Sunday, July 3

Sleeping in a real bed felt awesome!!! A very nice facility indeed. Had a nice breakfast in the cafeteria, again all I can eat!! We started the morning off down Twin Lakes road, which is a great hotspot for all sorts of orchids.



The trek. The high point of this particular spot is calypso bulbosa, but we didn't find it here at all this year. Poor things have a hard time up here, so it's not very surprising that we didn't find any. But we did find a bunch of other neat stuff!
Mosquitos:








Oh yeah, and plants too :)










And a couple other neat shots. I like close up macro stuff. This is a Tamarack or Larch tree. It's so far behind in growth in comparison to Duluth.


This picture is really neat. I made Josh take it because I didn't want to get wet. But I noticed there was a bead of water in the middle of the leaves. Only after looking at this picture on a computer did I realize that there are drops of water on the tips of each leaf surrounding the drop!


After Twin Lakes, we returned to CNSC for a brief lunch before returning to the van and driving to Halfway point. Here is where really cool alpine rock garden-like habitats are found! Stuff like this:




This stuff is called Avens. It is everywhere, as you can see in the picture above! The locals call it a daisy, it's that prolific.



Then as we drive, Joan shouts out "Bear!" see if you can find it:





Give up yet? Keep trying.







Still haven't found it? Try again.



Hey look, a bear! They are everywhere, but it takes a keen eye to see them. This was bear #1 for me! I have more shots that are less detailed, but they are like that roll of film from summer camp you brought back and got developed; you took 20 pictures of loons out on the water from a distance and to you they look awesome, but to any one else, it's a stick floating in the water 100 ft away. Haha sorry guys!!
So then we went to town and booked our beluga tour for Tuesday! We then continued into town to the "beach" where we saw belugas out in the bay!



Yep, that's the white blob out there. They are adorable. Can't wait to see them Tuesday!!!



Hey it's me! That's a big inukshuk!



Watch for bears.
And then, almost by stepping on it, I found Mertensia maratima, a neat little ground cover with blue flowers:



It creeps in sandy or gravelly spots.
Then we visited Miss Piggy:



It's a cargo plane that crashed back in the 50's? because it was carrying too much weight. The name references the type of plane and the fact that at times, it carried pigs in the cargo hold. Here we saw a bunch of neat plants, rocks, and a local lady who gave us some tips on cool rock stuff.
On the way back towards CNSC we stopped at the "bear jail".



Here they hold problem bears until the ice comes, then release them away from town. There were no bears here, it's still pretty early in the season.
Then, on that same road, we spotted another bear. This one was lounging out on the point, curled up on a rock. Apparently that's pretty comfy for a polar bear. They can have it.
(insert sleeping bear pic)



Here's what we look like when we see a bear. The scope comes out and we all have binoculars up :)

On the way back, since it was so sunny out, we decided to stop and take our group photo at the Churchill sign. It was comical to see 3 or 4 grown men jockeying for position to get the best shot with their cameras. And then one of them malfunctioned, taking a photo every second. I didn't even bother to do that with mine, since i have no tripod. I did snap this though:



Just imagine 10 people in front of it, and then you'll have the group shot.
So, we finally made it back to CNSC and had some delicious supper. Mom and I decided to stay behind from the evening run after supper; it's almost too much for one day, so I had a nice relaxing evening doing this blog and working on photos. Sooooo many photos.

Location:Churchill

Saturday, July 2

What a long train ride. Seriously. It ended up taking 18.5 hours. I'd say the average speed of the train was around 30mph...that's why it took so long. The reason it's that long is because the train runs over permafrost, and when it gets very warm out it can wreak havoc on the tracks, causing it to be a very bumpy ride.
One we dropped the miscreants off in Ilford, the train ride was much quieter and I was able to catch a few winks of sleep.
(insert sleeping on train pic)
We saw plenty of neat stuff along the ride; lots of tundra and plenty of cool plants, but also signs of civilization:



...Or whatever you call that. It seems like most of the structures that we saw along the rail were either abandoned or something that is used only in the winter. We even came upon this structure:



I wonder what the beach looks like.

So after lots of hours in the train, we finally pulled into Churchill!!!!!!!!!!!!! I hope that these many exclamation points get the point across that I'm pretty excited.



We got into the 10 passenger van from the center and took off down the road. It's very bumpy, and that's because of the permafrost causing heaves all over the place.



The town of Churchill is not much to look at. The houses are kinda crummy and the place is generally junky looking. But you get that in most of these tundra towns; lots of old rusty crap with no place to go.
We arrived at the center where we are staying. It's called the Churchill Northern Studies Centre, or CNSC. It's been in operation since 1976 and has hosted many many students and researchers from around the globe. It's in a really neat location, near an old missile testing base:






That funny looking building to the right is the missile launch structure. The rest of the buildings there are where they did research and whatnot, and there were all these connected walkways so they could get from building to building without freezing their toes off! The facility was used by the American military for cold war related stuff up until the late 90's with the last rocket being fired by Canadian weather researchers in the 2000's. Would be cool to see a rocket being launched from there, I bet it was sweeeet!
So we arrived at the center, had a little lunch, then had orientation with the building. The centre used to be housed next door, in a much less modern facility. We are in their brand new state of the art building which is still kinda being finished. Josh and I have our own room, bunk bed style. It's quite nice! Big window facing the view in that rocket picture above.
After lunch, we went out in the van for a bit, and it was a little gloomy but not bad. Foggy but still manageable. We mainly saw some birds and drove around some of the main roads we take daily. We saw a willow ptarmigan and a jaeger on a nest.
Then it kinda started raining so we retreated back to the centre since our van windows fogged up so darn much :( But arriving back this early was nice because then we could unpack and get settled nicely. We then had a delicious supper, of which we can eat all we want! Here is a little slice of Churchill humor on the lunch menu:



So after supper we saw a slideshow of Lorne's on the plants and flowers of the area which we will see. Very nice to see them up close to know what to look for!

So not a very exciting day, but that's what happens when you get off of a train after 18 hours; you tend to not want to do a thing!

Location:Train to churchill, Churchill Manitoba

Friday, July 1

Happy Canada Day! A wonderful nights sleep- slept like a rock. Man was it warm yesterday. Guess what? It was warm again today. While driving most of the day was nice since we were in air conditioning most of the time, it was still over 90° for the majority of the day and was a bit yucky when outside.
We started the morning with a hearty breakfast from the Tawow resort owners. Cakes as thick as steaks with delicious sausage. Full bellies until lunch time!
We started the day out on the road from the lodge to Hwy 6- absolutely filled up with orchids in the ditches. Very awesome way to start the morning. The first one we saw was cyp passerinum, a lovely little white jobby with a pleasant fragrance.











A little further down the road, some yellows:


















Here is what I see when we stop at a particularly cool specimen:





So much attention paid to one plant. This trip is definitely focused on photography!
Josh was super pumped to find "his plant": Cloudberry!





He even convinced Steig into sending him some Cloudberry seeds direct from Sweden when he returns home. What a con artist, haha!

We finally left Herb Lake Landing and drove for a while...I slept a bit...then we stopped for lunch at ___. lunch already, didn't we just have breakfast?? Regardless, we still ate, and managed to find some really nice gneiss. Gneiss is a really nice (haha) rock which is very compressed granite and forms very tight banding, resulting in striped rocks!











The campground we lunched at had a "swimming beach". Obviously the water is a little low:





Josh got some nice shots of a little yellow plant which is fairly arctic just chilling out on some rocks here.











Back on the road again, and Lorne always leads the 4-car caravan. Suddenly he hits the brakes and whips a U turn. We of course are wondering what the heck he saw, so we follow and park on the shoulder. Here is what he saw:











A yellow form of wood lily! Not very common so this was a photo opportunity. And we lucked out and had 2 to photograph in this area.
Onward to Pisew falls, quite a cool waterfall!





Josh spotted a really dense black spruce broom:





About the size of a regulation football, very cool.
There was a nice suspension bridge to go across the river, donated by the Thompson rotary club.











How much wood could a woodchuck chuck?





We finally arrived in Thompson, the (paved) end of the road! It's actually the third largest city in Manitoba if you can believe that. Here is where we get on the train to Churchill.


















Beer is a commodity in the bush, so they load up on it whenever possible and ship it up.





Bye bye Thompson!





Josh's favorite pastime, roadside botany, has turned into rail side botany!





Our first actual stop, Pikwitonei "The Pik".





It's tiny. This is the station.





The community dogs get really excited and go bonkers when the train arrives. The crusty old guy sitting down there was hobbling towards the hut and was basically tackled by the dogs. He smacked them with his canes, it was actually pretty funny.
(insert dining car experience and pic)

Here's a keen observation of train life on this rail, and I mean this in the least racist way possible: the natives are all drunks. Not kidding. Even the teenagers. I guess they have nothing better to do, or it was Canada Day? There was a group who were in our car that were very rowdy. One I'll call the shrieker, was pretty drunk and was screaming something about her husband and swearing lots. Made it a pretty pleasant 2 hours. They finally got off in Ilford. I put in my headphones and watched monsters Inc and listened to N2 of 2010's Alpine show. Audio bliss. All it takes is a little Dave to make a situation better.

10:57 and still light enough not to need lights... I love this. See you in Churchill!

12:46AM: Stopped at the true "end of the road" in Gillam.





This is the last real stop until Churchill, which is almost another 8-10 hours ahead of us. This is an unbearably long train ride! I wouldn't want to have to do this very often.