Team reach destination of Cambridge Bay; local people speak of changes as climate warms
Hi this is Glenn with the Arctic Voice update on 1st September. I’m calling at the moment on a cold and windy beach in Cambridge Bay. We reached our destination successfully after well over a week of very bad weather. In fact it’s very windy now. We’ve had a fantastic welcome -we’ve only been in Cambridge Bay just over day and we’ve been really welcomed. The residents of Cambridge Bay without exception are wonderful. It’s a beautiful town – all the houses are different colours. I’m looking down seeing reds and blues greens and ochre. It really is a very attractive town. It’s sited on very flat tundra and very often around the town you can see herds of musk ox and a friend of ours who does some interpreting work for us took us out yesterday evening and we saw lots of musk ox and I managed to get a few pictures not too close!
The people we’ve met so far have been really great – We’ve met Henry and Susie – Jerry and Julia – I met Jerry last year at Kugluktuk and he very kindly got some of our equipment from Kugluktuk to Cambridge Bay and that was really helpful of him. And Eddie and Martina whom we met in Bay Chimo we also met here – they were the people who gave us the caribou when we turned up very cold one evening after paddling.
We’ve spoken to quite a few people here in a very short space of time and there are lots of reports of changes, particularly birds and insects that people haven’t seen before are starting to turn up here. This is really very interesting – but perhaps the bigger thing that wasn’t on Victoria Island before was the Grizzly Bear and now the people’s cabins are being damaged by the bears – they think the population is about 200 hundred Grizzly bears. They are starting to move North. We presume with the onset of climate change. There are a lot of Grizzly Bears here now; they’ve actually become a danger.
Ironically there was a hunter who came from the USA who had come into town and he was out hunting - I don’t’ know what animals he was hunting but he’d gone for an evening stroll by the beach and a bear came running up and chased him and he went into the water up to his chest and apparently the guy was in tears and the bear was about twenty feet away and he really thought his end had come. One of the guides just happened to catch sight of it – he was out for a stroll and shot the bear. It seems a bit of a cruel irony that he was here hunting the animal and he came very near to his own end by that animal.
We’re visiting the local school tomorrow. We’re not meeting the children but we’re trying to establish some links with the school here. Possibly both. We’ll try to make that link with St Francis of Assisi (Secondary School Liverpool) while we’re here. We’ve also met the president of the kayak club and Alison sent a clinic in rolling. And I’m gong to get in touch with Neville from News North and have a chat with him and hope he has some good things to report. All is going well but we still have some work to do here.
