A beautiful day in the Arctic

It is a beautiful sunny Sunday afternoon in the Arctic. The temperature is still cold, at -34C right now, but the brightness of the sun is a promise of spring in the not too distant future. And each day lengthens a few minutes a day. It is now 3 o'clock in the afternoon and the sun is just past its maximum height, just above the trees.

Although the NWT follows mountain time for economic convenience, being so closely linked with Alberta, it should be noted that the Territory actually goes a long way west as well as north, as you follow down the Mackenzie River to reach Inuvik. So much so that if you follow a longitude line down from Inuvik to the latitude of Vancouver, the intersection of latitude and longitude ends up away west in the Pacific Ocean, as far west of Vancouver as Vancouver is west of Calgary. So the sun is highest in the sky here in Inuvik at about 2:30 PM Mountain Time.

It is good to finally have a normally cold winter, so the ice roads are safe for heavy truck traffic, crossing the Peel and Mackenzie Rivers to reach Inuvik on the Dempster highway, then on to Tuktoyaktuk or Aklavik.

Although it is sunny today, we have just had a cloudy week of almost constant snowfall with the temperature continuing in the -30's. And the snow is not light and fluffy at those temperatures but quite dense and heavy. Sandra has been doing a lot of shovelling, and a good contractor friend and neighbor by the name of Randy asked his man on the machine to clean out our driveway so that Sandra didn't have to shovel that out too. It was wonderful to have that done free of charge.

My health is so precarious with all the drugs that I am on that I have little strength in my legs and I am dizzy enough to often be in danger of falling. Some of the dizziness is still a remnant of the accident and subsequent concussion. So that is my reason/excuse for not being the snow shoveller in the family. 

So this has been just a rambling post talking about our winter experience in the Arctic. Our 2010 Volvo doesn't mind the cold at all and starts well without the block-heater being plugged in down to about -30. Actually, last winter when the battery was a year newer our V50 started at -39 one morning without being plugged in.

We plan to drive south to Edmonton in the last week of July to get the car maintained, new rear brake pads, and a new battery, and a few other important checks. Here in Inuvik we have Fred as a great mechanic for ordinary maintenance such as oil changes and pointing out what needs to be done of a more serious nature.

It is a 3 1/2 day and 3,500 km drive from Inuvik to Edmonton, west and south down through the Yukon, to Whitehorse and down through northeastern BC into northern Alberta. So it is a drive we make only once every year or two.

We are debating about changing to a newer model vehicle, probably a Toyota. However, money is tight so we might stick with the Volvo for another couple of years. It is interesting that Toyota is the only imported vehicle that has enough reliability for the Arctic. My guess is that nine out of ten taxis in the NWT are Toyotas. The taxi drivers we know swear by them regarding reliability and economy of operation and maintenance.