A whirlwind tour of Inuvik in the Northwest Territories
Jimmy Kalinek is blasting down the East Channel, Gully Channel and assorted unmarked bypass channels in his 12-passenger Hewescraft Ocean Pro to get our party of two to the mouth of the Mackenzie River on a tight deadline.
We’ve flown over Canada’s largest and longest river system, and the gnarly Mackenzie Delta ecosystem with its myriad lakes and streams, and now want to experience it all up close before we have to be at the airport in less than two hours.
Kalinek’s tours are usually much more leisurely, and more crowded, but he’s game to make this happen on our way home from a guided Parks Canada trip to Ivvavik National Park. He just started Only Way Outfitting in June and is eager to show people the Delta and the hamlets of Aklavik and Tuktoyaktuk, visiting pingos (domeshaped mounds), sod houses and traditional Inuvialuit fishing and whaling camps.
What Kalinek likes best about guiding is “meeting people and hearing different stories and seeing different cultures.” He’s still delighted by a Toronto lawyer who was scared of the choppy river, but exhilarated by the even rougher ocean crossing to Tuk, calling it “bloody marvellous” and asking to return to tag along on a hunt.
Kalinek describes his life, living in Inuvik but hunting moose and caribou, trapping mink and lynx and ot-
ters, fishing for whitefish, lake trout, herring and inconnu. He especially loves burbot (ling cod), “poor man’s lobster,” with melted garlic butter.
“My favourite food is caribou and I’m really starting to like muskox,” says the father of two, who worked construction and fighting wild fires before getting into tourism, and is a coach and athlete representing the Northwest Territories at the Northern Games.
Kalinek can’t wait for the new, all-weather highway to connect Inuvik and Tuk, replacing a seasonal ice road and opening up new package options. The highway opened in mid-November.
He loves his town, a planned community created in the 1950s with a population just shy of 3,400, but is wary of how modern the hub of the Western Arctic region has become.
“I always said if I was ever going to move away from Inuvik, it would be further north.”
You can drive to Inuvik on the Dempster Highway, or fly in like I did, staying at one of three hotels (Capital Suites Inuvik) and eating at the popular Alestine’s, where the local fish and chips is cooked in a school bus and served in a tiny cabin.
Other food and snack hubs are the Cloud Nine café at the airport, Mac’s News Stand and the 24/7 Midtown Market with a few halal offerings. NorthMart, a supermarket and department store with KFC Express and Pizza Hut counters and small seating area, is worth a visit.
On a drizzly drive through town, I admire the Midnight Sun Mosque (a.k.a. “Little Mosque on the Tundra”), built in Winnipeg and delivered here seven years ago, and marvelled at the corrugated steel utilidors, aboveground utility conduits that run through town carrying water and sewer. I luck into a tour of the iconic Igloo Church (Our Lady of Victory Parish) with Father Jon Hansen.
Volunteers lead five tours a week, which are by donation and usually attract a half dozen people.
“We’re the No. 1 tourist attraction in Inuvik on TripAdvisor,” says Hansen proudly.
The church was built by volunteers from 1958 to 1960.
The most inspiring thing that Hansen tell us is that Brother Maurice Larocque, the Oblate missionary who brought a northern priest’s vision of Catholic symbolism meets local customs to life when he built this church, only had a Grade 5 education.
Watch the short video for the behind-the-scenes tour of the upper church — the cupola and the cross — and admire the stations of the cross paintings by the late Mona Thrasher, a deaf Inuvialuit woman who lost her hearing in a hunting accident, did these paintings as a teenager and became a celebrated artist.
Well worth $5 is the tour of the Inuvik Community Greenhouse.
Our tour guide, executive director Ray Solotki, explained how an old hockey arena found new life as an 18,000-sq.-ft. greenhouse that now has 150 community plots and a commercial area to sell bedding plants.
The greenhouse hosts everything from hot yoga to long table dinners to promote community through gardening.
“We don’t have any rules,” Solotki says proudly. “You could actually grow a plot of grass and set up a lawn chair.”
My tour coincided with the Tuesday farmer’s market and I found Amy Badgley selling baked goods.
“I love everything about Inuvik,” she enthused, “but probably my favourite thing is the trees. They’re ugly, short and lean.”
When she moved to Vancouver Island for university, Badgley was homesick.
Her remedy? An ankle tattoo of a northern tree.
Jennifer Bain was hosted by Parks Canada and Northwest Territories Tourism, which didn’t review or approve this story.
My favourite thing is the trees. They’re ugly, short and lean