“Adventure” from Merriam Webster: a noun, 1) An undertaking that usually involves danger and unknown risk, 2) An exciting or remarkable experience, 3) An enterprise involving financial risk.

I mentioned in a previous blog that in a former life I was an adventurer.  But let me clarify... big time!  Now when I say “former life” I don’t mean to imply that Shirley McClain and I are friends, or that I’m a Hindu, or that I was a KGB Sleeper.  By “former life” I mean that my life has had many chapters and some of them have been so different it is as if they were printed in different languages!  In short, I’ve been involved in a lot of things.  I was a sea captain, a short order cook, I hiked through Nepal, and yes, I founded Hershey Foods.  OK, all of that was a lie, but one chapter of my life did turn out pretty adventuresome... at least according to my definition of adventure... and thankfully that chapter was printed in English, with a smattering of French and Inuit.  That comment will make sense later.

And by “adventurer” I don’t mean that I was a peer of Sir John Franklin (of the ill-fated Franklin Expedition to find the NW Passage), or of Roald Amundson (who was the first to make it THROUGH the NW Passage).  Their kind of Arctic adventure and my kind of “Arctic adventure” are approximately 7.6 light years apart, give or take a few parsecs!  I’m not into starving, scurvy, freezing to death, and dying of lead poisoning from solder-sealed meat tins!  No, my kind of adventure is closer to riding a ferris wheel at the fair.  But then, I don’t go to fairs... too crowded!  But I digress...

This installment starts a serial describing a past adventure, a long-past adventure that played out in Canada’s Northwest Territory (NWT) during the summer of 1978.  This adventure exists now only in musty memories and fungus-impregnated Kodachromes.  It’s the tale of a 7-week long Snow goose banding adventure in the Canadian sub-arctic.  Now, if you compare this location to my title you can see right off that I’m already embellishing.  To be technically accurate I should call this series “Adventure in the sub-Artic” because we were not actually IN the Arctic; we were not north of the Arctic circle.  The Arctic Circle sits at approximately 66 34 03 N latitude.  Our base camp was, as I recall, was about 33 miles north-northwest of the then Eskimo Point, NWT (now Arviat, Keewatin District, Nunavut Territory) and Arviat sits at about 61 06 N latitude.  So we were about 5 degrees, 25 minutes south of the Arctic Circle.  That translates to about 350 miles... roughly.  So I guess I should have named this series,  Adventure in the Arctic minus 350 miles, but that didn’t sound macho and cool.  So live with it already!  It’s my story and I’m stick’n to it!  The rest of it will be the truth... I hope.  You see I’m relying a lot on memory and I’m 58 years old and already presenting a real need for an Aricept prescription!

OK... off to the Tundra we go!

In the very hot summer of 1978 I was working as a  Regional Management Biologist for the Oklahoma Department of  Wildlife Conservation.  About 2 years into my career I was offered the opportunity to participate in a very large banding project sponsored by the states and provinces of the Central Flyway (of which Oklahoma was a member).  You see, North America is divided into several major migratory bird “flyways”, or corridors, and managing these populations of migratory fowl is an inter-state and international challenge!  As it turned out the goal of this project was to band about 50,000 Snow geese each year for several years running.  The statisticians would then work with band returns to estimate all kinds of parameters about the Central Flyway Snow goose population.  So here I was, a boy from SE Kansas, educated in the tall grass of NE KS and the Edward’s Plateau of SW Texas, bound for the tundra!  I thought I knew what I was getting into.  But like most adventurers... I didn’t.  I DID know what a Snow goose was and I DID know that Canada was north, but as it turned out, that was about it!  But God is indeed graceful to children and the mentally-infirm!

On a very hot and steamy July 6, 1978, I boarded a flight at Will Rogers World Airport in Oklahoma City.  My adventure had started.  At 9:00 PM that same day I was unpacking in my “motel” room at the Northern Studies Center in Churchill, Manitoba, Canada, after stops in Denver, Bismark, ND, and Canadian customs in Winnipeg, MB.  The Northern Studies Center was and still is a wayfarer’s inn for researchers headed north onto the tundra.  It was COLD in Churchill and spitting rain; quite a change from searingly hot Oklahoma.  Although very tired I did sit in on a presentation that evening by a research scientist who was showing movies of his Polar bear research.  Then it was truly LIGHTS OUT!

My destination for the next morning’s flight was my last hop... to Eskimo Point, NWT, which was at that very moment, experiencing a blizzard!  Yes, it was July 6th!  What would the morning bring?  Would the weather ground me in Churchill?

The photo with this blog shows the location of Arviat, NU (formerly Eskimo Point).  As you can see Arviat is a costal town, bordering Hudson Bay.  As it would turn out, our camp would be about 33 miles NNW, out on the tundra.

Stay tuned for Part 1, subtitled, “Does every Canadian eat raisins in their oatmeal?”