Accidental illegal park day

I spent most of today outside and out of town. I've marked out my path:

I thought it might be faster to the park to cut across the bay and then cross the little bit of land to the water, but we have had a lot of snow in the past weeks and it hasn't had a lot of time to settle. So I was slogging through thigh-deep snow most of the way across the bay, AND, somewhere along the way, both of my boot grip things fell off in the snow. I only realized they were gone after I got off the bay on the other side.

You can see my deep footprints across the bay here.

So I probably took the longest possible route to the park, but the park was worth it. We'll see how much I hurt tomorrow after that walk across.

Once I made it to the park, I headed up to the pavilion then down to the river. I looked at the falls, but they are so small that, under the snow, they weren't recognizable. I couldn't find the falls- everything looked flat. I walked along the river until I found a picnic table at which to drink my tea.

And a lovely little Inuksuk.

Walking on, I found some very nice fresh footprints all over the place. Some animal was crossing my path just before me quite frequently. It wasn't until I got near the airport that I saw him when an airplane startled him out of hiding. The animal that I'd been 'following' was an Arctic Hare, the first Arctic-specific animal I've seen so far! Unfortunately, the sight of me startled him immediately after the airplane did, and he disappeared just after I'd caught sight of him so that I didn't have time to take a picture.

Some of the footprints. My first guess was that a hare was leaving the prints, but deep snow distorted the shape in other prints so that I second guessed and thought of a fox, and my next guess from the 'hopping' steps was a raven alternating between walking and flying short distances

My goal today was to explore the park on this side of the river, and I think I did that pretty well. A side goal was to get to the area of the river where people collect water for drinking. A lot of people here dislike the taste of treated water enough that they choose to collect river water and drink that instead. Keep in mind that water treatment is fairly new to Nunavut- there are people here who predate the treatment plant (built in 1964). They raised their children and grandchildren to drink water straight from the river, in many cases not stopping when modern water treatment was available. When I moved here I asked someone if river water was boiled before drinking, and they told me that the water is safe directly from the source. During the summer, water is scooped. During the winter, the river freezes solid, but people still need their water. Every once in a while, someone will go down to the river, hack a hole in the ice, and chop up small pieces of ice so that everyone who wants fresh water can scoop up the ice chips and fill containers with them to melt and drink or eat frozen.

The water hole today

I spent my night after returning home watching For King and Country's livestream concert and eating river ice from a thermos with a spoon. Altogether a very nice day. My body is very tired- I was gone for nearly six hours and spent almost all of that walking (much through deep snow).

Grateful for Nunavut-specific social distancing orders that include time spent on the land as a must-have! I did learn after I returned that the park is actually closed to the public- of course, no one is going to follow that. People are going to keep going for water. I didn't walk in or out through the entrance, so I wasn't aware of the closure until Maxine mentioned it.

Oops. But anyway, I did not encounter any people within six feet of me (I did see tons of snowmobiles and a few very stuck quads).

- Aliya