Posted on May 11 2020
Kayak Nunavut '99, ten part series by Pamela Coulston.
Dispatches
A collection of full feature articles written by Pamela for major Canadian newspapers and other journals including: Ottawa Citizen, Edmonton Journal, Calgary Herald, and Montreal Gazette.
Posted on May 11 2020
We are off. My Mr. King and I, my travelling companion Mike Beedell, are embarking on an Arctic expedition to circumnavigate Bylot Island by kayak.
Posted on May 11 2020
Our attempts to leave Mittimatalik have been thwarted. It is approaching 11 pm and under the 24-hour Arctic sun we stand at the shoreline of town and look across the still frozen waters of Pond Inlet to our destination Bylot Island.
Posted on May 11 2020
We are, I think, exhausted although I'm too tired to be sure. We were finally able to leave Mittimatalik a couple of nights ago, towed by Hamm's snowmobile across the annual ice still fast in Pond Inlet.
Posted on May 11 2020
The Norwegian Otto Sverdrup said he could think of no greater hell than to be born a sled dog. Now here I am, in no greater hell, my life as a sled dog continues.
Posted on May 11 2020
Lady Franklin and the British Admiralty never heard from Sir John Franklin after he headed out in 1845 to look for the North West Passage because he was dead.
Posted on May 11 2020
Was this my mid-life crisis? It was my 40th birthday and I was spending it with my husband pulling our 300 kg komatiq, kayaks and gear from the abandoned Scottish whaling station on Bylot Island to Button Point, the last leg in pulling this beastly burden.
Posted on May 11 2020
You do what you can. You plan, you prepare, you research, you do your math. In the end, in the Arctic, nature will decide where you go and when you go.
Posted on May 11 2020
We were trapped. We had spent almost a week at Niaqunnguut 'the land shaped like a human head' (Cape Graham Moore). Undispersed ice on both sides of the promontory where we camped (a finger of land 40 metres wide and pointing 150 unprotected metres out into the water) precluded movement both forward and backward.
Posted on May 11 2020
This was not an emergency. This was not a search and rescue. We were not being saved (as such). But when the Coast Guard choppered into our camp one evening to check on us, we gratefully accepted the lift back to Pond Inlet.
Posted on May 11 2020
Even the snow geese didn't make it this year. Usually they come by the tens of thousands to Bylot but only a few thousand waited for summer to arrive on the island to build their nests and fledge their young.
Posted on May 11 2020
At first glance, Rwanda reveals few changes from a visit earlier this decade. A tiny East African country slowly modernizing: a new building here, a new traffic light there.
Posted on May 11 2020
There is a spirit that moves through the rainforest of British Colombia's mid-coast. I have seen it. Merging with the morning mist, a white anti-shadow moving against the current of streams, receding back into thick foliage. Here. Then gone. Then here again. Spirit bear.
Posted on May 11 2020
Nothing. Not one fish. Not even a bite. I've completely encircled this damned but apparently fish-full lake high in the mountains of Pamparomas, a remote district in Peru's Cordillera Negra, trying to reel in my part of tonight's dinner. I would have long since headed back to camp but the priest insists I catch a fish.
Posted on May 11 2020
Paca-paca, paca-paca, fine unshod hooves clack against the cobbled courtyard of a Peruvian hacienda in the outskirts of the capital Lima.
Posted on May 10 2020
Hell, if you're looking, is a tiny town deep in the Peruvian Amazon near the Bolivian border, locally referred to as Infierno.
Posted on May 10 2020
Surprisingly, everyone made it to dinner, they also made it to breakfast and lunch. The Coast Guard icebreaker Sir Wilfrid Laurier was taking a whipping from the weather in the middle of the Bering Sea. But not a meal was missed.
Posted on May 10 2020
This exciting little video clip shows life at sea on the Sir Wilfred Laurier. A storm in the Bering Sea lasting a couple of days — and the SWL just rolls with it. Filmed by Coast Guard staffer Gerald R.
Posted on May 09 2020
It is a story of ice and men. The maritime history of Canada's Arctic begins with bold explorers trying to chisel a route through the Northwest Passage, pick-axing through a frozen continuum in vessels ill-suited to what lay before them.
Posted on May 08 2020
It was not until the end of the trek, after 12 hard days of ascending and descending through the Bhutan Himalaya, that I understood the importance compassion played in the journey. In particular, the compassion of a young man, Tashi Dorji.
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