Ivvavik dreams
Rocky Yukon base camp is one of Canada’s best-kept secrets
How our people used to walk and walk and walk,” marvels 72-year-old cultural host Renie Arey as she makes her way with sure-footed determination along the rocky shore of Sheep Creek down to the Firth River, stopping for quick rests every time the pain in her arthritic hips and legs flares up.
Unlike her parents and grandparents, who lived off the land hunting caribou and belugas from the Beaufort Sea without any modern conveniences, Arey steadies herself with hiking poles. “I’ve got to go to Canadian Tire to get these,” she declares.
Arey wants her picture taken fishing and casts into the roaring river a few times. Parks Canada interpretation officer Rachel Hansen, Imniarvik Base Camp cook Nellie C. Elanik and I can see the Arctic grayling in the clear, shallow water, but the fish snub our lures for bugs and flies. Still, the metallic pink rod that I bought at North Mart in Inuvik gets a good workout above the Arctic Circle.
Ivvavik National Park got its name, which means “the nursery” or “place of giving birth” in Inuvialuktun, because some of the porcupine caribou herd use it as calving grounds. It’s the first Canadian national park created as part of an Indigenous land claim settlement. Inuvialuit is the name for the Inuit of the Western Canadian Arctic.
A gift to Canada under the Inuvialuit Final Agreement of 1984, Ivvavik’s remote, unglaciated wilderness draws barely 100 guests each year on guided and private trips through either Parks Canada or one commercial operator. The visitor tally climbs closer to 200 when you add in parks staff, researchers and youth groups, but even so, more people reach Mount Everest’s summit each year.
Ivvavik is on the radar of serious rafters and backcountry hikers, but Parks Canada has been working since 2011 to entice the rest of us.
Their guided summer trips, here and at several other northern parks, are one of Canada’s best-kept secrets.
To get to Ivvavik in late June, I flew through Yellowknife and Inuvik, both in the Northwest Territories, before catching a Parks Canada charter into the Yukon.
We flew over the spellbinding Mackenzie Delta, with its labyrinth of rivers and lakes, and explored Herschel Island Qikiqtaruk Territorial Park with ranger Ricky Joe.
Our Twin Otter made its bumpy landing at “Sheep Creek International Airport” and delivered us to Imniarvik Base Camp for four nights under the midnight sun. My prospector tent — with a wood frame, canvas walls and a queen bed — came with a propane heater that I didn’t need and a bug net that I did, plus a small deck with two Muskoka chairs.
The outhouse was steps away. Two proper bathrooms, one with a hot shower on a five-minute timer, were nearby. An electrified bear fence kept us safely apart from the grizzlies that roam the area, and Ivvavik site manager Nelson Perry doubled as bear monitor.
We knew to stay alert, thanks to a mandatory orientation at Parks Canada in Inuvik.
At that orientation, I met Calgary blogger Leigh McAdam from HikeBikeTravel, and three hiking enthusiasts from Chicoutimi, Que., and we shared our Ivvavik dreams. Mine was to catch an Arctic char. McAdam wanted to see caribou en masse or grizzlies. Gilles Lemieux wanted to see the natural world without urban interferences, such as buildings, pollution, sidewalks and artificial grass.
“We go exactly because there is nothing,” the retired geographer wrote in his notebook and later shared with me. “Nothing to disturb us while seeing everything there is. There, we can see everything through the nothingness because our mind is free to observe, hear and smell.”
Like Arey’s ancestors, we came to “walk and walk and walk,” but I couldn’t keep up with Lemieux and Lorraine Couture, who will soon celebrate their 50th wedding anniversary in Bhutan, and their equally fit friend, Jean Vallée.
That’s the beauty of the Parks Canada approach — there is enough staff so the group can split up and stay safe in bear country. I did the five-kilometre hike to Sheep Slot and saw Dall sheep galore. The 10-kilometre Gordon’s Food Cache/Trapper’s Campsite in extreme heat nearly did me in because of challenging terrain full of tussocks and hummocks (essentially tundra lumps) — plus mosquitoes and bulldogs (deer flies) — but at least we got to fish over a picnic lunch.
I opted out of a long evening hike to Inspiration Point and Wolf Tors, and therefore missed epic sightings of a caribou, grizzly and Golden eagle. I skipped the all-day Halfway to Heaven hike so I could fish, read, write, and watch a family of siksiks (Arctic ground squirrels) frolic. I definitely did not join Parks Canada travel media relations co-ordinator Guy Thériault in his daily dips in chilly Sheep Creek.
We all convened in the kitchen cabin, where Elanik whipped up yeasty buns, spare ribs, soup, pancakes, and endless bacon. It was here that we watched Nature’s Epic Journeys, Caribou, a BBC documentary about the Porcupine herd’s migration between the Yukon and Alaska. We also watched a year’s worth of motion sensor-activated animal action at one of the park’s 34 wildlife cameras.
On the screened deck, we played a traditional Inuvialuit game called napaatchak, throwing a nail encased in a wooden handle at a cardboard box to try to get it to stand up straight. For Canada Day, Hansen and I went fishing at the stroke of midnight — and saw two Arctic grayling swirling in an unusual circle chasing each other’s tails. (I never caught a char, but did get a grayling the fourth time I went out.) Thériault barbecued steak, and Elanik dazzled us with a cloudberry trifle to celebrate Canada’s 150th birthday.
Coming to Ivvavik gives Hansen, an Inuvialuk mother of four from Inuvik, time to hit the “reset button” in a magical place. “It calms you and brings rejuvenation. I feel a spiritual connection to my ancestors.”
Arey says it “lifts” her up to come to the place where her ancestors hunted belugas and caribou, and lived off siksiks and ptarmigan when times were tough.
She was raised by her grandmother and lost her language when she was sent to residential school for eight years, but she raised seven kids, regained her language and was a field worker who helped with the 1984 land claims agreement. The one thing that Arey taught us that will stay seared in our minds was the Inuvialuktun word for good morning — uvlaami. It helps that it rhymes with the Beatles song “Ob-La-Di, ObLa-Da.” Quyanainni, the word for thank you, didn’t roll off the tongue so easily. When it came time to leave and greet the next set of guests on the airstrip, Arey thanked us and then broke down singing a goodbye song.
“I’m sorry I got emotional,” she said. “I’m very happy that you are all here to honour my home and to understand how our peoples lived in the past. So, I’m very glad that you all came.” Jennifer Bain was hosted by Parks Canada and Northwest Territories Tourism, which didn’t review or approve this story.