Leaving Ellesmere Island

OK, I have to admit, I actually left Ellesmere Island 3 weeks ago.  I've been a bit of a slacker in the past couple of weeks with updating the blog, but I still have some pics to show you from my flight home.

The weather was fantastic on July 9, when I flew out of Grise Fiord.  Here is the town on take off:

That's the Greenlander mountain in the middleground, the entrance to the fiord is to the left:

Grise Fiord (the fiord):

Isn't it beautiful?  They even pay me money to be on these flights.  And since it was a Saturday, they paid me overtime!  You can see a couple of glaciers in the photo below:

More fiords and ice as we follow the southern coast of Ellesmere Island:

Lots of glaciers now in the background mountains:

The ones below are of the south cape of Ellesmere Island:

Still more glaciers:

And the last look at the south coast of Ellesmere as we head across Jones Sound to cross Devon Island.  Lots of glaciers:

I'll show you some Devon Island photos, and the Mars on Earth site on Devon Island as seen from the air, so stay tuned!

Early summer landscape

Just another photo of the beautiful melting landscape on Jones Sound, again from July 6.  You can see the corner of town at the far right:

Tent rings and old food caches

These photos are also from July 6.  There are some old tent rings out near the old air strip that people don't remember seeing before, I think they are just in a corner of the field that people didn't go strolling on very often.  We had a look at them.  I think they said they were probably from the Dorset people:

These are probably old food caches from around the same time:

Wolf tracks

I'm told these are wolf tracks.  I wouldn't have known if someone didn't tell me; they're big, but some of the dogs are pretty big too, so I can't tell the finer points of dog toes vs. wolf toes.

Glacier

Grise Fiord used to have a lot of glaciers visible from or near town.  These have been receding in the past 20 years or so, and I notice the difference even in the 3 years that I have been visiting.

This is one of the few remaining ones you can see near town- it's visible from the old airfield to the east.  It's that filled-in area in the upper-left quadrant of the photo where the two mountains meet.  I took the photo on July 6.

Ice chunks

Just a few more photos of ice that gets stuck with the tide.  These were taken July 4.  There's nothing to show scale, but these are big - the ones at the bottom would be around 5 feet thick.

Gulls on ice

Interesting rock

A couple of days ago we went for a little drive out to where the old airstrip was for our coffee break.  As I was wandering around, I saw this very cool rock:

It was a little boulder of boring grey, but was covered with what looked like kleenex that had been through a washing machine.  No, it wasn't bird poop!  I think they're called extrusions, they were white and a little bit sparkly.  Very cool, the sort of thing you usually ooh and aah at in the geology section of the natural history museum.  It's not that big, smaller than a volleyball.

River

Here's one of the little rivers that comes out of the mountains, babbles over the tundra and empties into the bay.  These small rivers are surprisingly loud, you can hear them from far away and the rush they make, especially from a distance, sounds a lot like a large highway.

Ice starting to break up

The ice close to shore is breaking up.  This photo is from July 2:

Canada Day boat race

The weather was perfect in Grise Fiord this Canada Day.  One of the community events is a sailboat race for kids, held on the pond in the middle of town.  Kids build their own boat and they race them across.  I missed the start of the race- my balcony looks out on the pond but I guess the crowd was keeping an awed hush during the race.  Here are some photos from the end:

The boats are pretty impressive!  The winds were light but they were all moving well.  Love the little flags on some of them.