridge Bay would be to kimchi, which is truly a foreign dish. (There is only one restaurant in town besides the Pizza Hut/KFC Express, and its menu offers the usual hamburgers and fries that are popular with everyone in the North.) And there’s more: I’m still carrying the scars of my childhood, where my immigrant mother urged me not to bring Korean food to school for lunch, lest the other elementary school kids bully me about my smelly kimchi.

But if I’ve learned anything since moving to Cambridge Bay a little more than two years ago, it’s that although Ikaluktutiakmiut are fiercely proud of their Inuit culture, they won’t scrunch up their noses at something different. When we had a Punjabi Malaysian woman living in town, women flocked to her yoga and belly-dancing classes. And the most popular table at the Christmas Bazaar, besides Roni Ohokannoak’s Arctic char antipasto, is Salma Easmin’s Bangladeshi food. So I figured if I was ever going to break my smelly lunch anxiety, this would be the place to do it.

Earlier in the fall, at one of our community markets, my friend Christine and I gave away small samples of kimchi for free while we sold our hand-rolled kimbap sushi rolls. A few kids asked what we were giving out.

“I don’t know if you can handle it,” I told one boy. “It’s really spicy. You might cry.”

“I’m not going to cry!” the little boy insisted, shoveling a piece of kimchi into his mouth. He stared at me defiantly. Until his eyes watered up. He ran off to the bathroom while his friends laughed.

Tears aside, that first foray went quite well, so Christine and I decided to take the plunge and make a big batch of kimchi to sell at the Christmas Bazaar, the biggest community market of the year. We followed the recipe my mother had taught me, but instead of using shrimp or squid to season the cabbage, we used Arctic char jerky to add a little Northern twist of our own.

I was expecting most of our customers to be newcomers from down south, since kimchi seems to have become the new hipster culinary trend on Food Network these days (where was this kimchi enthusiasm when I was a kid?). But everyone is curious, from elders who love spicy food to young mothers inventing new maktaaq fusion dishes on the spot. Two hours in, we’ve sold 20 jars.

“I hear you’ve got kimchi,” says my friend Alex, who arrives later in the afternoon. She’s half-Japanese and excited for a rare chance to indulge in some authentic Asian cuisine in Cambridge Bay. But she’s too late.

“I’m so sorry. We just sold our last jar.”

[upheremagazine]

Firing up Yurt Fest

Iqaluit’s answer to Burning Man. BY ANUBHA MOMIN

Photo by Sara Statham

There are no tickets, there is no website. The date is flexible and the location remains undisclosed until the 11th hour. If you’re on “the list,” you get an email the day of the event, with a time and GPS coordinates that take you literally to the middle of nowhere.

Now in its fifth year, Yurt Fest is what I think of as an uncrashable party. People usually drive out by snowmobile, pulled in a qamutik, meaning access is limited at best and treacherous at worst. The party starts around 9 p.m. at the mouth of the bay, where festival-goers flock to solicit rides or directions. Several intrepid partygoers without machine transport decide to begin the six-kilometre trek from Iqaluit across frozen Frobisher Bay towards the yurts on skis or by foot. Bay on skis or by foot. Snowmobiles whiz away from town at full speed, stopping to pick up pedestrians who want a lift. Slowly, 250 or so attendees have arrived at the yurts, piled three to a skidoo or half a dozen in a qamutik, some passengers already buzzed from the beers and whiskey they sipped in or on their sleds.

Ducking your head and stepping into a yurt, you find disco lights, a fully functioning DJ booth—as long as the generator is running—and a loveseat made of snow. Outside, a 12-foot-tall snowman perches on a wooden structure fabricated mostly from pallets, an abundant source of wood north of the treeline. This lumber monument is to be later lit on fire, an ode to Burning Man, the desert cousin of—and inspiration behind—Yurt Fest. It’s part dance party, part winter camping, and the most anticipated event of the year by Iqaluit’s would-go-to-Coachella-if-it-didn’t-cost-$2,000-to-fly-out-of-here crowd.

The theme is Return of the Melting Man, the name of the snow effigy who is destined to return to the ice from which he was made. Around midnight, a trio of fire dancers come out swinging before the contents of a bright red jerry can are poured over the slats of wood between the Melting Man’s legs. An archer (yes, an archer) draws his bow back, takes aim and lets fly a flaming arrow. Miss. He tries again. Miss. And again. Miss. A roman candle eventually does the trick, and the Melting Man is engulfed in a roaring fire beside us, on the bay frozen thick with six feet of ice.

The fire fest continues as strangers, neighbours, and friends come together in small groups to set friendship lanterns alight—our own icy-cold version of a full moon party. Flashes of green, yellow, and pink slowly ascend into the midnight blue sky, and for a moment the party is put on hold as we collectively look up, faces aflame, eyes aglow, silent in awe at the spectacle around us.

Then it’s back into the yurts for some music. We peel off our parkas and toques, grinding into the shifting snow floor below our feet. In 2014, Yurt Fest features a live performance for the first time, courtesy of Toronto rapper Rich Kidd, who spends most of the night in a full sealskin coat. Rich Kidd’s intimate performance at times blends freestyle raps with traditional Inuit throat singing, a testament to the North-meets-South fusion that is characteristic of Iqaluit’s social fabric.

The show is followed by hours and hours of live DJ mixes, bodies and music drifting in and out of the yurts as the sun returns from a brief hiatus. The white light of Iqaluit’s increasingly earlier mornings does little to sober the alcohol-soaked spirits of the crowd; guests remain on the sea ice, mingling, hula hooping, drinking, dancing, until they can no longer warm their feet, hands, and cores with mulled wine or smoke. The Ski-Doo shuttles begin in earnest around 4:00 a.m., although some stay even later.

Steering my snowmobile over the rutted ice towards town, I blink against thick snowflakes that further cloud the already uniform, white landscape. It is as though the sky were conspiring to extinguish the last embers of Yurt Fest, such that you would never know what had occurred just hours before unless you had been there.

[upheremagazine]

"Lady is not going to make it"

One skittish steed can make Midnight Sun Outfitting guides' harrowing yearly journey through northern Yukon bush much more dangerous. STORY AND PHOTOGRAPHY BY GENESEE KEEVIL

Logan Young leads a string of horses through the peel trail that leads to the Midnight Sun Outfitting hunting camp.

Lady doesn’t like to get her feet wet. The delicate black quarter horse gallops the first 24 dusty kilometres, keeping pace with the pack, until the dirt road ends at the river.

It’s the first day of the trail in to camp, a four to five day journey that doesn’t often follow a trail at all, through some of the Yukon’s toughest terrain. Only a handful of big-game outfitters still use horses to hunt, in part because getting that many mounts into remote fly-in camps is treacherous, time consuming and often traumatic.

Most of Alan Young’s 32 horses have done this trek before. They’ve sunk in belly-deep mud, swam river crossings and jumped steep rocky chasms. But this is Lady’s first year. And Lady doesn’t like to get her feet wet.

“Where the hell is Niall?” Jessie Young, 25, has four fresh horses strung out behind her, their bridles tied to the packsaddles of the horses in front. If she has to stop, those horses start yanking backwards, nipping each other’s hind ends and twisting around the thick black spruce, tying a tangled knot of rolling-eyed panic. Jessie can see all the other wranglers and their strings of horses, but she can’t see Niall, a young, inexperienced wrangler—or Lady.

Jessie stops. Her horses start to pull back, tugging the wrong way. She screams for Niall. “We can’t stop now, we’re going to lose all those fucking horses,” says Logan. Jessie’s younger brother is up front leading the pack and chasing about 16 loose horses through scrub brush and muskeg. He pulls his horse up so short, the horses strung out behind him domino to a stop. Logan—22, lanky, no-nonsense and always on the move—is not good at waiting. He lets out another streak of expletives. Jessie starts to coil her snake of horses around. She’s going to have to go find Niall.

Just as Logan starts cursing again, Niall appears, sopping, apologetic and a little lopsided. Lady is behind him, running loose, her bridle rope muddy, wet and dragging. There’s no time for explanations. Logan is gone, his string of horses jolting forward behind him like a shunting train. Everyone is quiet.

Logan ducks under a windfall, cowboy hat intact. Then he turns off the trail into brush that feels like a human-sized spider web, avoiding a mud pit where horses got bogged down last year. Branches slap cheeks, stab eyes, and another low-lying deadfall rips at a backpack, threatening to pull rider from horse.

“You’re 17.” Jessie is yelling from the back of the pack, counting forward. The idea is to tally all the loose and tied horses between her and the next wrangler, who then counts the horses in front of him and yells the new number forward. “You’re 23.” Logan is too far ahead to hear his number. “Ooooooooowheee.” Jessie sings out the familiar high whoop she and Logan use to communicate when they’re separated by 32 head of horses. “Ooooooooowheee,” she trills again, hoping to slow her brother down. Some of the horses are dragging, yanking back on ropes.

When she finally catches Logan, he hasn’t got a full count. The loose horses are still ahead somewhere. He has been following hoof prints all day, his black felt cowboy hat pushed back on his head. “Keep’em going, or we’ll lose them.”

It’s Logan’s 16th trail in—he’s been doing it since he was six—and losing horses is not new. A couple years back, on this stretch, he lost 12 of them—and a wrangler.

The cabin at Louie Brown camp is a rest stop along the trail through the Peel—a warm shelter on a week-long journey.

By the time Logan hauls into Louie Brown camp at the end of the first day, it’s dinnertime—and he's already lost a horse. Waiting by the cabin, munching fireweed and twitch grass are the 16 loose horses Logan has been tracking all day. But not Lady. She disappeared a couple hours back, in that tangle of buck brush, windfalls and muskeg.

“Lady is not going to make it.” Jessie is matter of fact. She is wearing a pink T-shirt, a pair of ripped jeans held up by a big silver rodeo buckle and earrings made out of 30-calibre Winchester bullets.

A couple years older than Logan, Jessie remains a little calmer than her brother and doesn’t push quite as hard. She is nursing a smashed finger, its nail ripped off by a saddle during her stint in red and white chaps and a tight red blouse, galloping around the ring as a Calgary Stampede Girl carrying a flag twice her height. The finger is taped up inside a metal brace. When she isn’t driving 32 horses through the Yukon wilds, Jessie dresses wounds and doles out meds in nursing scrubs, a voice of quiet compassion at a busy Calgary hospital. She turns back. “I’m going to look for Lady.”

It started way back at that first river crossing. Lady stopped dead, almost yanking Niall off his horse. The jolt pulled his saddle sideways just as his mount started to cross the river—in the wrong spot. Niall, a short, awkward, aspiring writer who joined this crew of cowboys to experience first-hand the last vestiges of Canada’s settler roots, isn’t sure exactly what happened next, but suddenly he was swimming. So was the horse he was riding, and so was Lady.

She refused to follow and Niall let go of the rope he was was using to lead her. By the time he caught up, Logan was gone in a cloud of curses and Niall didn’t have time to catch Lady, or even tighten his saddle.

It is hard to find experienced cowboys crazy enough to make this trek. Alan, who won't be on this trip in, used to troll the jail, getting convicts like Chicken Charlie out for the summer to trail horses and guide trophy hunters. Nowadays, he picks up hitchhikers or finds wayward travellers instead, promising them quick cash and an adventure they wont forget. Some have never ridden a horse before and, after this trek, never want to again. Others, like Niall, keep coming back for more.

Wieners and beans are steaming on the Coleman stove when Jessie finally returns. She rode back for miles, calling and calling and was just about to give up when her horse let out a whinny. Silence. Her horse whinnied again. A faint whinny replied. “Lady was way up on a rock on the mountain,” says Jessie. “She was standing there, out of the bugs, not moving, the wind blowing through her mane.” Logan shakes his head. “That horse isn’t going to make it.”

A high-pitched screaming whinny pierces the night. A crash. Another whinny. Inside the blue nylon tent, Jessie and Logan wait, eyes wide open. Minutes pass in silence. Nothing. They settle back into their sleeping bags, pull toques over ears and drift back to sleep.

Crash. The ground is shuddering. Something hits Jessie so hard she is thrown across the tent. Fabric rips. In the pitch darkness they see the silhouette of a tree land in the tattered vestibule. Logan crawls out through the gaping hole in the tent and starts cursing, as Jessie joins her brother, shivering in long johns in the wet grass. The horses must have been picking on Lady until she panicked, ripping the tree she was tied to right out of the ground. With the tree crashing behind her, Lady started to run. She was on top of them by the time Logan heard the hooves. In that split second, he threw himself on his sister, shoving her out of the way as horse and tree descended on the tent, slamming down where Jessie had been sleeping.

Logan is used to hooves crashing around him. But he isn’t usually in a tent when it happens. A champion team roper, who won Wyoming last year, he has been running the rodeo circuit for close to a decade and is so fast in the ring, the University of Wyoming gave him a rodeo scholarship to come study business. After analyzing corporate strategy all week, Logan spends weekends in chaps roping calves. It’s a natural fit, having grown up on a Saskatchewan cattle ranch, spending summers at his parents’ outfitting camps. He rode in pack boxes as a toddler, sitting in the wooden crates, diamond-hitched onto the side of horses swaying through the mountains during sheep and grizzly hunts, and shot his first mountain goat at six. Spooked horses, misfiring guns, he has seen it all. But this is the first trampled tent.

Logan is yelling over the horse at Niall, who is helping diamond-hitch pack boxes full of wieners, beans and instant noodles onto Splash, a spooky paint with one brown eye and one blue. Niall pulls madly on the ropes, his feet lifting off the ground. Splash spins. Logan curses.

It had been a relaxing morning. The crew of cowboys did yoga in the grass, Logan reaching down to grab hold of his duct-taped muck boots, while Jessie leaned into downward dog. As they ate bacon and eggs, Lady stood nearby quietly munching grass. She is an affectionate, delicate horse, who loves getting the white star on her forehead scratched.

“Let’s go, let’s go.” As soon as the last horse is saddled, Logan jumps on and flies out of camp with four horses tailing behind. Jessie and her string are the last to leave. “Ooooooooowheee.” Logan keeps riding. “Ooooooooowheee.” Jessie yells up the line, “Tell Logan Lady won’t follow.” More cursing. “Pull her,” he yells. Jessie turns her train around and catches Lady in the meadow.

Logan and the wranglers behind him have already crossed the river, horses splashing and slipping on the rocks, when Jessie catches up. Lady won’t be pulled. More cursing. Logan whips his horse around as if on the tail of a calf in the rodeo ring and gallops back across the river. The horses stomp and snort in the trees, tugging lines. Splash, tied to a pine sapling, raises a back foot, threatening the horse behind him. Blackflies swarm. No sign of Logan. Or Lady.

“She is too soft,” says Jessie. “We’re going to have to leave her. But Logan has to figure this out for himself. I know my brother.” Ten minutes later Logan gallops back across the river. He is alone. “We’re leaving her,” he says untying his string of horses from the sapling. “She won’t follow.” He tosses Lady’s halter into a saddlebag and is gone.

“Did you take off her bell?” Jessie yells. The horses wear bells all summer to help outfitters and guides find the free-roaming mounts when hunters need them. Sometimes it can take a wrangler three hours of walking before tracking down a string of horses to saddle for the day’s hunt. Many claim that after a season out there in the Yukon wilds, they continue to hear bells, on downtown street corners, in the middle of office meetings, in dreams. Logan left Lady’s bell on. “It will help scare the bears away,” he says. “But it won’t help with the wolves.”

Logan leads the horses along the water.

There are big white bones on the trail, bleached and brittle. It is day three of the trail in and the horses are near “the Crevasse,” a 40-foot drop into thick muskeg several horses deep. Last year, a couple mounts got bogged down here, their one-ton bodies immobilized by mud, legs sinking deeper with every ounce of struggle.

This year, the pack of loose horses disappears just before the crevasse. Casey is leading. A stout white horse with a distinguished mustache and droopy eyes, Casey has done more trail-ins than Logan or Jessie. He was trailing in with their grandfather.

But Logan doesn’t follow Casey and his pack of free ponies. Instead he starts climbing up high to the right of the cliffs and mud, looking for a better way across.

On the far side of the muskeg, a rusty come-along hangs in a tree. Jessie was up to her neck in the mud a few years back tying ropes around the horses so her brother could winch them out, like trucks in a mud bog.

Where Logan finally crosses, the drop into the crevasse is only a couple of meters. The horses sink to their knees in the thick black muck, falter, then lurch out, sliding and clomping up the slippery rocks on the far side. “That was Ginger,” says Logan, his horse sidestepping the big bleached bones on the trail. “She was one hell of a horse.” A few years back during the trail in, Logan pulled out his gun and shot her. Ginger had broken her leg trying to cross the crevasse. “It’s hard to shoot a horse you’ve ridden for hundreds of miles,” he says.

It is pouring rain. Horses brush up against trees sending showers down necks, wet buck brush slaps ripped rain pants, and leather saddles are soggy. Logan is hunched on his horse scrolling through pictures on his iPhone, beads of water dripping off the brim of his cowboy hat. He doesn’t stop for lunch.

By late evening Logan still isn’t stopping. The midnight sun lures him on toward base camp where hot showers, satellite Internet and heated bunk houses mark the start of hunting season. Even when Goose, one of the horses tied behind him, gets his head on the wrong side of a deadfall, Logan doesn’t stop.

Goose yanks back, eyes rolling, nostrils full of fear. Logan curses and pulls harder, kicking his mount ahead. The terrified packhorse skids, and falls to its knees. Logan yanks harder. Goose’s canvas-covered load tilts precariously to one side, her neck at an awful angle against the tree.

Snap. The tree breaks, a chunk plunging into Goose’s cheek. Logan’s string of horses lurches forward in the rain. There is blood running down the packhorse’s cheek, her loaded boxes all akimbo.

“Remember when we thought we lost Casey?” It was during trail in, and he just quit. They built a huge bonfire, fed Casey an apple, then a sandwich, but the old horse wouldn’t budge. So they left him. Alan points out the window toward the mountains at the far end of the lake. “We figured he was done,” he says. Then about a week later, sitting having coffee in the lodge, they saw this white speck at the end of the lake. It got closer and closer, and there was Casey back for another season.

Jessie glances toward the end of the lake. The last time they left a horse behind, stuck in the mud, it didn’t make it back. “It was dad’s favorite horse,” she says. Alan tried everything to get him out, even flew all the way to Dawson City to buy a come-along to try and winch him out of the muskeg. “By the time he got back, there was a grizzly on him.” Alan shot the bear.

“Remember the time we lost that wrangler,” says Jessie. They were camped at Louie Brown and the wrangler went off to look for a bunch of missing horses. Night fell, then morning. Eventually the horses came back. But no wrangler. They waited. Even lit a tree on fire. But he didn’t show. Another night, still nothing. So, they saddled their antsy herd and left. “And he just walked out of the bush,” says Jessie. “He’d been chased by a grizzly and ended up treed for two days only a couple of miles away.” Right around the spot she’d last seen Lady.

The snow in the meadow is trampled. Like there has been a soccer game, or a wrestling match. Jessie is just about back to Louie Brown. It’s the end of September and she is trailing out the horses. She guided a hunter on a grizzly this year. She got another hunter a record-breaking ram, earning her a Wild Sheep magazine cover. The fingernail on her Calgary Stampede finger is growing back. And she can’t wait to see her boyfriend, a bronc rider from Alberta.

Logan is already gone. He had to get back for the final semester of business school, leaving Jessie to get all these loose horses home. “I wonder if we’ll see Lady?” The crew of cowboys laughs.

At first, Alan didn’t understand what Jessie and Logan were saying, when they finally got up the nerve to mention the missing horse. “What do you mean you left her?”

“She was tired,” said Jessie. Silence. “Well, she might show up here,” he said.

It was a cold, wet hunting season with the snow settling in by September. Trophy hunters shivered in high-end camo on the side of mountains waiting for rams, glassing for caribou and moose, and keeping an eye out for prize grizzly, while the wranglers turned guides brewed up bush coffee, instant oatmeal and saddled horses. Jessie and Logan guided reality tycoons, Haliburton execs and big oil guys who throw down $50,000 for a week hunting on their dad’s Yukon outfitting concession, while Niall spent the summer building a new log camp, hewing the pine by hand. Goose spent much of the season trudging through creeks and muskeg with a cheek so infected it looked like she was eating a baseball. The stick that broke off in the gentle white packhorse’s face during trail in started to fester and smell. Jessie filled a syringe with milky penicillin and punched the needle into Goose’s neck. The baseball kept oozing. Logan wanted to lance it. Even that didn’t help.  

Vets don’t get called into the Yukon outback. With floatplane rides and exam costs, it’s cheaper to buy a new horse. A foot-long gash on a horse’s leg gets boiled spruce sap stuck over it with a burlap bag. Infections are lanced. And if things get really bad—a broken leg, too deep in muskeg—everyone has a gun.

Jessie has a toque pulled over her ball cap, hands numb. She’s trying to stay on what might be the trail and keep track of all the loose horses, including Goose, who finally managed to fight the infection. Night is falling. Louie Brown isn’t far. They’ll unload the stove, get hot food going, let the horses rest.

Just past the trampled meadow, as they enter the trees, Jessie sees a shadow. It is moving. Coming toward them—fast. There is no time to pull guns from leather saddle holsters, before it is on them. A tinkling bell. Then, not too skinny, no longer skittish—Lady lets out a whinny. The horses whinny back, and the cowboys laugh.

[upheremagazine]

Don't cry over spilled beads

Presenting the winner of the 2014 Sally Manning Award for Northern aboriginal nonfiction. 

BY ADINA TARRALIK DUFFY

It was the fifth time I had broken a necklace that day. The thread kept slipping or the needle dropping out of my hands, the beads slipping away like rain. Hitting the grey tile floor like a tiny Technicolor hailstorm. The reoccurring, scattered sound is disheartening. Tears well up in my eyes and I am tempted to give up beading, to sweep them all up and toss them in the trash, but instead I kneel again in frustration and begin to gather the beads from the dirt and dust.

Tuinnaq Bruce, Adina Tarralik Duffy's grandmother, at the old Hudson's Bay Company post in Wager Bay, photographed by David Pelly

As I put my hands in the grit of my unswept apartment floor and carefully press my index finger over a bead, I realize that it’s her I am thinking of, my anaanatsiaq—my grandmother. I can’t concentrate. My thoughts are in a distant place and seeping into memories past. The soft focus of grief is all around me. Sometimes crashing, sometimes caressing.

She never wasted anything. I never saw her lose her patience. Once, when she was teaching me how to bead floral patterns, my clumsy young hands had knocked over the bead bowl. I let out a heavy sigh and looked up at her wildly, afraid she may be mad at me. She only smiled. I got down on my knees and began to pick them up. Frustrated that I couldn’t seem to pick them up with my chubby, little six-year-old fingers, especially the lonesome ones caught in the cracks and corners of her aging linoleum floor, I began to whimper. My anaanatsiaq gently leaning beside me, placed a hand on my shoulder.

“Imanna,” she said to me softly. “Like this,” as she pressed her soft, wrinkled finger on a single red bead on the floor. It stuck to her finger and she easily placed it back in the shallow beading bowl. The memories flood me like scattered beads.

Like the time she told me a story after a housefly, the dreaded ananngiq, kryptonite to even the mightiest Inuk hunter, had buzzed by my head. I let out a too-loud squeal and expressed my great dislike for them, lamenting their very existence. My grandmother shook her head and told me to be careful about saying such things. That every creation has its purpose and its place. She told me how a young soldier also hated bugs with a vehement passion, that he believed they were the scourge of the earth and wished to have them completely wiped out from the planet.

Then one day he was fleeing from the enemy and hid himself inside a mossy cave. As he waited until it was safe to come out, he fell asleep. He was stirred from his sleep sometime later by the creeping, crawling legs of a spider scurrying across his face. Just at that moment he noticed an enemy fighter at the entrance of the cave about to ambush him. He was awoken just in time to kill the enemy and was able to escape unharmed. She told me that from that day, the soldier realized that all creatures serve a purpose and we must never think ourselves more important than any other living thing. I asked her if she knew who the man was. She said, “Uillium Uallasi.” I was amazed, realizing that she had just told me a story passed down to her about the great Scottish hero, William Wallace.

She’d often surprise me as we’d sit together listening to the local radio or gospel tapes, staring out the window looking over the Hudson Bay. She might be knitting socks or making a new pair of kamiks for one of her many grandchildren. She’d eventually break into a story and it seemed at first that she was just talking, but her stories always ended in lessons. She was always teaching and I was always learning, even without realizing it.

The smell of fresh bread or bannock was often present at her house. Goose, walrus, seal or caribou stewed on the stove. Rice pudding or her famous salmon and macaroni dish waited for hungry visitors to come and feast. Tea and cinnamon buns on the table, sugar encrusted spoons and condiments sat alongside an assortment of leftovers from any other given day. Mustard pickles to go with stewed seal, Heinz 57 to go with boiled maataq, soya sauce to go with frozen Arctic char. The little signs of colliding cultures and colonialism all around us.

My grandmother once remarked that she liked me better when I was fat. I could hear my auntie kind of giggle as I awkwardly stuffed the rest of my foot into my shoe. I was only half way out the door.

It stung because I knew she was right. There was a distinct, marked difference in my behaviour one teenage summer. Most of which centred around refusing to visit her house because I didn’t want to be pressured to eat. I was determined to be super skinny and gathering around the cardboard or the kitchen table was not on my agenda anymore.

The day I overheard her remark was the first time I had ever heard her utter anything about me that could be viewed as a negative. But unlike the skinny obsessed western world, fat wasn’t a four letter word to her. Even though I knew it wasn’t right for me to avoid her house, it took me years to realize the high cost of my vanity. Like many grandchild-grandmother relationships, much of our relationship centered around food.

It wasn’t until my mid-twenties that I returned back to my grandmother’s table. The table with the peaceful, yet ominous view of the Anglican church casting its shadow through the lace curtains.

For the latter years of her life, my grandmother hated all the pills she had to take, the food she was forced to eat, the rules that were imposed on her for health reasons. One of which was the nurses had told her to stop taking sugar in her tea. I knew this was a rule and had noticed she had taken to the change without much fuss. When someone served her tea with no sugar she did not seem to mind at all. As she sipped on her tea she would look at me with a little twinkle in her eye, nearly winking. One day she finally revealed to me her little trick.

She told me that she would sneak a candy into her mouth just before asking for or receiving a cup of tea and quietly sip on her secretly candy-sweetened drink. We smiled wistfully at each other and began to giggle. She always had that rascally way about her that was so endearing, even to the end.

As I gather up the last of the beads scattered across my kitchen floor, the sunshine beaming down across my knees, I begin to recall my last memories of her. Flooded with loss I gaze down at my hands and the tears form heavy in my eyes. No wonder she liked me better with my big rosy cheeks that rivalled St. Nick himself. I was happy and carefree. I ate whatever she offered and she never had to worry whether I’d make it through the winter. She often praised me in front of other elders for not being the fussy type as she handed me things like boiled seal intestines, raw ptarmigan or fermented walrus. I never gained back the weight, but I also could never gain back all the moments and treasures lost.

In her last days, greatly discouraged by her immobility, she was often too listless to eat. She no longer had an appetite. Her sense of worth had always been in doing, in working, in helping and serving those around her. She would often fall into bouts of weeping and it was intensely difficult to watch this great woman I love so deeply struggle so much. It was hard to watch her in pain. I admired my mother’s ability to help her through these difficult hours.

During one of my last few visits with her, she grabbed my hand desperately as I was about to leave and with wild eyes filled with tears she told me she wished I could take her with me in an amautik. My mother commented that she must be speaking nonsense. My heart was stabbed with pain as I told her she was not speaking nonsense at all. She was heartbroken at being left here again, and she was more than aware that many people had stopped coming by like they used to, the house was quieter and lonelier. She was immobile and couldn’t come with us, she had to be left yet again, unable to do the things she loved.

I placed my hand on her cheeks and told her that if I had an amautik big enough that I would take her with me everywhere. She smiled softly and knowingly, the heavy water in her eyes retreated for a moment but there was still a languid sadness that remained. It was a small comfort to her, that I understood, but we both knew that I would still leave her. She would still be bound to her living room. These were her last days.

That night, I decided to stay longer, the hours passing slowly as we all sat together on the couch. My grandfather was watching the television on mute. My grandmother and I sat mostly in silence. She had refused to eat earlier when my mother had come to feed her. She wept and refused the meal. She did not have the heart to eat anymore, she said. She did not feel well. My weary mother, concerned, kept trying and managed to get her to eat a few bites but gave in shortly after. She would try again tomorrow. Later in the evening as my own hunger began to noisily announce itself, I got up to cut up some frozen char quaq. I sliced the pieces carefully.

Normally I would have sat at the table by myself until she joined me. Because I knew she was unable to leave the confines of the couch, I decided to pre-cut pieces of char and placed them on plate. I rejoined my grandparents on the couch. As I sat there and ate, after a while my grandmother reached over and took a piece for herself and began to eat. I smiled a little to myself and wondered if she would take more... and she did.

After she consumed a fair amount of fish, the colour returning to her face, she smiled and turned to my grandfather. She said, “Takkuu nirijuruluujunga. Look at me, I am eating.” She said it in the self-deprecating way of the Inuit. Belittling herself so as not to sound proud, but knowing what she was doing was good. My grandfather beamed and gently patted her hands. The 60-year love between them was so palpable it nearly knocked me over.

After we were near the end of our tiny feast, my grandfather got up and went to the kitchen. He chopped up pieces of mataaq and caribou, not much but enough to restock our tiny shared plate. He placed it in her hands and we all sat and quietly shared the last meal I would ever eat with my anaanatsiaq. It was a small redemption for the cultural and social rejection of my confused youth.

As I stand up from gathering the last of the scattered beads, I think of how many more stories I could have listened to, how much more I could have learned had I not priced the value of my appearance over the value of her company. But as I am flooded with the richness of her memory, instead of inconsolable tears I am comforted by one of the very first lessons she taught me: don’t cry over spilled beads.

Every summer for 30 years, Sally Manning made her pilgrimage up North. It wasn’t a religious experience; for Manning, a writer and teacher, it was life-affirming. After her first time in the Barrenlands, she was hooked, and planned an adventure every year: biking the Canol Trail, paddling the Nahanni, hiking through Auyuittuq National Park on Baffin Island—and she never tired of it.

But on what would’ve been her 30th summer in the North, Manning stayed home in Parry Sound, Ontario. She’d been diagnosed with terminal cancer, with months to live. The following spring, when we last spoke, she said it might be nice to visit Yellowknife—and her friends there—one more time.

She died two months later, on June 3, 2014, around the time summer started to warm the lands and waters she so loved. She left behind a large family, two books, and a literary award encouraging Northerners to share their own stories. It’s only natural, then, that the first-ever winner of the Sally Manning Award is Adina Tarralik Duffy, who composed a tribute to a beloved and greatly respected woman with a rich legacy of storytelling and a deep respect for cultural values.

We’d like to thank judges Richard Van Camp, Timothy Taylor, Candis Callison, Joseph Boyden and Marion Lavigne. And we thank Sally Manning for helping bring these and future stories to light.

[upheremagazine]

Party like a Northerner

From dogsleds to snowmobiles, iglus to ice castles, and chainsaw-tossing to harpoon-throwing, here’s your guide to winter celebrations in Canada’s North. 

These ice towers, climbable and equipped with a zipline, are set up right downtown in Whitehorse. The largest is 20 metres tall. Photo by Cathie Archbould

So you wanna visit Canada’s North. A lot of people will tell you to avoid the winter—why come when it’s minus-30 and dark, when you can come instead during the summer months and experience a paradise of midnight sun, warm lakes, mountain trails and rushing rivers? Well, the answer to that depends on who you are as a person.

Unlike the whooping cranes and Arctic terns, who fly south for the winter, we Northerners stay here year-round. While bundled up in furs in our ice-fishing shacks, we may speak wistfully of summer, like romantics remembering a lost love—but we are a winter people. Four months of summer (at most) is enough for us. Any more and life would be too easy. When the summer sun starts setting near suppertime, we start thinking of the fun we’ll have once the big lakes freeze and gives us more room to party; when we can take our snowmobiles anywhere we can point our compass, or hitch up a dogteam and do the same; when we can drill through the ice and jig for our fish; when we can gear up in furs and show off our winter best; and when we can haughtily walk around in the cold, taking pride in not complaining. Besides, who needs the midnight sun when you have the Northern Lights? Here’s your guide on what to do, where to go and when to come on your next Northern adventure.

Photo by Bill Braden

Every year, for the past 20 years, Yellowknife’s Snowking (known as Anthony Foliot in the warmer months) reigns over a massive snow castle on Great Slave Lake. But Foliot’s not your typical king, in that he’d rather heap praise on his frosty-bearded crew of dedicated castle builders than take credit for everything.

“I’m just the overseer. Everyone’s got a specialized position. We’re a team. That’s how it’s evolved,” Foliot says as he uses a dolly to cart giant slabs of ice across the frozen lake in early February.

The six-man crew has worked every day—and weekend—since January 1st, hauling ice, pouring snow and placing blocks, though the veteran Ryan McCord jokes they try not to wear themselves out.

“Well… we start at the crack of 11, work till four, take a coffee break. Often we work later than four depending on how the day goes,” McCord says while positioning the frame of the castle’s chapel (yes, weddings are commonly held at the Snowcastle). With the sun dipping below the horizon by mid-afternoon in early January, the crew often poured snow in the dark. Some days temperatures dip below -40C, but McCord says the crew can stay warm, “just by workin’.”

It seems the little piece of Yellowknife Bay that becomes the Snowking’s sovereign territory come wintertime is going through the same kind of change many monarchies eventually experience—the snow monarch remains a powerful figurehead and head-of-state, but the day-to-day is governed by an ice-ristocratic class.  He now shares his powers with a board of directors. The festival is also a registered not-for-profit society and its workers fall under the Workers Compensation Board. It’s a change from the castle’s simpler, un-bureaucratic earlier days, when Foliot used to tunnel into snowbanks for neighbourhood kids in Old Town’s Woodyard.

“Oh yeah, we’re all legit!” Foliot says, “We’re just kinda fine tuning it all the time. It’s not new but it’s more efficient.”

By early February, the snowy workers are keeping pace with the building schedule—barely—so Foliot speaks haltingly as he carts around blocks of ice for the ambitious build. While this year’s castle won’t necessarily be bigger than the rest, it’ll certainly be more grandiose.

“We got a real bumper crop, 364 pieces of ice,” Foliot explains, pointing to the ice blocks they pulled out of the lake in November, when the ice was thin and clear. Most of the ice will go into large window walls on the south-facing side of the castle.

“Oh man these are gonna be so fun placing,” Foliot says as he slides an ice block on top of another at the chapel site. “Did you see that? Did you see how that just slid?” Regardless of the structure of the festival, Foliot’s rebel-pioneer spirit will show through, his unending passion for the festival permeating the icy castle walls.

“They’ll just be glorious on a day like today,” Foliot says, looking at the clear-blue sky and blazing midday sun. “Can you imagine, in a room, outta the wind, big ice windows, and white walls with art?” You have to see it to believe it.

Trek over the top: March 5-8, Dawson city, Yukon

Imagine sitting in a sleepy Dawson saloon in the dead of winter, sipping a beer and pining for those bustling days of summer, when suddenly, out of the cold dark the roar of snowmachines fills the air as hundreds of hard-drinking, ready-to-gamble Alaskan sledders descend into the streets. It’s been happening to Dawson City since 1993 and folks on both sides of the border couldn’t be any happier.

“It was just a couple guys in Tok who got this crazy idea and said, you know, let’s just go ride to Dawson. They went over and had a good time and it just exploded from there,” says Bob Brooks, president of the Alaska Trailblazers, organizers of the run from the U.S. side.

The 650 km round trip isn’t for just any green rider though. The route follows the famous Top of the World/Taylor highway—which is groomed in the winter—but it can get dicey near the top where snow often blows over the trail.

“There’s place called the 'terrible terrace' with snow sliding down the mountain over the road. People have lost their snowmachines over the hill and it just destroys them,” Brooks said.

Perilousness of the journey aside, the weekend trip attracts riders from all over the U.S. and Canada, with a healthy contingent of trek veterans—some who have been on every ride the past 22 years. Arriving in Dawson on Thursday night, the riders try to fit in as much banqueting, booze and blackjack as they can before they ride back to Tok on Sunday, bellies full, with some new cross-border friends.  

Thebacha Loppet, March 7, Fort Smith, NWT

With its 26-kilometre trail winding alongside the majestic Slave River, the Thebacha Loppet is one of the most beautiful cross-country ski runs in the northern Canada—and it’s celebrating its 40th birthday this year.

From its start point in Fort Fitzgerald, Alberta, the loppet traces an old portage route around the famous Slave River rapids towards Fort Smith, where skiers pass through ancient pines decked in layers of powdery snow, with views of the rapids along the way.

With more than 100 participants registering in 2013, the loppet is growing each year, attracting not only northern skiers, but southerners too.

The race is open to all ages and abilities, but be warned, the race has seen some extreme conditions in the past, with temperatures dipping below -40C and ice fog clouding the trail. After a long day of skiing, participants can warm up with home-cooked food at the famous potluck dinner held in the Fort Smith rec centre.  

Photo by Jesse Winter

Thaw-di-gras Spring Carnival, March 13-15, Dawson City, Yukon

Chainsaw toss? Synchronized snowmobiles? Anything’s possible in Dawson City during the annual Thaw-di-gras Spring Carnival where townsfolk and tourists alike compete in a  hodgepodge of events scattered around the historic Klondike hub.

Local businesses and organizations get a chance to create their own events, from more traditional Canadian fare (road hockey tournaments), to the northern (dogsled races), to the lumberjack (axe throw and log toss), to the zany (snowshoe basketball), to the downright odd (cat show?).

And the small size of Dawson means you can sample just about all the events over the weekend on a pair of mukluks. (It’ll help to walk off the 18 bowls of chili from the cook-off, too.)

“My favourite is the tea boil,” says Paul Robitaille, with the Klondike Visitors Association. It’s a race against other teams to get a pot of water boiling with a pile of kindling and a few matches.

“One year I was blowing on the fire and just kinda had a backdraft and it blew back and burnt off half my beard, but it was worth it for the last-place ribbon. People are proud of those. ‘Yeah, I got last place in the tea boil, I’m a horrible tea boiler!’”

Photo by Bruce Barrett/Burning Away

Burning away the winter blues, March 21: 8:30-10:30 p.m., Whitehorse, Yukon

As the old Internet meme goes, “Kill it with fire.” Well, Whitehorse residents take that literally when it comes to winter.

Hundreds march a doomed effigy each year down a torch-lit path aside the Yukon River on the evening of the spring equinox, from the venerable S.S. Klondike to the Robert Service Campsite, where a massive bonfire roars. “It’s kinda this really big, symbolic, cathartic gesture of throwing the effigy into the fire and saying goodbye to people’s winter’s blues,” says Geneviève Gagnon, organizer of the event.

The themes differ each year—with the Yukon Educational Theatre working alongside local artists—but the outcome is the same: an effigy personifying the dreadful dead-of-winter blues will be torched.

Polar Pond Hockey Tournament, March 21-22, Hay River, NWT

Hundreds of players. Dozens of teams. Ten rinks. The Polar Pond Hockey Tournament is fast becoming an annual tradition in Hay River, as its planners are organizing its seventh year.

Held on the frozen Hay River, across from the Fisherman’s Wharf in Old Town, the tournament attracts players from across the territory and even some teams from Alberta. And the organizers are professed hockey nuts: Clearing the snow with bobcats and, during the tourney, cleaning the ice with a real, legitimate Zamboni. With a giant heated tent, live bands and beer gardens to kick off the games, one could argue the weekend is just as much about partying as it is about hockey.

Teams play four-on-four style hockey with no goaltending in three separate categories: open, ladies and oldtimers.

Photo by Alistair Maitland/Percy DeWolfe

Percy DeWolfe Memorial Mail Race, March 26, Dawson City, Yukon

It’s the last race of the season for Yukon mushers, and it’s a doozie.

Tracing the tracks of the storied mail carrier Percy DeWolfe, ‘The Percy’ is a 338-km dogsled race from Dawson to Eagle, Alaska and back. The shorter Percy Junior and Percy Skijor races, which are each 160 km long, are held the same day.

With no steep hills to climb and a rather simple route down the Yukon River and back, the race may seem like a piece of cake for some, but Percy racer Brian Wilmshurst, of Dawson City, warns contestants not to take it too lightly. The race attracts a dozen or so competitive mushers as well as bush teams with no race experience each year. “Oh, they think, ‘This race is gonna be pretty easy,’ then they get out there and they’re like ‘Wow, this kicked my butt!’”

While many other races have checkpoints for dropping off gear or injured dogs, at the Percy, racers have to carry everything to the finish line. Blizzards, overflow, jumble ice and even bare ice along the river can wreak havoc on mushers sleds too, and the unchanging riverbed scenery can play with the mushers heads sometimes too.  

On the other hand, travelling along the exposed river can mean some warm days, explains Wilmshurst. He might even find himself racing in shorts and a T-shirt to combat the bright sunrays.

After the race mushers can warm up and share stories of the years’ races in the bustling bars of Dawson. If you can’t make it down to the Percy this year, you can follow the racers’ progress with their GPS tracking at www.thepercy.com.

Long John Jamboree, March 27-29, Yellowknife, NWT

With only three years under its belt, the Long John Jamboree is only a youngin’ when it comes to March festivities in the NWT, but as it heads into its fourth year, the event is quickly becoming a mainstay in Yellowknife.

Held atop the frozen ice of Yellowknife Bay at the end of March, revellers can expect long days of bright sun and cool spring air. Though the events are subject to change each year, some of the regulars include ice sculptures, snow volleyball, a beard and facial hair contest and “flaunt yer skivvies”—where locals show off their long underwear.

Keep an eye out for the Roughneck Relay too, as contestants saw wood, throw tires and build fires. There’s mushing to watch out for as well. For more than 60 years, the 150 Canadian Championship Dog Relay has drawn a crowd to Yellowknife, and this year the racers are competing in three 50-mile heats on and around Great Slave Lake

The jamboree is capped off with the “burn on the bay,” a massive bonfire of pallets stacked on the ice of Great Slave Lake.

Muskrat Jamboree, March 27-30, Inuvik, NWT

The skin-a-muskrat contest may be the namesake of Inuvik’s jamboree, but sometimes there’s too much snow for the organizers to find their winter lodgings—luckily, there’s plenty to do otherwise.

This year’s jamboree should feature the crowd favourite Trapper Skills event, where teams of one man and one woman collect wood, make a fire, chisel ice, boil tea, make bannock and skin a muskrat.

And if that’s not Northern enough for you, Lloyd Binder and his herd of 3,000-4,000 reindeer plan to make their famous spring crossing of the Mackenzie River early this year, to coincide with the jamboree.

Dogsled races, snowmobile races, harpoon throwing, toboggan pulls and log sawing events round out the four-day festival’s true Northern spirit. With longer, sunnier days shining down this time of the year above the Arctic Circle, the jamboree is the place to be to see the spirit of the Mackenzie Valley on display.

Toonik Tyme, April 2-6, Iqaluit

It began 50 years ago as a $700 shot to drum up tourism to then-Frobisher Bay. It’s now Iqaluit’s (and Nunavut’s) biggest festival.

On this golden anniversary, Toonik Tyme organizers plan to boost the one-week festival to new levels, extending dates to squeeze in more activities and drive in visitors from across Nunavut and the world.

In the Toonik Tyme Central tent, outside Nakasuk School, visitors can grab hot chocolate and bannock then see a seal-skinning competition or take part in traditional Inuit games as well as not-so-traditional games like Iqaluit Fear Factor.

The big band headliner this year is A Tribe Called Red, but a whack of Nunavut musicians will perform live music in between the usual mix of popular free activities like snowmobile races, ice sculpting and iglu building.

The event also includes a community screening from the imagineNATIVE film festival and a photography exposition of Toonik Tymes past, capped with a closing country food feast.

Nattiq Frolics, April 6-13, Kugluktuk, Nunavut

Nunavut’s westernmost community Kugluktuk rejoices in the lengthening daylight with a week-long festival: Nattiq Frolics.

The most popular events among locals are the Ski-Doo races, with competitions for adults and children drawing large crowds down to the ice.

A community parade, ice-fishing derby, seal hunt, traditional dress competitions and more have also been favourites in years past.

Dust off your moccasins – or purchase a new pair from a crafter at the festival’s bazaar – for April 10 and 11, when country music legend Charlie Major is set to play the Kugluktuk Recreation Complex.  

“He’s a popular artist in the west side of Nunavut. So many of our people here have grown up listening to him,” says volunteer Miranda Atatahak.

Photo of Longjohn Jamboree by Patrick Kane/Up Here

Pakallak Tyme, April 27-May 3, Rankin Inlet, Nunavut

When asked why he thinks spring celebrations are so popular in the Arctic, Rankin Inlet recreation coordinator David Clark pulls no punches.

“Because our winters are so damn long and we’re happy that the weather is a little nicer and the sun’s out long,” he says with a chuckle.

Clark is the driving force behind Rankin Inlet’s hamlet days celebration—normally the largest and most popular in the Kivalliq region.

Mainstays of the week-long celebration include dog team races, snowmobile races—both cross country and drag racing—and traditional games, as well as square dances and other live music performances.

“Our whole community gets involved with it,” says Clark.

Omingmak Frolics, May 11-18, Cambridge Bay, Nunavut

Omingmak is Innuinaqtun for muskox, and the burly Cambridge Bay festival that carries it as a namesake wanders into town once a year—and this year will be the 40th time it does.

Though planning is still underway, Cambridge Bay recreation coordinator Fred Muise says a few events are guaranteed to make a show: the Ski-Doo races (an Arctic standby, as you know by now) and an Arctic char fishing derby the weekend beforehand (if you think you can take on the locals). Children's musical group Splash'N Boots will be on hand to woo the youngsters, while New Brunswick comedian Tim Maloney will entertain the adults at a banquet.

To get a taste of the local Innuinaqtun culture, check out the opening ceremonies for throatsinging and drum dancing. In the past, there have been many events centred around language and traditional sports, muskoxen have been skinned, and traditional foods have been available to try. If you're interested in planning your trip to the community around the Frolics, check out the group's Facebook page.

[upheremagazine]

Seeking Klondike gold with drones

A savvy team of Yukoners finds quicker, less invasive ways to explore for gold.

BY EVA HOLLAND

Inventor Tao Henderson, a co-owner of Groundtruth Exploration, is at home in his Dawson City workshop. Photo by Chris Windeyer

On a cold, grey February morning, Tao Henderson drives a snow-covered mining road through the hills outside Dawson City. The road is unplowed, and Henderson follows another set of tire tracks that have sliced through the powder ahead of him, four-wheel drive engaged as his Toyota Tacoma tackles each bend. This is where thousands of prospectors fanned out with gold pans and sluice boxes during the Klondike Gold Rush of 1898, North America’s last great gold stampede. Dawson City, now a sleepy Yukon settlement waiting out the long dark winter before the return of summer tourists by the busload, was at the heart of the gold fever. In those days, dance hall girls accepted gifts of gold dust from armies of suitors, and miners found and lost fortunes on the creeks where the placer gold flowed. 

The gold rush is long over, but the paydirt is still here. Dawson City has become a quiet, quirky place, its array of century-old heritage buildings—the grand old theatre, the one-time brothel—linked by dirt and gravel streets, and old-fashioned wooden boardwalks that freeze solid in winter and creak at every step. Outside of town, in the hills and the maze of old tailings, miners still comb the land for gold.

Henderson stops when he reaches a pullout already occupied by a truck and empty flatbed trailer. He parks the Tacoma and walks towards a strange, squat machine sitting in the snow a short ways off the road. Mounted on two segmented rubber tracks, like a bulldozer or a tank, a custom-built metal apparatus supports the tall mast of a rotary airblast drill. This is the RAB, a hybrid invention of Henderson’s own making, designed to take bedrock samples from as deep as 100 metres down while making minimal impact on the earth’s surface.

Two workers in hard hats and coveralls hover over the machine as its bit drives a narrow hole into the earth; the snow around the testing area is darkened by a light dusting of pulverized rock. Henderson circles his creation: asking questions, taking notes, floating ideas about how to improve its performance. A black lab lounges nearby, snow dusting its muzzle, apparently unconcerned by the noise.

Henderson is a co-owner of Groundtruth Exploration, a small, nimble mining consultancy that is remaking the traditional methods of gold exploration. Finding gold has always been a risky, expensive and time-consuming venture, years long and with a heavy footprint on the land. Henderson and Groundtruth are looking to radically revise that time-honoured process, making it cheaper, faster, and greener. Using an aerial drone, some repurposed technologies from other industries, and a couple of inventions of Henderson’s own making, Groundtruth Exploration is set to change the face of gold mining exploration worldwide.

Henderson has always needed to understand how things work. As a toddler, he deconstructed an alarm clock, taken from his mother’s bedside table, while it was still plugged into the wall. After that, his mother would buy him small appliances from thrift shops, cutting the electrical cords off and handing them over for him to destroy and rebuild.

Henderson, now 38, spent his youth tinkering with small engines—skidoos, dirt bikes, ATVs—and he also got “pretty heavy into model airplanes” in his early teen years. He grew up on a farm in Guelph, Ontario, and spent his early years working at a machine shop. Eventually he headed west, and 10 years ago he landed in Yukon.

Settling in Dawson City, he met Isaac Fage, now co-owner of Groundtruth, then later Shawn Ryan, the legendary Yukon prospector, and Ryan’s wife and business partner Cathy Wood. Henderson worked a series of odd jobs in Dawson before inevitably gravitating to mining exploration, still—alongside tourism—one of the region’s crucial industries.

It’s an irony of mining exploration, so often a target of criticism for the environmental damage it unquestionably does, that many of its participants landed in the business because of their love of the wild. Fage is no different. “I found this line of work because it was in the bush,” he says. “That’s where I wanted to spend my time.”

Fage, 34, grew up on a dairy farm in Nova Scotia and studied international development before settling in Dawson City in his early 20s. “Typical Dawson story,” he says. “I hitchhiked up there and just kind of fell in love with the place.” He was soon hired on by Ryan and Wood, getting his start as a labourer in 2004, and working his way up through the industry over the next few years.

Groundtruth Exploration was formed in 2010, near the start of an enormous exploration boom in the Yukon that peaked in 2011. That year, Groundtruth had nearly 100 employees, and collectively they gathered more than 170,000 soil samples and staked more than 22,000 claims in the area around Dawson City. Since then the rush has died off again, the usual boom-bust cycle of mining, and Henderson and Fage have spent the past three years focusing on research and development. This summer, they’re ready to unleash the Groundtruth method on the world.

Groundtruth uses drones to conduct aerial surveys of a mineral claim. Photo courtesy of Groundtruth

Groundtruth’s modest headquarters is just outside Dawson City, in a tranquil subdivision with a view of the hills where the Klondike’s first prospectors found gold. A vinyl-sided doublewide serves as the company’s main office building; outside it is a row of three wall tents—large, sturdy canvas structures that are common in the North—and a small outbuilding that Henderson uses as a workshop.

Henderson, lean and dark-bearded with a small stainless steel hoop in each ear, shows me around the property before we settle down inside the office, where he walks me through the company’s exploration innovations.

Traditional gold mining exploration looks like this: first, a claim is staked on a plot of promising ground. Next comes a series of surveys: mapping, where a geologist walks the land noting exposed mineral showings and other geological features; geochemical surveys, in which samples of soil, rocks and stream sediments are collected and then shipped out and tested in labs for traces of minerals; and geophysical surveys, in which properties like magnetism and conductivity are assessed to determine the presence of minerals below the earth’s surface.

Once an area of potential mineralization has been identified through mapping and sampling, a method called trenching is used to gain better access to the bedrock. At its most invasive, backhoes are helicoptered into the wilderness to dig long lines into the earth, exposing the bedrock to scrutiny and further sampling.

Finally, drilling begins. Steel drill bits fitted with diamond teeth cut deep into the bedrock, penetrating hundreds of metres and bringing up long, wrist-thick cylinders of rock, known as drill core. Mineral deposits are three-dimensional phenomena whose size and shape vary, so the drillers don’t just work their way straight up and down: they create multiple holes in an area and drill down at a variety of angles, tracking their efforts carefully. Later, the core is analyzed in a lab, metre by metre: if a substantial mineral deposit is found in the lengths of core, its shape and extent can be extrapolated using the data on hole location, depth, and angle of attack.

In the Yukon, where winter stretches on for more than half the year, the annual window for exploration activity is fleeting. Broken up into brief field seasons, this process can take two or three years. It’s also labour-heavy, incredibly expensive, disruptive to the land, and almost never results in a workable mine.

That’s where Groundtruth Exploration comes in.

Groundtruth’s newly developed five-step program starts with a lightweight aerial drone. It’s made up of a 650-gram foam body, two removable wings, and a single propeller. On its body, it carries a camera, battery pack, data link, and instruments that measure wind speed, wind direction and altitude. “It’s a tough little bird,” says Henderson. The unit and its accompanying software cost $34,000.

Henderson and his team use the drone to complete highly detailed surveys of the properties they’re working. Before heading into the bush, Henderson pre-programs the bird to fly a grid pattern over the area he wants to survey, taking high-resolution photos as it goes. Its onboard GPS generates x-y-z axes and location data for every photo taken, and later that information, together with the photos, is used to produce an incredibly detailed three-dimensional model of the mining claim.

Flying the drone is exponentially cheaper than circling endlessly in a helicopter, burning fuel. From the 3D model its photos create, Groundtruth can scout potential camp locations on a claim, get a sense of hazards and obstacles, and measure distances precisely—the width of a river crossing, for instance. They can also use it to make volumetric calculations: using imagery collected from above a nearby quarry, Henderson shows me how to calculate how much gravel remains in the stockpile.

After the drone has done its work, the team turns to soil sampling, a process they perfected during the boom. There’s no rushing this phase—it still requires boots on the ground—but Groundtruth has invested in training and developed efficient systems and methods for every aspect of the job, from building temporary camps to collecting samples. They like to compare themselves to a commando team: an elite military unit that gets in and out as quickly and quietly as possible, with all the fat trimmed.

Next, in lieu of doing the traditional geophysical survey, known as induced polarity or IP, Groundtruth deploys a system called the “supersting.” Instead of measuring chargeability in the bedrock, it measures resistivity—the inverse of conductivity. Resistive zones, such as the quartz veining that often indicates the presence of gold, offer a weak response to the presence of an electrical current sent into the earth—it’s a kind of negative test, where the very weakness of the response is the red flag. The system has been around for awhile—“It’s been on the market for 10 or 15 years,” says Fage—but not as an exploration tool. Instead, it’s typically been used by environmental consultants and people in the geotechnical world. “They’ve used it to look for sinkholes, they use it to look for the water table,” says Fage. But Groundtruth is pioneering a new use for it, to take a targeted look at mineralization that lies close to, but below, the surface of the earth.

Groundtruth's "Supersting" system repurposes technology used in the geotechnical world to measure resistivity in the bedrock, rather than conductivity. Photo courtesy of Groundtruth

The system doesn’t delve as deep as traditional IP—but with most Yukon gold deposits lying less than 100 meters down, it doesn’t need to. It’s fast, it provides high-resolution data, and unlike traditional IP it doesn’t require the removal, by chainsaw, of long swaths of forest to make way for the laying of cables.

As with the drone, and every other phase of the Groundtruth program, the point of deploying the supersting is to maximize the amount of information available before the drillers start their work. There’s no getting around the fact that mining for gold involves digging holes in the ground. But the purpose of Groundtruth’s innovations is to allow exploration companies to concentrate on drilling for known or probable deposits, rather than burning money and disrupting the land where there may in fact be no gold, and hoping for the best.

In the fourth phase of the program, one of Henderson’s babies goes to work. It’s a custom-built piece of machinery he calls the GT Probe—he’s spent more than a year developing it in his little workshop outside the office. “I wanted something to replace trenching entirely,” Henderson says. Trenching is one of the more troublesome stages of exploration because of the long scars it leaves on the land. “I knew there was a way to get around that, for sure.”

He started out brainstorming on a paper napkin, and soon created a basic model in Google SketchUp. Then he began working on a prototype. The end result is a small hydraulic drill-type unit—the probe itself—mounted on a tracked platform. It’s operated by remote control, by an operator who walks along behind it. With a width of 130 cm, it’s compact and agile enough to maneuver through treed terrain. In lieu of trenching, it uses a percussion hammer to punch small holes at five-metre intervals, driving about two metres deep, and retrieving small cookie-cutter samples of bedrock.

Henderson designed the GT Probe as an alternative to the sometimes destructive practice of trenching. Photo courtesy of Groundtruth

The sample is tested for geochemical traces on the spot, using an x-ray fluorescent device, or XRF—most commonly used to detect lead paint, or to locate scrap metal at dumps or precious metals in recycling. “It’s underutilized in this industry,” says Fage. The XRF technology “doesn’t see gold very well,” he allows, “but it almost always picks up the suite of [gold] indicator elements—arsenic, molybdenum, antimony. So if we know the geochemical fingerprint of the target that we’re after, we don’t need to see the gold to understand whether or not we’re on top of the structure.” The instant feedback provided by the XRF allows Groundtruth to refine their search in real time, weeks or even months before the GT Probe samples can be tested in a lab. 

With its 1,100 kilograms spread out over one square metre of track coverage, the GT Probe produces less than one PSI of ground pressure. When it moves through the bush or in deep snow, it looks surprisingly light and graceful—more Wall-E than Panzer. “If you were to walk behind me,” says Henderson, “you wouldn’t know where we’d been.”

The final piece of the puzzle is the RAB, which Henderson perfected this past summer. It’s used as a partial replacement for traditional diamond drilling—the RAB can drill down to 100 metres in a 10-hour shift, at one-third the cost of a diamond drill. It helps a company know whether its drill target is mineralized at depth. “Once mineralization is outlined with RAB, then it will be easier for junior mining companies to raise money for followup diamond drilling because they are working on a target with confirmed mineralization,” says Fage.

“The other RAB advantage is that we can drill more reconnaissance holes with a smaller budget than using diamond drilling and increase the probability of hitting a discovery on the first pass.” The rotary airblast drill is used elsewhere in the world, and Groundtruth believes North America should embrace it. In Canada, Fage says, “ninety per cent of our drilling is diamond coring whether it needs to be or not.” The RAB is faster, cheaper, and less disruptive. “We have an opportunity to make the early-stage drilling more efficient.”

The people who fund mining exploration projects are gamblers at heart. They pour millions of dollars into searches with a 95 per cent—or higher—probability of failure. Like casino-goers who can’t accept that the house nearly always wins, they bet big and lose big, either for the rush of the risk or in the expectation of someday turning their luck around.

Shawn Ryan is a different sort of character. The thrill isn’t in the risk for him: it’s in the problem-solving, in the identification of a target and the methodical and relentless pursuit of a solution.

Ryan, 51, grew up in northern Ontario, in the gold-mining company town of Timmins. He worked on a trap line in the surrounding forests throughout high school, and when he graduated he did what most young men in the area have done for generations. “Dad worked in the mine,” he says, “and we were guaranteed a job in the mine when you [graduated] if you wanted.” But instead of heading underground Ryan opted to work for the company’s exploration arm—“being in the bush instead of being in the mine.”

In 1989, after a mining industry crash in Ontario, Ryan headed north. He bought a trap line on Yukon’s southern edge and worked it until he heard about another wilderness gig: wild mushroom picking. The morels that grow in the wake of the Yukon’s summer forest fires are fungal gold, and Ryan soon gave up the hunt for furs to go after mushrooms instead. He and his wife Cathy made their home base in a barebones cabin just outside Dawson City and for several years they made their living off fungi. But surrounded by old tailings, it was inevitable that Ryan would eventually turn his attention to prospecting and the mystery of the Klondike’s gold.

“It was a research project,” he tells me when we meet in Whitehorse. The consensus among Yukon prospectors at the time was that the placer gold—the loose gold dust and nuggets that gold rush stampeders pulled from creeks, the gold that existed close to the surface—was all but gone, the terrain picked over by a century’s worth of seekers. But Ryan figured the loose stuff had to have come from hard rock deposits under the ground. He wanted to find the mother lode.

“I had my old canoe,” he says. “We’d go up the river, and just kind of methodically started beating the bush.” He was just getting rolling when the Bre-X fraud, arguably the biggest financial scandal in mining history, was exposed in 1997. After that, says Ryan, “You couldn’t sell a project if your life depended on it.” Investors were gun-shy for years. “We didn’t give up, but what happened was, everybody else did.”

For years, he spent his summers combing the land around Dawson City and his long, dark winters reading up on geology, geophysics, geochemistry. He consulted with the Yukon Geological Survey, and he staked claims. He started taking on seasonal employees to help him with the hunt. His eventual discovery of the White Gold district south of Dawson triggered the 2009 staking rush, and a territory-wide exploration boom that lasted through 2011.

Since the mayhem of that year, the Yukon’s mining exploration industry has slumped. International capital has dried up, and the territorial government is currently locked in a series of lawsuits with local First Nations governments over the extent to which the latter must be consulted before new mines and mining activity are approved.

Though it’s running on a much smaller staff since 2011, Groundtruth Exploration and its novel exploration methods have created a buzz within the industry, remaining an exception to the litany of gloomy industry news.

“My motto is, we can do better,” says Ryan.

His relationship with Groundtruth Exploration is complicated. In many ways, he’s the face of the company—the big name attached to it—but technically he has no ownership stake. His wife holds a share, but Ryan himself is at arm’s length. Instead, for the past four years he’s had an exclusive arrangement—as a prospector optioning out his own staked claims to junior mining companies for further exploration and development, he’s been able to offer the services of Groundtruth as part of the deal. “If you bought a project from me, you had access to this team,” says Ryan. “So it was a business advantage that I had an elite team at my disposal and they were exclusive.”

Much of the work that Groundtruth has done to perfect its systems and test its new methods has been carried out on Ryan’s array of staked properties. But this year, for the first time, Groundtruth’s services—the full package, from the drone, to the GT Probe, to the RAB—will be available to anyone, anywhere. According to Fage, it’s the RAB drill that’s generating the most interest. “The drill is the tool that will travel,” he says. “We’re going to find partners for the whole package but the drill’s kind of the clincher.” He predicts that their program will be in use “in all kinds of interesting spots” within a year. Ryan says they’re taking calls from around the world.

His elevator pitch is a compelling one. Groundtruth’s new program, he says, can turn a two-year exploration effort into a three-week project, at a fraction of the price and with reduced environmental impact to boot. Failure is the norm in the mining exploration industry, says Ryan, and Groundtruth’s program will rule out all those dead ends exponentially more efficiently than traditional exploration. For the five per cent of projects that warrant moving on to the next stage, which includes the big drilling program, “we’re going to find them faster,” he says.

For the director of the Yukon Geological Survey, Carolyn Relf, it’s Groundtruth’s problem-solving approach that sets them apart as much as any one technological innovation. “They’re very creative and they’re not stuck in old thinking,” she says. “Next year they might have some other toy they’ve developed that can do things that people haven’t tried before.”

As we sit and chat in a busy downtown coffee shop, it becomes clear that Ryan is something of a local celebrity. A geologist he knows walks over to greet him and asks how the drone program is going. A few minutes later another miner, a stranger to Ryan, comes by to congratulate him on the success of the GT Probe. He’s just seen Ryan’s presentation at a conference, and he can’t get over the way the machine can extract bedrock while clinging to a steep slope. Ryan rattles off specs, outlining the GT Probe and the RAB’s capabilities, and the man responds to each with a happy exclamation. “60 metres!” “Holy moly.”

Before he walks away, the man grips Shawn Ryan’s hand and shakes his head. “The face of exploration’s changing, man,” he says. “Totally.”

[upheremagazine]

We're closer than you think

Seven Northern mining exploration projects that aren't so high-maintenance

BY HERB MATHISEN

When you think of harsh and unforgiving, you may tend toward the shrill winds and frigid temperatures associated with Arctic climates. But it’s going on more than two years of harsh and unforgiving conditions for mining and mineral exploration companies seeking investment. As prices for most commodities remain low based partly on slower expected growth in emerging economies, and the mining industry tries to regain investor confidence from its less-than-stellar performance during a boom earlier this decade, project developers and junior exploration companies forge ahead with the unenviable task of building up mineral resources and reserves to ensure that a healthy number of viable projects are on tap once operating mines are tapped out.

It’s no secret that mining projects in the North are more difficult (read: expensive) to develop than their southern counterparts. Remote projects mean higher costs getting supplies and workers to site and getting the product out to market. A study by the Mining Association of Canada found that capital costs for Northern gold and base metal mines were roughly 2.1 times those of mines in more accessible regions. (And operating costs were 1.6 times higher.)

But not all Northern projects are created equally. Granted, labour will invariably be more expensive up here, but a good number of project developers have hit the jackpot: their deposits aren’t located out in the middle of the barrengrounds, hundreds of miles from the nearest town. Some projects in the North are found just outside of big centres and can piggyback on roads or power grids, while taking advantage of a local workforce. Others are in established mining regions, which means they can benefit from infrastructure already put in place by operating mines. Here’s how they’ll do it.

1. Yellowknife City Gold Property: TerraX Minerals

What is it? A 93.5 km2 collection of gold properties north of Yellowknife on the same shear system that sustained the Con and Giant mines, which produced roughly 6.1 million and 8.1 million ounces respectively. The company has been busy consolidating properties in the area for the last two years and analyzing more than 200 historical drill cores. In 2013, it conducted a 520 line-kilometre airborne survey and, in 2014, initiated a small drilling program. This has helped TerraX zero in on its “Core Gold Area,” which comprises the Crestaurum and Barney Zone deposits.

Where is it? The southwest corner of the property is just eight kilometres from the Yellowknife airport. The northeast border of the property is two kilometres from the newly-recommissioned 7.5 mW Bluefish hydroelectric station. A transmission line runs south from the power station to the city, along the east side of TerraX’s property.

Benefits: This really is about as good as it gets up here. The southern portion of the property is accessible by road year-round, as it’s located just north of the Ingraham Trail—the start of the famous diamond mine ice road. The company could potentially link up to the Bluefish system, and Yellowknife, an established mining hub with a large pool of skilled workers, is just a 10-minute drive away.

What’s next? The company is upgrading the seven-kilometre road to its Crestaurum deposit. In late 2014, it secured $2.7 million in financing and contracted out a winter drilling program to Forarco Canada Ltd. which began on the “Core Gold Area” in mid-January.

2. Wellgreen: Wellgreen Platinum

What is it? The most advanced project on this list. Wellgreen expanded its measured and indicated mineral resource estimates last year to almost 330 million tonnes at 0.52 g/t platinum-palladium-gold.

Where is it? Roughly 300 km northwest of Whitehorse, and 30 km from Burwash Landing, which has an airstrip.

Benefits: The property has all-season road access and is only 14 km from the Alaska Highway, which connects to deepwater ports in both Haines and Skagway, Alaska. A high-capacity transmission line ends at Haines Junction, 125 km away, but with its road in place, the company may go the LNG route, having signed MOUs with two suppliers (one in Alaska, another in Alberta) and General Electric for LNG generators.

What’s next? In November, the company raised $9.1 million in equity financing and is now completing a preliminary economic assessment of Wellgreen, with hopes of beginning pre-feasibility level studies later this year. Wellgreen wants to start the permitting process in 2016.

3. Klaza project: Rockhaven Resources

What is it? Rockhaven Resources has identified nine main mineralized zones at its flagship Klaza gold project, covering roughly 77 km2 in southwestern Yukon. The company has completed more than 50,000 metres of diamond drilling since it took over the project in 2010, including more than 19,000 metres in 2014, which produced many high-grade showings particularly in the Western BRX zone.

Where is it? About 50 km west of Carmacks and the Klonkide Highway.

Benefits: Another project that’s road accessible year-round. Rockhaven doesn’t have to move its drill rigs by helicopter; it can lug them around by bulldozer.

What’s next? With more than $3 million in the bank as of September, Rockhaven is planning “aggressive exploration at Klaza in 2015,” according to a November release.

4. Marlin project: Canterra Minerals

What is it? In October, Canterra announced the discovery of a diamond in one of the 126 till samples it collected over the 2014 exploration season.

Where is it? 220 km northeast of Yellowknife, and just 20 km northwest of De Beers Gahcho Kué project.

Benefits: One of many exploration projects clustered around the NWT’s three operating diamond mines (and Gahcho Kué, under construction). Canterra can use the winter ice road to bring in fuel and supplies in advance of spring and summer exploration programs. Randy Turner, Canterra CEO, says it's much easier to explore in the region than it was in the 1990s. “You’ve got the ability to truck fuel and supplies—lumber and stuff—up the winter road. That didn’t exist back then,” he says. “It’s a lot cheaper to truck it up there than to fly it in. ... The more money that goes into exploration, the better chance of success.”

What’s next? Results from the 2014 programs were still being analyzed in early 2015 and would provide the company with potential targets for future drilling.

5. Kennady North: Kennady Diamonds

What is it? A 2012 spinoff from Mountain Province Diamonds, 49-per-cent owner of Gahcho Kué, Kennady Diamonds released results from a mini-bulk sample of roughly 19 tonnes at its Kelvin kimberlite in December that showed an average grade of 2.59 carats per tonne.

Where is it? To the west and north of Gahcho Kué. Like, literally, right beside it.

Benefits: The ice road to Gahcho Kué goes right through Kennady North. “We’ve also benefited from being able to use the airstrip at Gahcho Kué from time to time,” says Kennady CEO Patrick Evans, who also heads Mountain Province. But could there be more? As another diamond explorer, Margaret Lake CEO Paul Brockington, explained to The Northern Miner: “What we’re looking at up there is the potential, in theory, for additional feed to other producers.” Evans poured cold water on the idea though, noting that diamond processing isn’t as cut-and-dry as processing gold or copper due to the differing quality of diamonds from different deposits. “The probability is that, at an operational level, Kennedy will build its own plant to be able to process its own ore more quickly and receive its own diamonds for sale."

What’s next? Kennady's preparing a bulk sample of up to 700 tonnes right now.

6. HOAM Project: Olivut Resources

What is it? Olivut Resources is searching for diamonds where no one else is. So far, it’s discovered 29 kimberlites within its 522 km2 property east of the Mackenzie River. The company flew an extensive helimag survey over priority areas in 2013 and spent much of 2014 analyzing that data. (Olivut spent only $160,000 on exploration from January to October 2014).

Where is it? The southern part of property is roughly 15 km from Fort Simpson.

Benefits: The company can take advantage of Fort Simpson’s all-season highway and airport, as well as its proximity to the Mackenzie River, which is busy with barge traffic in the summer.

What’s next? Olivut continues to pore over its airborne magnetic database.

7. Pistol Bay: Northquest Ltd.

What is it? Norquest has spent more than $10 million to explore its 861 km2 gold property on the coast of Hudson Bay. Last summer, it focused most of its work focused on its Vickers Target.

Where is it? Just north of the community of Whale Cove, Nunavut.

Benefits: An all-season road, originally built by the hamlet for hunters, runs through the property, so fuel and goods can be trucked in from Whale Cove. The hamlet also has an airstrip and port. Northquest boasts on its website that its drilling costs are “half of that of our peers working elsewhere in the Arctic.”

What’s next? $3.5 million's been budgeted for exploration in 2015, subject to Northquest's ability to raise those funds.

[upheremagazine]

Outpost: The lost kingdom of Grandview

Though the homestead and path to it are overgrown, the memories of the best place to stay on the Mackenzie River hold strong

BY KAREN McCOLL

"The Grandview: Where the women are strong, the men are good-looking, and the children are above average."

Daniel and I stumbled upon Grandview accidentally. Sure, it’s loosely labelled in our guidebook, but we certainly weren’t looking for it. 

It was our third day of paddling since leaving the small Sahtu Dene community of Fort Good Hope, NWT, and we had been making fairly good time until some tricky sandbars forced us to make a wide detour around a couple of islands. Then a headwind picked up and with it came waves, so we decided to take a break from paddling. Not 50 steps from where we dragged up our canoe, we discovered a wide but overgrown trail leading up from the shore. I figured it would lead to yet another derelict cabin surrounded by clouds of mosquitoes but we followed it anyway, for something to do while we waited.

After 100 metres of mild bushwhacking, the sticks gave way to a surprisingly large clearing, perhaps the size of two football fields. It was dotted with a few houses, sheds, tools and incredibly—since we were hundreds of kilometres from any road—several rusting Caterpillar machines and an old truck overgrown with vegetation. Beside the main house, there was a sign: “The Grandview. Where the women are strong, the men are good looking and the children are above average.”

It was a ghost town. Months later I learned about its ghosts: Fred Sorenson, the good-looking man, and Irene, the strong woman, both of whom died just over a decade ago. As Naomi, one of their above-average grandchildren, puts it, “Grandview will never be Grandview again without Fred and Irene.”

(photo by Kristine Bourque) A small plane circles overhead. Visitors! Naomi knows that in less than an hour, her grandfather will drive his tractor up to the house and deliver the aircraft’s occupants. Who will it be this time—forestry workers? Surveyors? Family friends? She hears coffee brewing on the stove and smells something delicious baking in the oven. Her grandmother Irene calls out to her. “It’s time to dye my hair!” She and Naomi joke about putting on lipstick and make-up in anticipation of their guests’ arrival.

Naomi’s mother raised her and her brothers in Yellowknife but brought them out to Grandview each summer, when the place would become a bustling “roadside” stop on the river that served as the territory’s highway. Grandview sits 100 kilometres (three hours by boat) downriver from the closest community, Fort Good Hope, NWT. Labelled The Grandview on our map, the Sorensons’ home was built on a terrace overlooking the massive Mackenzie River. Fred built it as a logging camp, but Grandview’s legacy is for Fred and Irene’s hospitality. For nearly three decades, their reputation was known up and down the Mackenzie Valley and attracted visitors from around the world, many of whom returned again and again for good food and conversation.

Laura Mackenzie (nee Sorenson), who now lives in Northern B.C., says her parents chose to settle at Grandview in ’71 for its access to good timber, proximity to a pre-existing airstrip and relative flatness. Its sweeping vista over the river was a bonus. Fred logged and ran a sawmill, employing fallers, peelers and skidder operators from nearby communities.

During the peak of his logging operation, Fred supplied wood to every community in the Northwest Territories that had houses built on pilings, and provided the lumber for power poles. At that time, the river was deep enough that river barges could pull right up to Grandview’s shore and take the timber downriver to Tsiigehtchic or Inuvik or to destinations upriver. Workers would set up camp at Grandview with their families for the summer, and Irene also ran a bed and breakfast. She was a tremendous cook and fed loggers and other work crews as well as hunters and paddlers who stopped by.

Winston McNeely met Fred and Irene shortly before they moved to Grandview. He arrived at their camp across from Little Chicago Creek wet and cold after travelling on the river. He first met Fred, who sent him to Irene. She served him and his partner hot coffee and a meal of stuffed rabbit and “everything that goes with it.” Living out an isolated bush-life as they did, Fred and Irene were known to help all who passed through, whether that meant fixing a snowmobile, providing some boat gas or serving up coffee and a hot meal. McNeely’s first encounter with the Sorensons was the beginning of a long, storied friendship that he thinks back upon fondly from his home in Fort Good Hope, at 72 years of age.

Naomi and others describe her grandfather Fred as “a man’s man.” He was strong, tough as nails and always working in jeans and a plaid shirt. McNeely says Fred once had to cut a chunk of his own bone out of his muscle and stitch himself up after an accident while he was out on the land. “He showed me that piece of bone,” the 72-year-old recalls with a chuckle. Fred could also be harsh. One time, McNeely was drinking whiskey with Fred and a traveller who had accidentally burnt down Fred’s smokehouse while he was doing some work at Grandview. When the visitor went to pour himself a second drink, Fred grabbed the bottle. “You want more?” He growled. “Well—get your own.”

Naomi’s mother, Kristine Bourque (nee Sorenson), admits her father could be difficult to get along with, but he always had a smile on his face. He was very particular, she says, a trait she thinks rubbed off on all his children. Naomi says Irene tempered Fred perfectly. 

“If Grandview is renowned for anything, it’s for my grandmother’s love,” says 35-year old Naomi, who currently lives in Nelson, B.C. Irene was the “epitome of ‘kind.’”

The Sorensons weren’t originally from the North, but they made it their home. Fred was born in 1926, Irene in 1927, and both grew up in Saskatchewan. They got married in their early 20s and lived in Northern Alberta before moving to Inuvik with their children in the ’60s, when the government-planned community was still being built. They moved up the Mackenzie River to Arctic Red River (Tsiigehtchic) and then to various logging camps farther upriver before settling at Grandview with their two youngest children, Ramona and Roald. Their four older children, including Laura, went to a residential school in Inuvik and came to Grandview during the summer.

In their first house at Grandview, Irene cooked over a woodstove and used a moss-covered hole in the permafrost to keep things cold. Laura remembers her mother sometimes having an extra 15 or 20 mouths to feed with all the men working at her Fred’s sawmill. 

The Sorensons’ first house burnt down in the ’80s, so they built another home that eventually had a gas stove and fridge and a generator for doing things like watching TV, but they never had plumbing. Water was pumped from the silty Mackenzie and left to settle in huge barrels or hauled up as ice in the winter. They never purified it, as far as Naomi remembers. Communication was by radio, which she says was always played at full volume so it could be heard from outside the house. There was a small garden, and at one point Grandview housed up to 100 chickens. Fred hunted and trapped, but they also brought in supplies by boat, plane or snowmobile at least once a month.

Demand for lumber slowed down in the ’80s after the Dempster Highway was built and more supplies started being transported north by road, so that’s when Fred turned to trapping full time.

“It was a hard life,” says Laura. Living off the land at Grandview was Fred’s dream, she says, and despite the hardship, Irene stayed by his side. Winters could be lonely, with few workers or visitors and a difficult three-hour snowmobile trip to the nearest community. Irene would leave occasionally in the winter to visit her children and grandchildren but usually didn’t stay away from Fred and Grandview for more than a few weeks.

“That was her life she grew to love,” Laura says.

The Grandview guestbook is said to have been filled with names of people from Germany, Japan, and the United States, but I’ll never be able to track the hotel’s farthest-flung visitors, because the guestbook was lost in a house fire.

Larry Dyke visited Grandview a couple of times in the ’90s when he was doing erosion studies along the Mackenzie River as part of his work with the Geological Survey of Canada. He can still remember one of the “remarkable” roast beef meals Irene served. Staying there was like “suddenly becoming a member of the family,” says the now-retired 67-year-old from his home in Ontario. Fred demanded it: “He’d pound his fist on the table and say, ‘Eat!’”

Mark Nixon, also formerly with the Geological Survey, says—and so do others—that Fred made incredible smoked fish. McNeely says it was different than traditional dried fish because Fred soaked it in brine before he smoked it.

“Oh and it was ever good,” he says.

Nixon knew of helicopter pilots in Norman Wells who would adjust their schedules just so they could squeeze in a visit with Fred and Irene during their shift. The Coast Guard also regularly parked the vessel on shore and came up for a coffee and to trade something for fish. Naomi loved visits from the ships.

“It was a big deal for us kids because we got to go down to the ship and take a tour,” she recalls. “And of course the chef would always have treats for us.”

(photo by Fran Hurcomb)

It was hard work, too. When visitors arrived, Irene started cooking, and Naomi was often at her side. Then there were the less pleasant chores, like doing laundry with a ringer washer and cutting the grass with a push mower, which Naomi hated because twigs and rocks would always jab her calves.

Naomi and her brothers had their share of fun too, berry picking, beach combing, tunnelling in the piles of sawdust and running through the bush. Dyke remembers pulling up on shore one day and seeing the children splashing gleefully in the frigid river in flimsy summer clothing, oblivious to the cold.

Whether it was spent swimming, scavenging, doing chores or entertaining, Naomi says the day often ended by watching Betamax movies on Fred and Irene’s TV. “Over and over again we watched Cannery Row and Cat Blue.”

It’s been a long time since anyone has cuddled up on the couch at Grandview to watch a movie. Judging from the piles of scat Daniel, my travel companion, and I saw, the old homestead sees more visits from bears than people these days. Willow and alders have obscured the once-famous view from the property and while some of the cabins are in decent shape, the machinery doesn’t look like it will ever push earth again. Only the piles of sawdust on the far side of the clearing give the impression that someone could have been working there yesterday; they’re stale and the place is empty.

Not far from the main house is a small, white-gated cemetery marked by two faded wooden crosses and tombstones. Irene and Fred both died in their early seventies—Irene of a brain aneurysm in 1998 at Grandview and Fred of a stroke three years later while staying with family in Yellowknife. They had been married 50 years. Their daughter Kristine told me people showed up at Grandview en masse to pay their respects at the Sorensons’ separate burials. “The shore was lined with boats.”

During their almost 30 years at Grandview, Fred and Irene became fixtures in the region. “We really miss them up there,” McNeely says. The couple had been honorary members of his community’s Métis organization.

As I wandered the property, the sound of wind blowing through Grandview’s tree tops was overpowered by the occasional hum of a small wind generator whirling up to speed. It’s mounted, along with a solar panel, on the roof of the main house. Although the windows and doors were boarded up, I was able to peer through one of the higher windows into someone’s well-kept living room. Laura told me later that this house was built for Fred not long after Irene died and a house fire destroyed their old place.

Another house on the property belongs to Laura’s youngest brother Roald, who spent the most time at Grandview, growing up and into his adult years. His house is left open for people who need it—and travellers  like Stanley Mulvany, a kayaker who passed through a few years ago, appreciate it.

“I found a note on the table dated the previous year inviting travellers to make themselves comfortable and to leave them a note,” Mulvany writes in his blog. “The house was spacious and clean. The two bedrooms had the beds made up as though we were expected.”

Kristine and Laura haven’t been back to Grandview in years. Neither has Naomi, but she wants to visit soon, even though she knows it might be difficult. So much will have changed in the 10-plus years since her last trip. Grandview was obviously well loved at one point, but now it feels like an outdoor museum slowly returning to the earth.

Daniel and I could have spent hours there exploring, but the weather was subsiding and it was time for us to go.

On the way back down to our canoe, we followed a wider trail that must have been the main path for hauling supplies up from the river. We passed four long, wooden scows sitting side-by-side in the willows. I’m sure Fred built them just as he and Irene built all of Grandview.

Knowing what I know now, it seems unnatural that we left Grandview tired and hungry. But we were, after all, decades too late to enjoy Irene’s roast beef and Fred’s stories.