Day: 60

Real Heatwave Last Night

Temperature: 7F

Location: Canadian Barrens

Latitude: 63deg 59’ 39 ’’ N

Longitude: 97deg 9’ 29 ’’ W

Distance Traveled: 23 Miles

We had a real heat wave last night. The temperature got up to 7 degrees above zero Fahrenheit. We literally roasted in our sleeping bags, it was a very hot night. I would unzip the sleeping bag and have my head out of the bag, but then the frost from the tent (due to the storm last night) would fall into my face. So I would then go back into my sleeping bag, back into the heat. It was a kind of back and forth night, and I had really weird dreams because of this. It was hot.

In the morning it didn’t take much to heat up the tent. It was actually kind of uncomfortable. When we got out we checked the temperature and saw that it was 7 above. We don’t trust warm weather here, because we could be set up for a really big blizzard. But luckily, as we were hooking up dogs and breaking camp, the weather simply cleared up. The wind shifted to the northwest, which is the fair weather wind, and the temperature dropped to 17 below by the time we broke camp. Even 17 below is a pretty mild temperature for us. And the windchills aren’t that bad.

We had a REALLY good day of traveling. We covered 23 miles over good surfaces, a little bit of snow here and there. The snow was interesting. We had about 3-4 inches of regular powdered snow when we got out of the tent this morning. It simply sat on everything. We rarely see this in this country of winds. And the snowflakes were very intricate, something else you rarely see here. With the northwest wind, the structure of the flakes actually held the snow together for a while. But then, as the wind picked up around one or two o’clock, the wind started blowing everything into the air and that was the end of the snow on the ground. It began to drift up, but nothing that really slowed us down.

We really had a great, upbeat day. I think we are a couple of days now from Baker Lake.