The welcome signs

On the railroad station

On the road entrance (there is no road which goes anywhere)

Inukshuk

            Our guide explained the stone figures used as the mascot for the Vancouver Olympics.  They are called Inukshuks.  The ones placed along the coast were navigation aids for seal and whale kayakers.  They have an opening in the middle of them that sights to a prominent rock or post to give direction.  The ones inland have no opening and look like a man to caribou herds that will veer off of them during a hunt.

Today's weather

They are really serious about this!

            In Churchill we met our local tour guide and school bus driver, Sheldon.  He is an interesting person who works several jobs as well as for the polar bear protection group that works to deep people safe from the bears.

When was the last time you saw a high powered rifle on a school bus?

           To kill time until our rooms at the Tundra Inn were ready, we got a tour of town.  We couldn’t miss the huge grain terminal.  Out on the peninsula formed by the Churchill River and Hudson Bay we walked out to the battlements at Cape Merry.  The cannons here and the ones at Fort Prince of Wales on the other side of the river could supposedly keep French man-of-war ships out of the river and the fur trading businesses.  When two French marine ships did appear, the locals surrendered without a shot.  It was a case of 600 French against 60 locals - not good odds.

           In 1619 Dutch fishermen tried to establish a whaling station here but did not succeed. By the 1930’s the railroad made Churchill a working town dealing mostly with grain.  Today the town transports grain and the tourist business is succeeding offering tours for hunting big game (moose and caribou mainly), seeing Beluga whales that come into the river to calve in the spring, and looking for polar bears from the safety of large tundra buggies.

           The whales come in to this end of the Churchill River to mate and calve.  It is safe from predators, which need deeper water.  In the spring and summer there are so many whales here and they are so used to seeing people that they are rather tame and will come up to a small boat or kayak to be petted.  The water is so clear, you can see them calving and nursing and playing.           

Grain elevators and pier

Prince of Wales Fort

Cannon at Prince of Wales Fort

Prince of Wales Fort

           We stopped for pictures of the “whale-back granite” with the colorful orange lichen.  Lichen is a symbiotic algae and fungi organism that likes the leeward side of this smooth rock.  Sheldon found us a patch of ripe gooseberries.  They look like huckleberries but are slightly more tart.

Whale-back granite

           We looked at “Miss Piggy.”  She is a C46 that crashed here in the 1980’s.  C46’s were known to have a payload larger than the engines could lift.  Miss Piggy took off loaded, and an engine died over the bay and she tried to return.  Her rear wheels caught the power lines to the town and sat down on the shale-back rocks.   All six on board walked away and the plane remains where it landed.

            We stopped at the airport terminal (very tiny) to “look at the exhibits” and perhaps buy jewelry from a local selling there, but really to use the rest rooms.

A more successful inbound flight coming in over the remains of Miss Piggy

Remains of Miss Piggy

Remains of Miss Piggy

            We visited the location of the Polar Bear Jail.  The wildlife management group traps bears that get into the dump (which is now inside a metal building) or wander into town, or make a nuisance of themselves.  The traps are serious metal culverts.  The bear is tranquilized and put into this 25-cell jail where it is kept dark and they are not fed.  Most of the bears (there were five in jail now) are released when the ice comes and they are hungry enough to go right out to the ice and start hunting seals.

Polar bear traps

           We drove further out and looked at two interesting sled dog “ranches.”  At the first one, the dogs are chained on long leads with no “houses” and they are not able to go far enough to reach another dog.  Male dogs are in one area and females in another.  These are not friendly house pets but wild, self-sufficient, working dogs. 

Local sled dog - quite unlike the dogs used in Alaska

            At the second one we saw two polar bears.  One sort of watches over the dogs and chases other animals away.  However, we watched while he let another large male swim over and walk near and through the dogs to get a hunk of the food the dogs had not eaten.  Bears want fat not meat and dogs don’t have much fat – especially sled dogs.  Wolves will eat the dogs, but the polar bears usually will not.  

Bear approaching - food is just across the road

He has finished the food

Off to greener pastures

            Churchill has an excellent Eskimo Museum.  They have quite a collection of carved ivory and soapstone made by local Inuits.  They are very fine art pieces.  They also have stuffed examples of the local polar bears, foxes, and wolves, etc. and a huge walrus and a musk ox.

            As we have driven around the coastal area of Hudson Bay, we have seen: yellow-leg ducks, snow and Canadian geese, snow buntings that the Arctic foxes like to eat, ravens, a peregrine falcon, and a bald eagle.

            The trees growing here are predominantly white and black spruce.  Many trees are fine examples of krummholz with no branches growing on the prevailing wind side and low branches that grow 360° around the trunk up to the normal snow depth where they are protected.

            The Canada Parks visitor’s center at the railroad station has an excellent mock up of a polar bear den and exhibits of polar bears, arctic fox, migration of birds and items from the Inuit, Cree and Dene First Nation people of this area.  It was a small but nice exhibit.

            Our rooms at the Tundra Inn were nice and spacious. There are a number of interesting gift shops in town and most were open at some time during our visit which coincided with the Canadian Thanksgiving and included a Sunday.

            The food at the Tundra Inn was excellent, including a Thanksgiving buffet on Monday. We also had a couple lunches at the Gypsy Cafe, a local place with good food and lots of variety.

            We were guided around town by pretty street signs. Fortunately we did not run into any polar bears on the streets!