MOUNTAIN LIFE - Blue Mountains | Winter 2020

57 The other two guests and I look at each other incredulously, anxious to get the hell out of here. And then we make a beeline back to camp. Which is also on the ice. To be fair, I may be overly squeamish when it comes to being on ice; back home in Ontario, you simply don’t go near it when it’s breaking up in the spring. It’s just a bad idea. But as the guides assure us, the ice is two metres thick here. It takes two inches of ice to hold a human, so everyone else seems to roam around here without concern, while everything my mother warned me about thin ice, comes welling up within. I walk around gingerly, constantly in fear I’ll break through. But I never do. No one does. For the Inuit, the edge of the ice is the line of life. It literally provides life. As the sun penetrates the thinning ice, algae and phytoplankton begin to grow in and on the ice. This attracts krill, which attracts fish, which attract narwhals, belugas, seals, walrus and bowhead whales. And for the Inuit these animals represent life. They hunt from the floe edge every spring. Whatever they manage to harvest will help the community survive throughout the year. I’m on a six-night tour with Black Feather. This is one of the best places to see narwhal and people come from around the globe to glimpse this mythical beast. On sunny, calm days we spend hours in camp chairs a few metres from the edge, watching the sea, hoping for a small sighting. The floe edge is about a 15-minute commute from our campsite. We’re camped on the ice, but we’re on much more stable, “land-fast” ice. In simple terms, it’s ice that is attached to the land. Camp is about 100m from the rising land of Bylot Island, home of Sirmilik National Park. With six Mountain Hardwear Trango 4 tents, and two Space Station domes, camp is pretty comfortable. Each Trango is set on a 4x8ft sheet of plywood, and has a cot with a Therm-a-Rest, and another Therm-a-Rest beside it. You can put all your stuff on the Therm-a-Rest and sleep on the cot. Black Feather provides a sleeping bag rated to -30C and overall, it’s pretty comfortable. The ice doesn’t creak or move during the night and as long as you keep your stuff dry, you’ll stay warm. Just make sure to pee before you go to bed. The optically pleasing Space Stations make up the cook tent and the common room. We spend a lot of time in there, eating delicious food, learning about narwhals and polar bears from the amazingly qualified guides. Temperatures vary between -10C to 13C during the week. As we get closer to the edge, it’s obviously rotting and crumbling. Then we realize we’re on the Greenland side of some of the latest cracks.