Summer on the Icy Edge of the World

Every day people travel east to the concrete confusion of New York City or west to people-paved Waikiki Beach. But those with a flair for the unusual can travel a similar distance in a different direction and step onto one of the vast, raw, uncrowded edges of the world, into the neolithic culture of the Canadian Arctic.

It is a world of awesome beauty: of shimmering auroras dancing in the sky, countless lakes dotting the tundra, vast herds of grazing caribou, bands of Eskimos marching quickly into the 20th Century from an Ice Age way of life.

Summer Wonderland

Most people consider the Arctic a frigid, inhospitable wasteland, the domain of ice and cold. That is true of the savage winter Arctic, where temperatures can plummet to minus 60 degrees. But the summer Arctic is dramatically different. Temperatures can reach 90 degrees, although 57 is average.

It’s a place where one can be alone when one chooses, or can mingle with a hardy people who live in constructive harmony with the vagaries of nature.

The Arctic also is a sportsman’s Shangri-la. A plethora of wildlife challenges the best hunters. Anglers find an almost untouched paradise where Arctic char and grayling provide spectacular light-tackle acrobatics in lakes never fished, nor even named. Lunker trout are abundant and average 35 pounds. There are more than 100,000 lakes in the Canadian Arctic, the world’s largest reserve of fresh, unpolluted water.

Gateway to the Roof

The small town of Inuvik, Eskimo for “the place of man,” is the Arctic’s front door, gateway to the roof of the world. You get here by connecting with a Pacific Western Airlines flight at Edmonton, Alta.

As your course to Inuvik heads toward the Arctic Circle, invisible boundary of the Land of the Midnight Sun, it passes abeam Great Slave Lake, which is larger than Lake Erie. You are then guided by the Mackenzie River (Canada’s longest) as it flows north to the Arctic Ocean.

The terrain below is flat, a barren wilderness, drab and colorless, without sign of civilization. But that is not surprising. The Northwest Territories are half as large as the United States, yet populated by fewer than 40,000 souls, mostly Indians and Eskimos in widely scattered settlements. Not enough to fill Dodger Stadium.

A sand bar in the river marks the crossing of the Arctic Circle, an anticlimax to those who expect to see a frozen hint of the Arctic world. But ice is too much to expect during the warm Arctic summer.

Protective Coloration

From above, Inuvik looks like a toy city freshly cut from cereal boxes. It is a town where the homes are painted in a wild array of brilliant colors.

Neither roads nor rails tie this place to any other on earth. The town’s 20 miles of dirt streets lead nowhere. Inuvik’s only link with civilization is the highway of the sky. Supply barges do come here, but only during the Mackenzie’s ice-free season, May to October.

This surprisingly modern community of 4,000 was built from scratch by the Canadian government in the mid-1950s at a cost of $31 million, a remarkable achievement considering that the area is covered by ice and snow nine months of the year.

A center for Arctic development and administration, Inuvik brings education, medical care and opportunity to the natives of the western Canadian Arctic. It also is an oil exploration center, and regional headquarters for the fabled Royal Canadian Mounted Police.

Government Workers

Who lives in Inuvik? Mostly government workers who either want to get away from it all or consider that the high salaries paid them are worth two years of hardship. Most are from southern Canada and have difficulty sleeping during glare-filled summer nights and working during gloomy, dark winter days. They manage to average five hours of sleep a day in summer and hibernate for about 11 hours a day in winter.

Their multicolored wood-frame homes are similar to many in the United States, but all are connected by an umbilical web of above-ground plumbing that supplies heat and water from a central plant.

The buildings perch on stilts driven deep into the permafrost, the permanently frozen earth only inches below the surface. If the houses were built conventionally, the alternating summer thaw and winter freeze would heave them off their foundations.

Only one building in Inuvik rests on a concrete slab: the Catholic church, which is designed and painted to look like an outsize igloo. It conforms to the theory by tilting first one way and then the other with the changing seasons.

The summer Arctic climate is almost tropical, owing to the humidity from water evaporating off thousands of surrounding lakes and streams. Lightweight sportswear is recommended, and visitors also should bring the latest in Arctic fedora fashions, a headnet, as well as enough insect repellent to kill a caribou.

Hazardous Breathing

At times there are so many mosquitoes that it can be hazardous to breathe through an open mouth, a blessing in disguise to someone accompanied by a loquacious travel partner. And because it can snow here in July, bring a parka just in case.

But don’t bring a pet: A dog not on a leash is considered wild and is shot on sight.

Accommodations are available at the surprisingly comfortable Finto Motor Inn ($75 double), but do not show up without a confirmed reservation (P.O. Box 1925, Inuvik, Northwest Territories X60E 0T0, Canada). Two more motels also are available.

For all its strangeness, Inuvik is only a white man’s creation grafted onto a remote northern stem. But only 80 miles farther north, on the edge of the Arctic Ocean, you can find the real Arctic at Tuktoyaktuk, a primitive, colorless, world’s-end outpost.

Taxis of the North

Chartering a small plane for the flight to Tuktoyaktuk is like hailing a taxi in New York. You stroll to the seaplane base and hire one of the bush pilots--they’re all good, or they wouldn’t be flying here. The cost varies according to how many passengers board, but figure about $50 for a flight that lasts most of a day.

The chartered flight from Inuvik to “Tuk” should be made at midnight. Flying over the Mackenzie River delta under the harsh brilliance of the midnight sun is spectacular. The flight is a short one, about 40 minutes, but its brevity belies the wonders seen en route.

The griddle-flat topography stretches endlessly beneath the wings, polka-dotted with myriad lakes and ponds. These pools of water are like floodlights that flash sequentially as you fly through their beams of reflected sunlight.

Nose Knows It’s Summer

The lakes below are separated by muskeg, the top layer of the eternally frozen subsoil. This smelly muck melts and refreezes with the changing seasons. In the summer it can be like quicksand and has swallowed roads, animals, trucks and even runways.

As the plane pulls its shadow across a large grazing preserve where thousands of reindeer feed during the summer, you notice the trees becoming shorter as the flight progresses north; the soil above the permafrost is too shallow to allow an extensive root system to develop.

Finally, about halfway between Inuvik and Tuk, there are no trees at all. This is the beginning of the tundra, a land devoid of all vegetation except the hardiest shrubs and mosses. Christmas trees are flown to settlements in the tundra.

Tuktoyaktuk’s twin sentinels, the only two elevations that rise above the flat landscape anywhere in the vicinity, become visible when you are 30 miles south of the village. These mysterious hills, called pingos , are found nowhere else in North America and rise from the tundra like extinct volcanoes, but instead of molten lava they have cores of solid blue ice.

Some time ago the people of Tuk (mostly Eskimos) decided to hollow out a pingo and use it as a natural museum to display frozen sea life. They got carried away and kept digging until they had excavated a permanent indoor ice rink for a popular northern sport, curling.

Early-Warning Radar

Descending toward Tuktoyaktuk, you pass the massive radar antennas of a Distant Early Warning (DEW line) station that maintains unceasing surveillance of Soviet skies on the other side of the North Pole. The Tuk station is one link of the 4,500-mile radar chain extending from Alaska to Greenland.

Although visitors can stay in the Beaufort Inn ($105 double), the Eskimos of Tuk live in primitive shacks (not igloos) that seem incapable of sheltering life during the brutal winter. Snow sleds in various states of repair are scattered about, like abandoned cars on a New York expressway. The moody silence is broken occasionally by the yapping of shackled huskies, ferocious to all but their masters.

White beluga whales are plentiful in the waters near Tuk. A summer day rarely passes that an Eskimo family is not on the beach practicing centuries-old surgery on a freshly caught whale. Entrails are discarded carelessly in the bay. Nearby, steaming pots contain boiling muktuk, the whale’s outer skin.

Near the center of the village stands an orange structure, similar in appearance to the portable potties at construction sites in the States. But instead of being a potty, it is the entrance to a subterranean communal icehouse used by the Eskimos to preserve fresh meat.

Permanent Winter

Inside, you climb down the 30-foot ladder and find yourself in a world of perpetual winter, surrounded by frozen walls of permafrost coated with millions of ice crystals sparkling in the light of a dim bulb. The temperature is well below freezing. Several rooms lead off from diverging tunnels, which resemble catacombs.

The beach at Tuk is at the northern edge of the continent, a jumping-off point for the North Pole, only 1,400 miles away. Most visitors feel compelled to stick a hand into the Arctic water, at which time it becomes shockingly obvious why Eskimos cannot swim. Those chilling waters would discourage anyone from wanting to learn.

The Canadian Arctic is exciting, adventurous, well off the beaten path, but it’s not for everyone. Luxury is unavailable. It is, after all, a place where, not long ago, only explorers dared to venture.

Beaufort Inn, P.O. Box 60, Tuktoyaktuk, Northwest Territories X0E 1C0, Canada.