July 11, 1999 This article first appeared in the Ottawa Citizen's broadsheet magazine, the Citizen's Weekly. It is not to be reproduced without permission of the publisher. To obtain copies of this or other articles in this series, please contact the Citizen at 596-3555. Join our Arctic trek: Two adventurers set off in kayaks to explore Canada's newest national park. Starting today, Mike Beedell and Pamela Coulston begin their Sunday reports in the Citizen's Weekly. By Bruce Culp, The Ottawa Citizen Wheeling low above the glistening ice pack, the midnight sun scrubs the tiny Inuit community of Pond Inlet on Baffin Island with summery cheer. For a few brief months, the chilly talons of the bitter cold recede, though they never truly disappear. Breakup comes at the end of July in this part of the Eastern Arctic, a time when Inuit hunters venture forth in kayaks, their hearts singing as the calving grounds of the seal and walrus draw near. Adventure photographer Mike Beedell and his wife, Pamela Coulston, are engaged in a similar journey of derring-do, but an epic embracing the northern wilderness as a natural treasure unto itself, not as a resource for exploitation. They plan to circumnavigate Bylot Island , soon to be Canada's newest national park , by kayak, paddling through 1,000 kilometres of brash ice and cold, gin-clear water. Their adventure begins today in the Citizen's Weekly. Bylot lies just north of Baffin Island, 10 kilometres across the sea ice from Pond Inlet. Mike and Pam start at the southeastern tip of the island, and will voyage in a counterclockwise direction up the northeast coast. If they are successful, it will be the first time in recorded history anyone has circumnavigated this 12,000-square-kilometre outcrop of rock. "We both are very cautious,'' said Mike, who is 43. "But it has to be that way. It is the most fickle environment in the world. You can go from a near-calm sea to 10-foot waves in a miraculously short time. "But you are vibrantly alive. You are so much intuned and your awareness is peaked. You can feel the tug of the current on your boat and see the wind five kilometres away gaining momentum.'' Last week, the pair left Pond Inlet. After lashing two kayaks and several hundred pounds of equipment onto dog sleds, there was no turning back. Packed inside the 18-foot boats, whose hulls are reinforced with extra layers of tough fibreglass, was a rich assortment of extreme-weather gear. Modern voyageurs, they also carry a solar-powered satellite phone, digital camera and a lightweight laptop computer. Their weekly dispatches will be uploaded to orbiting satellites and relayed to the Citizen's Weekly throughout the summer. Bylot's desolately beautiful moonscape is decorated with tongues of blue-green glaciers that inspired Group of Seven painter Lawren Harris to feats of rapture in the 1920s. The glaciers are now ravaged by a 24-hour sun, drip-dropping meltwater into clear rivulets, soon to become coursing streams cutting through the icy slope. Spring brings forth tens of thousands of migrant birds to cliffside rookeries, whose clatter fills the blue sky with a primordial din. The rocky island is a bird sanctuary, set aside by Environment Canada in 1965. The crag acquired its name from Robert Bylot, Henry Hudson's first mate. During a mutiny in 1610, Bylot ordered Hudson, his young son and a handful of supporters into an open boat. Bylot, blackguard that he was, refused the loyalist party a fowling gun. Hudson was never seen again, but the large bay where the incident occurred would bear his name forever. For centuries, the waters surrounding Bylot's northern shores were thought to hold the eastern entrance to the elusive Northwest Passage. The doomed Franklin expedition swung through Lancaster Sound just north of the island in 1845. Three years later, Franklin's voyage ended in tragedy in the pressure ice near King William Island. The Norwegian explorer Roald Amundsen discovered the passage in 1903. Far from the heaving icefields, Mike stood a month ago on the veranda of his log house in the Gatineau Hills, peering at acres of rolling swale. Earlier, he had run his fingers over a walrus skull in the living room, his brows serious, almost fearful. Hot weather hung over the Ottawa Valley and clouds massed on the horizon, but didn't portend any rain. With preparations still burning energy, he didn't have the time to mull over the danger that could emerge in the North, from anything as benign as an oncoming cloud bank. In the Arctic, such a warning of changing weather must never be ignored or misread. Ground blizzards can appear moments after a shrill whistle is heard on the breeze, the wind chill dropping to -30 degrees. The cold penetrates everything, even through watertight dry suits. If there is no open water, the pair must haul their kayaks, with uncertain steps, across pressure ridges and a matrix of icefloes. If a kayaker slips from an icepan into the ocean, the agony is sudden and intense. The freezing stupor reaches into the body's outer extremities, soon followed by the warm fingers of euphoria, a sure sign the cold has penetrated to the core. After that, there are black lights and, finally, death. Bodies aren't necessarily recovered, either. The water is too cold for the food contents of a stomach to ferment and bloat with gas. The dead don't rise to the water's surface, as they do in other parts of the world. Tragedy has no closure. "We are not doing this as a heroic thing,'' Mike said with typical earnest enthusiasm. "It is a journey we want to share with Canadians and to make people aware of Canada's newest territory.'' Mike's dream of Kayak Nunavut '99 started decades ago. Before meeting Pamela, he had travelled extensively through the Arctic archipelago by dog sled, Hobie Cat, kayak and on foot. To pay tribute to the explorers who succumbed to the Northwest Passage's siren call, he joined wilderness writer Jeff MacInnis on a two-man voyage by Hobie Cat from Inuvik to Pond Inlet. Over three summers, from 1986 to 1988, the pair endured the worst conditions the North could offer. They were almost killed when a violent storm threatened to crush their catamaran at Aston Bay off Somerset Island. Luckily, they struck landfall before gale-force winds howled out of the sky, menacing their efforts to build an icewall to save their flimsy tent. "Sometimes I go into a journey without getting any real lesson,'' Mike said. "The why always comes later.'' He envisioned a greater thrill. When plans were laid in 1992 to include Bylot Island in a large national park, Mike found his answer. Sirmilik National Park, which will officially open in August, is managed by the federal government under the National Parks Act, but the new government of Nunavut will also be involved. Bylot Island, as wondrous as Banff and Yellowstone parks were to budding naturalists a century ago, could offer incredible wilderness potential to visitors. Hope prevails, especially among political leaders and adventure outfitters, that the region's fortunes rest upon eco-tourism. "The North sculpted my life, so I want to try giving back,'' said Mike. "I want to give something back to these northern communities.'' Mike, who runs six kilometres a day, is small in stature but possesses a wiry strength. Patient and level-headed, his mental endurance has saved his life a number of times. During a crisis, he doesn't panic. To accumulate a library of 250,000 slides on Arctic life , perhaps the best of its kind in the world , takes a special frame of mind. A week before the journey, he left Ottawa for Bylot Island to make food drops at campsites along the course of their voyage. The food cylinders are durable enough to foil polar bears. In the Arctic, the summer silence is broken by reports resembling gunshots. The massive floes crack like skirmish fire as they rend apart, slowly splitting into leads of open water, enabling the beluga whales, bowheads, narwhals and orca to complete their northward migration. As air-breathing mammals, cetaceans know instinctively when to proceed below the thick sea-ice and when to remain in open water. They will often rest their large chins atop the ice floes for days, until it is safe to swim further north, where the massive schools of krill and cod swirl. The Inuit have a special name for this kind of instinctive patience, whether found in sea mammals or humans. They call it quinuituq. All Arctic residents await nature's seasonal rhythms with reservoirs of forbearance, not unlike suburbanites anticipating a traffic light turning green. As a photographer, Mike looms as large in the Arctic consciousness as did Ansel Adams on the new American frontier. His imagery captures wildlife scenes that defy all natural colour. With the Arctic sun providing long shadows, animals are imbued with dignity and grace. His work has been featured in National Geographic, Geo, Outside, Equinox and Canadian Geographic. No one falls asleep at his slide presentations. While in his 20s, Mike once spent days buried inside a snow cave, shivering, near death. But he wanted to see the seasonal migration of caribou. Duly rewarded, the herds trudged right over his hole. Some of these photos appear in his bestseller, The Magnetic North. "Some people have been there before him, but he sees it in a different light,'' said Pamela. "That's where he shines. When he is out there, that is who he is.'' The pair were married six years ago after being introduced by a mutual friend. On their first date, they took a canoe trip. According to Pamela, Mike drove her crazy with his ongoing dialogue of the animal kingdom. When a beaver tail slapped in the distance, Mike told her it was, well, a beaver. "I was getting a slow burn,'' said Pamela. "I said to him: `I'm not a Holt Renfrew girl and I didn't pay for this tour.' '' While Mike's personality centres on brio and adventure, Pamela is a person of almost cubist multiplicity. Mike gets up early in the morning and heads for the newspaper. He is a dreamer, but not an idle one, though he relies on Pamela to micro-manage the day's minutia. For instance, his photo library is worth millions of dollars, but is a mess. His calendar is so cluttered, it needs special attention to keep appointments. "We are more a team than a romantic couple,'' said Mike. "We work very independently sometimes. We are capable of doing things on our own.'' Theirs is a marriage based on confederation. "Hopefully, we will be more patient with each other,'' said Mike. "Either we will be more bonded to each other at the end of the trip or less so.'' To find out how difficult the trip would be, Mike and Pamela had to seek out expert advice. Before leaving for the North, they attended an impromptu meeting at the Canadian Ice Service on Sussex Drive and heard the news. Was something wrong? The agency is buried deep within layers of bureaucratic labyrinth, in a glass cube across the street from the National Gallery. The two were greeted at the front door by Sharon Jeffers, a 42-year-old meteorologist and ice forecaster. Ms. Jeffers, whose smile is as wide as the Arctic Circle, watched spring take hold of the North, bit by bit. Using satellites and other means, the Ice Service monitors ice conditions throughout the High North, information that is used by scientists and merchant vessels plying the treacherous shipping lanes of the icefields. With an air of conspiracy, Ms. Jeffers escorted the couple to an office workstation, where Bylot Island was frozen, literally, on two giant computer monitors. The technology is heavily copyrighted. Clicking a mouse, Ms. Jeffers zoomed the remote island in closer, its rugged coastline rimmed with shelves of sea-ice. As the close-up tracked across the screen one bar at a time, 30 megabytes of graphics were gobbled up, for each row. The Canadian Ice Service has incredible computer power: one reason why the technical staff outnumber the ice experts in the office. Satellite imagery showed a slip of land pushing into the sea. It is called Cape Fanshawe, where the couple intend to camp on the island's northeastern coast in their third week. Sitting between glacial talus, the cape has attracted colonies of seals for millennia, tens of thousands of them. On the computer screen, it appears as a black band, which means it reflects little light. The ice there must be smooth and easy to pull kayaks over, if no leads of open water are available. "How are conditions in comparison to last year?'' asked Mike. "Well,'' Ms. Jeffers explained, "there isn't as much multi-year ice.'' Researchers have documented a warmer Arctic for the past three years. It is a small blip in an overall warming trend. The American robin was spotted on Baffin Island for the first time in 1947. Multi-year ice tested at different points throughout the North over the past decade shows that the ice is a foot thinner, melting more with each summer. Mike sees something. "Can you tell us how good this ice is?'' he asked, pointing to about four kilometres off Cape Fanshawe's frozen shore, where a shearline separates the fast ice from another formation. Here the two shelves grind against each other, like tectonic plates on a fault line. "It's pretty gross,'' said Ms. Jeffers. "Mostly brash.'' Pack ice, often called slob ice, is treacherous work. When winds gust, the icefloes pack together under pressure so vigorously that ridges rise into peaks. The broken brash, fractured pans and layers of grease ice, can make navigating a kayak difficult, almost impossible. "You should be open to the idea that you could see something you have never seen before,'' cautions Ms. Jeffers, looking each one in the eye. Their trip was delayed a week due to hazardous floe ice. Along the floe edge, they will soon witness the migration of whales. Since the mammals need to breath air, the migration attracts the highest predator on the food chain, the polar bear, which eats everything thriving around the floe edge. Very large males can stand over three metres high. The most unpredictable are adolescent males, which has the power to knock a beluga senseless with one blow, but not the supple agility. They can go hungry. "There is a heavy concentration,'' of them on the island, said Mike, "so we will have encounters. When polar bears are in the water, one can kayak faster than them. But a walrus is like a one-tonne torpedo.'' This huge animal, heaving itself up on its front flippers, has little patience for interlopers of any sort. Extremely territorial, males reach the size of a Volkswagen Beetle and are only a little cruder in design. Their regular diet is normally collected from the bottom of the sea, their tusks scraping loose clams, crabs and worms. Their powerful mouths, in addition, are designed to suck out the meat from shells broken with their teeth. But within every walrus colony lurks a rogue male, defying all normal behaviour. It is a loner, a meat-eater. It watches closely from a red-stained shelf of ice for easy quarry. With a violent blow of its tusks, it kills seals, indiscriminately, in an explosion of water and spray. If they are in the way, it attacks people. Like a high-powered vacuum cleaner, these walrus suck the viscera out of half-dead seals. Even level-stomached naturalists are unsettled by the sound of the slurping spectacle, like ice cream through a straw. In the end, all that is left of the seal is a gruesome purse of skin and bone. "That is one wildlife experience that is very rare,'' said Mike, as if thinking how he would shoot it for Italian Elle, which has published his photography of gyrfalcons and arctic foxes. This article first appeared in the Ottawa Citizen's broadsheet magazine, the Citizen's Weekly. It is not to be reproduced without permission of the publisher. To obtain copies of this or other articles in this series, please contact the Citizen at 596-3555.