Day: 12

Lutselk'e Rest

Temperature: -20

Location: Lutselk'e School

Latitude: 62deg 24' 13''

Longitude: 110deg 44' 13''

Distance Traveled: 0 Miles

We’re in the village of Lutselk’e. We arrived here last night, and it is now Sunday. We’ve been put up in the home-ec room of the local school. There are six of us in there, with our gear all over the place. I come from a large family, there were six boys, and we all used to sleep in the one room floor on the large second floor we called the dormitory, similar to this situation. Here we’re all sleeping on the floor together, cooking together. We’re very tight group.

The town was not very active today, and there of course was no school, which gave us the opportunity to wash our gear and dry out our sleeping bags. Tomorrow we will give some talks at the school and visit with some of the native people. Everything is going very well here in Lutselk’e, and we’re meeting a lot of people.

The weather has been very pleasant, it’s about 10 below. We did get a satellite overview for the area 300 miles east of here, where we will be traveling, indicating temperatures of 40-50 below. So we’ve got some really cold weather coming up, as we expected. The weather will probably remain mild for us as we’re in the treeline for the next week, but once we’re out in The Barrens, I think we are going to really get blasted with wind and cold. So we’re really enjoying this reprieve.

The dogs are resting really well. They’ve been sound asleep on the ice all day long. A lot of people here have snowmobiles, as opposed to dog teams, but the dogs aren’t paying any attention to people walking by or driving by on snowmobiles.

There is some snow falling right now, and a lot of kids are out walking around. Sunday night is a big night for them, and they’ll stay out ‘till about midnight, sliding and playing. They keep long hours here, but don’t start school until about 9 in the morning. It’s kind of a topsy-turvy world here. They just sort of go with the rhythm of things. They live very much in tune with the seasons, so winter is sort of a time off here. The caribou, however, have been traveling close to the village, a couple of hours by snowmobile, so they have been doing a lot of hunting. The hunting has been very good this year. Their freezers are stocked up for the whole year with meat, and the people are very happy about that. Last year the caribou migrated much farther east, but this year they’ve been closer to the village. So there is much celebration about that.