My Arctic Adventures

For the past three days I have been residing in Churchill Manitoba, where I have been on a dog-cart, a 4-wheel drive pickup truck, and a tundra buggy.

On October 11th I went dog sledding, well actually it was dog-carting because there wasn’t enough snow to go dog sledding, so we did pretty much the same thing, but there were wheels, making it a cart. My family and I went at about 15mph, being pulled by eight dogs. It was really fun, my favorite dog was Zaboo, he was an orange-goldish color, and very energetic. On the actual ride I took a video, (which I will include later) but the snow and dirt kept flying in my face and I was afraid it would damage my camera’s lens so I had to stop it short.

The next day we went on something called a “tundra buggy” it was like a really big bus, but it was completely customized so that there was a bathroom and a kitchen, and an observation deck at the back! So we were driving around the arctic tundra in a big bus-thing for about eight hours! We saw a total of four polar bears within those eight hours, but we only really got close to two of them, the first, and the third. The first bear we saw was pretty young and after about three minutes took shelter from us in a large outcrop of rocks. The second was just a sleeping lump in the distance and so there isn’t much to say about it. Then there was Paul, well I named him Paul because he reminded me of a character in my friend Jaret’s story. At the end of fifth grade we had to write a narrative for an assignment in English class, Jaret and I made a decision to include each others characters in our stories. Paul was the name of Jaret’s character and this polar bear, for some strange reason, reminded me of Paul. So Paul was a pretty lazy polar bear who woke up about every five minutes, once he woke up for about three minutes. I have a pretty good video of him which will be up on my blog later. The final bear was probably the second bear, just this time he was awake, but he was pretty far off in the distance so there isn’t much to tell about him this time either.

The next day was the trip home, but I convinced my parents to rent a car for three hours and we drove around all of the back roads in search of polar bears. We actually found one, we had heard about a man who owned a team of dogs, for dog sledding, and according to the story whenever he fed his dogs, he would throw out a fish to “the bear”. Now, the town didn’t like this at all, because he was taking money away from tundra buggy companies, he would charge people to drive around on his property, and they would get to see the bear. But then he sued the town because he said that if he stopped feeding the bear, it would come and eat some of his 180 dogs, he actually won the court case and kept feeding the bear. So we drove over to his property, and just kept on the outskirts but, there we saw it, a very large, well fed bear! At first it was hard to see, because it looked like there were 20 of them, but after a closer look we saw that 19 of them were incredibly large, white huskies. Unfortunately I didn’t get any pictures of him, because my video camera ran out of battery, but it was still a great last minute experience.

I think this was a great trip because there is so much of a difference between looking at the taxidermy polar bear at the London Museum of Natural History, or going out in a tundra buggy for eight hours. Another reason I’m liking the big trip, and this section in particular is because it is teaching me so much about the difference between seeing, and doing! I will try to get the videos up as soon as I can but it may take awhile, so bear with me, I assure you that some of them are pretty good.