Talk Without Speaking

It’s sweltering in Ottawa as only Ottawa can get and we walk out onto the tarmac. Carefully walking around the orange pylons so as not to walk under the idling engine we climb up the rear steps into the back of the plane. I’m in my shorts and t-shirt and I’m in a plane bound for Iqualuit! Northern Quebec flies by and I can’t believe how quickly the tree line fades behind us, the forests replaced by punctuations of thousands of lakes and barren, rocky landscape. I layer up on the flight but I am still in shorts and we disembark in Iqualuit despite my seat mate telling me, “You won’t last long in those!”. Off the flight, we are quickly accosted by a CBC North crew who are doing an article on “southerners” and why they are choosing to come to the North. Dude films us on camera and asks us what we think average Canadians opinions are of on Nunavut or if they are even aware of Nunavut at all which, I feel, they are not.

Although the Iqualuit airport only has 2 gates I am momentarily confused as to where we are supposed to be going. No security or checkpoints at all on the flight from Iqualuit to Pangnirtung. I am a bit dismayed to find out that Iqualuit being a secondary landing point for the space shuttle is an urban myth; apparently the space shuttle never achieves a high enough trajectory in order to land at Iqualuit instead staying closer to the equator.

We’re quickly away to Pang which is a 50 minute flight away. Being able to sit anywhere in the plane despite actually having been issued with boarding passes causes us some additional confusion but we’re quickly off and our overall wearing flight attendant is very interesting. Only half of the flight is actually used for passengers, the front half of the plane, I suppose, is reserved for cargo.

We swoop in over Pang flying to the end of the still frozen valley before sharply turning and coming in over town for a gravel runway landing. We meander out of the one room airport after collecting our bags, chat with a nearby RCMP officer who gives us some tips on where we might find some white gas, our first, very important, priority. We quickly learn that Pangnirtung is on the verge of running out of white gas ? this is going to be a rude awakening for the hikers who come in later in the season. We manage to score 4 litres of gas which we are limited to because that’s all we have containers for. The gas we buy from the Pang fuel depot, a series of truck/train containers and seemingly meat lockers out on the street. Four men hang out in one of the lockers, a small cash register on one side, a checkers board set up near the floor on the other, the white gas comes from a barrel in container C ? they dish it out with a juice container into a steady stream of Inuit’s fuel containers.

We end up being the only ones in the Pang campsite which amazes us as we fully expected to be here in a somewhat throng of would-be park explorers but we soon learn that we are certainly on the vanguard . Others, it seems, are waiting for warmer weather and more of a guarantee that they will actually make it into the park. This looks dicey, we find out when we visit the parks office, the head of the fjord is still frozen. They do tell us that absolutely anything can happen although we must resign ourselves to the possibility that we will have to hike into the park and extra 30km that would certainly eliminate any possibility that we have of making it to Asgard! The women in the visitor’s centre, who also administrate the campground, refuse to charge us as they say that the campground hasn’t been “cleaned” yet for the season. This isn’t remotely apparent to us and we decide to leave a donation for their awesome hospitality.