To The Rescue!
Canada's width and breadth is enormous, its landscape breathtakingly various and beautiful, from its great mountain chains in the West to its wide, white, bare Arctic arras, its great sweeps of prairies, its industrial heartland replete with huge forested tracts, and its maritime presence. It is, doubtless, the history of intrepid explorers venturing into the vast frozen distances of the Canadian North that has for so long held a spellbinding fascination over peoples' imagination, through the telling and re-telling of exploration and the people who live there.
Canada's Inuit population still live off the land in that great frozen north. An immense, isolated, sparsely-populated region of wide land and coastal areas, dear in the popular Canadian imagination and home to those familiar with those wide, white sweeps. Their hunting prowess, coupled with their comfort in the environment bred in their bones, an integral part of their living heritage, also enables them as proud First Nations Canadians to deploy as Rangers.
Under the Canadian Land Force Command, over four thousand Inuit are deployed as Canadian Rangers, to ensure that there is an ever-present eye on the landscape, patrolled by the people who know it best. That huge northern, coastal isolation challenging for others beside the Inuit to live within. First-hand accounts of a changing environment come from the Inuit, familiar with traditional weather patterns and the impact on the frozen North. Great floating ice floes that polar bears depend upon are increasingly on the melt.
And Jupi Nakoolak, along with his uncle, Jimmy Nakoolak, 17 and 67 respectively, set out with confidence to hunt polar bear a week earlier, a normal enough proceeding. Except that 11 kilometres outside of their community of 750 souls in Coral Harbour on Nunavut's Southampton Island, their snowmobile broke down. And that's when Jupi began his long walk back to town for help. That plan too failed as the icy highway he walked upon broke up into a floe which began to drift into Hudson Bay.
How geographically remote can you get on the North American continent? Well, in the capital of Nunavut, Iqaluit, during this long Arctic night, the Olympic flame recently blazed through town. The Olympic torch relay is somewhat different this year; itself travelling Canada's Far North where traditionally exist Cree and Inuit settlements where the people still hunt caribou and use dogsleds - and make use of the Internet.
The torch has travelled through Old Crow, Yukon, Canadian Forces Station Alert, 800 kilometres from the North Pole. From Iqaluit to Kuujjuag, in northern Quebec with its Inuit population of 2,500, where houses are built on stilts over permafrost, and where satellite television dishes and another dish for the Internet are common fare. Remote they may be, but they're also wired and connected. Cellphones are next, towers recently erected.
And although 170-year-old Jupi Nakoolak, stranded on that inexorably-moving ice floe for three nights, was spotted by a Hercules aircraft rescue team after his uncle Jimmy Nakoolak walked back to town on the pack ice along the island shore, would-be rescuers also lost track of the boy in the vast, icy blackness. Finally managing to parachute two search-and rescue technicians nearby, to be with the hypothermic young frostbitten man, awaiting the arrival of a rescue boat.
Their relief, when the rescue boat arrived must have been enormous; all's well that ends well. Except that wasn't the end, and it wasn't as well as it first appeared, since the rescue boat itself got stuck in the ice, and required rescuing. Coral Harbour locals on all-terrain vehicles searched the coastline, hopping from ice pan to ice pan in the harbour, to finally reach the stranded rescue boat.
The six Coral Harbour men, the two parachuted rescue technicians, and Jupi himself, strained and pulled and freed the vessel from the ice, dragging it to shore. And the rescue proceeded. Jupi and his uncle Jimmy, stout souls, taken to Churchill, Manitoba to be medically treated for hypothermia.
Born in the North, taught to be a hunter, Jupi Nakoolak knew what to do when one of the three polar bears floating into Hudson Bay along with him on that 50 by 50 metre ice floe became too morbidly interested in his presence.
Canada's Inuit population still live off the land in that great frozen north. An immense, isolated, sparsely-populated region of wide land and coastal areas, dear in the popular Canadian imagination and home to those familiar with those wide, white sweeps. Their hunting prowess, coupled with their comfort in the environment bred in their bones, an integral part of their living heritage, also enables them as proud First Nations Canadians to deploy as Rangers.
Under the Canadian Land Force Command, over four thousand Inuit are deployed as Canadian Rangers, to ensure that there is an ever-present eye on the landscape, patrolled by the people who know it best. That huge northern, coastal isolation challenging for others beside the Inuit to live within. First-hand accounts of a changing environment come from the Inuit, familiar with traditional weather patterns and the impact on the frozen North. Great floating ice floes that polar bears depend upon are increasingly on the melt.
And Jupi Nakoolak, along with his uncle, Jimmy Nakoolak, 17 and 67 respectively, set out with confidence to hunt polar bear a week earlier, a normal enough proceeding. Except that 11 kilometres outside of their community of 750 souls in Coral Harbour on Nunavut's Southampton Island, their snowmobile broke down. And that's when Jupi began his long walk back to town for help. That plan too failed as the icy highway he walked upon broke up into a floe which began to drift into Hudson Bay.
How geographically remote can you get on the North American continent? Well, in the capital of Nunavut, Iqaluit, during this long Arctic night, the Olympic flame recently blazed through town. The Olympic torch relay is somewhat different this year; itself travelling Canada's Far North where traditionally exist Cree and Inuit settlements where the people still hunt caribou and use dogsleds - and make use of the Internet.
The torch has travelled through Old Crow, Yukon, Canadian Forces Station Alert, 800 kilometres from the North Pole. From Iqaluit to Kuujjuag, in northern Quebec with its Inuit population of 2,500, where houses are built on stilts over permafrost, and where satellite television dishes and another dish for the Internet are common fare. Remote they may be, but they're also wired and connected. Cellphones are next, towers recently erected.
And although 170-year-old Jupi Nakoolak, stranded on that inexorably-moving ice floe for three nights, was spotted by a Hercules aircraft rescue team after his uncle Jimmy Nakoolak walked back to town on the pack ice along the island shore, would-be rescuers also lost track of the boy in the vast, icy blackness. Finally managing to parachute two search-and rescue technicians nearby, to be with the hypothermic young frostbitten man, awaiting the arrival of a rescue boat.
Their relief, when the rescue boat arrived must have been enormous; all's well that ends well. Except that wasn't the end, and it wasn't as well as it first appeared, since the rescue boat itself got stuck in the ice, and required rescuing. Coral Harbour locals on all-terrain vehicles searched the coastline, hopping from ice pan to ice pan in the harbour, to finally reach the stranded rescue boat.
The six Coral Harbour men, the two parachuted rescue technicians, and Jupi himself, strained and pulled and freed the vessel from the ice, dragging it to shore. And the rescue proceeded. Jupi and his uncle Jimmy, stout souls, taken to Churchill, Manitoba to be medically treated for hypothermia.
Born in the North, taught to be a hunter, Jupi Nakoolak knew what to do when one of the three polar bears floating into Hudson Bay along with him on that 50 by 50 metre ice floe became too morbidly interested in his presence.
Labels: Adventure, Canada, Environment, Nature
posted by Pieface @ 6:07 PM
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