… yesterday, I was hoping that we would be emulating Richard Barnes today and, getting rather tired of Southern Comfort we would “Go North”.
And it must be my really bad conscience telling me something, or else the tension has totally swept me away, Or else it was the early night. But I was wide-awake at 02:25 this morning, looking at the aircraft coming into land at the airport.
By 04:00 I was out of bed working, having given up the idea of sleep a long time previously. I really need to do something about this otherwise I’m going to have a catastrophe.
After all of the alarms had rung, I went and had a good shower. And gathered up all my things.
Luckily, at the check-out I managed to locate a coffee machine so I was able to fuel up. Maybe I’ll feel a little more like it when it starts to work. Who knows?
At the baggage check-in at the airport I noticed that I’m definitely losing my touch. My suitcase weighed a mere 16.6 kgs and that included Strawberry Moose. It’s not like me at all. I could have taken a couple of extra children in my baggage allowance.
Security was another total farce. We had probably the surliest member of the Canadian Government Service that I have ever encountered (and I’ve encountered a few, believe me, as regular readers of this rubbish will recall).
And then my boots rang the alarm bells at the barrier so I was told (not asked, told) to take them off. And so I made an acerbic remark about the fact that I’d rather take my chances with the freedom fighters than the Security Services, which led to my being “selected for special screening”.
The guy then couldn’t make the explosives detector work so I sat down on his table to rest, to which he took a great deal of exception. My response was that I wasn’t going to hang around like this while he messed around with all of his useless equipment, and we had something of a stand-off as I dug my heels in.
In the end, I was waved through, but not before they confiscated my bottle of water. For some reason or another they took exception to my book too and we had a little argument about that as well.
I really don’t know what’s the matter with these people. It’s almost as if they go around looking for a fight. So the best that I can do is to make their day and oblige them.
While I was sitting down, I started to make a list of the things that I don’t remember packing. I can see it being another one of THOSE voyages. And I must remember to find a large bin-liner in which to wrap His Nibs, otherwise he’ll be rather wet.
Our aeroplane is one of the old British Aerospace BAe146 voriants, either an Avro RJ85 or an RJ100, and the only way to tell them apart withour a tape measure is to have one standing alongside another.
You can tell from the registration number too, but I can’t see it on my photo. It’s a charter flight operated by a company based in Yellowknife and there weren’t all that many people on it, which makes me think that it might be an RR100.
I ended up sharing a row of seats with an elderly British lady who has lived in Canada for 75 years, and a rather garrulous British guy who had clearly had more than just a whiff of the barmaid’s apron.
A meal was supplied on the flight and I was rather dubious about whether it was really as vegan as it was supposed to be.
After a nice relaxing flight we came in to land at Yellowknife in the Northwest Territories for a refuelling stop.
That’s a decision that seemed to me at the time to be a rather strange decision, knowing the likely range of a BAe 146. And the cynic inside me was not assuaged by the news that we received here.
It seems that, once more, we had been confounded by the weather. Instead of blowing stuff away from us, is blowing stuff towards us and blocking our passage, which can be very painful if you have forgotten to bring your ointment.
The bad weather conditions mean that we can’t go on yet again, and we are now stranded here in Yellowknife for a while. Looking at the positives, because I need to adopt a more positive outlook, at least, I can say that at 62°27N this is the farthest north point that I have ever reached, beating Finland 1981 by a good 100 or so miles.
But will we make it any farther north?
That positive outlook didn’t last very long, did it?
While things are being organised, I went for a walk outside the airport.
Straight away, I stumbled across a paid of really old Douglas DC3 “Dakotas” parked up at the end of the runway. I knew that there were some that had been abandoned here but I didn’t think that I would be lucky enough to find them.
This one here is registration number C-GPNR and it was apparently built in 1942, construction number 13333 and ex-USAAF serial 42-93423.
It’s a DC3-S1C3G variant, which seems to indicate to me that it’s fitted with two 895-kW Pratt and Whitney R-1830-S1C3G Twin Wasp radials rated at at 1200hp, so it’s much more powerful than the versions fitted with Wright Cyclone engines.
But it doesn’t look as if it will be going very far in the near future as from what I can see, its last airworthiness certificate that I could find expired on 23rd May 1996
This one is a Douglas C47 version – the Skytrain – of the DC3 Dakota.
Her registration number is C-FCUE, built in 1942 as construction number 12983 and fitted with two Pratt & Whitney R-1830-92 Twin Wasp radial engines. It’s claimed to be the first aeroplane to have landed in Yellowknife and can count among its celebrated passengers the Canadian Prime Minister Pierre Trudeau.
It’s also been suggested and one very vocal local yokel told me that one of these two aircraft was involved in the D-Day landings in Normandy in June 1944
But it’s a shame to see them here slowly disappearing into the landscape like this. Someone ought to do something about saving them.
There’s another aeroplane here too, away in the distance. This one is on display on a plinth. Yet another obliging local told me that this was the first aeroplane to have landed on the North Pole and so I went to see that too.
And, lo and behold, it’s Arctic Fox, registration CF-TFX.
She’s a Bristol Mk31 freighter and you will have to look long and hard to find another one of these aeroplanes anywhere in the world because there can’t be more than a dozen remaining.
She was built in 1953 to a wartime design as a freighter as you can tell from the clamshell front doors for transporting machinery and vehcles.
She was bought by Wardair in 1958 and used for the transportation of freight around the North-West Territories.
But her claim to fame is much more important and personal than that, because she was the first ever wheeled aeroplane to land at the North Pole, a feat that she accomplished on 5th May 1967 under the control of a pilot called Don Braun.
It was purchased from Wardair in 1968 and installed here as a monument on 22nd June 1968
I went back to the airport afterwards to see what was going on, and eventually we were picked up by a shuttle bus and driven to our hotel. We’re staying in the Days Inn in the centre of the new town, up on the hill.
And much to my surprise, I don’t seem to be alone.
The Vanilla Queen, whom I mentioned yesterday and who is named for all those of you who know your Dutch rock music from the early 1970s – is the Québecoise who was on my plane from Montreal to Edmonton yesterday. She was then in the hotel last night, again on the ‘plane this morning, now on my shuttle bus and she’s staying in my hotel.
We had a lengthy chat and what she told me caused me to give her all of my adulation. She comes from Montreal, south of the river, and had the urge to go to live in the Arctic. So one day, she just upped sticks and moved to Iqaluit, the principal town on Baffin Island, beyond the Arctic Circle.
And how I admire people like that who have that kind of courage.
She’s a hair stylist (NOT a hairdresser) by profession, so I joked that she would have loads of fun trying to do something with what remains of the hair that I still have.
For lunch I wandered off into town and came across a Subway. That’ll do me nicely.
But not before I’d witnessed the total demolition of an old wooden building here.
Half of the town was out watching it, and I thought that it was the highlight of the year, but it turns out that it was a silent protest as almost everyone in the community was up in arms about the whole affair.
Mind you, someone whom I met later said that in her opinion it was a derelict wreck and about time that it went.
On the way back I noticed a sign saying that the town had been built on the oldest rocks yet known in the world,, so I recounted to one of the officials on our voyage the story of the rocks being 4,000,004 years and three months old.
But as Alfred Hitchcock and Kenneth Williams once so famously remarked “it’s a waste of time telling jokes to foreigners”.
A little later, there was a guided tour of the town organised so I leapt on board. And so did The Vanilla Queen, and we had quite another chat.
I was expecting to see the sewage farm, the rubbish dump and the brand-new bicycle rack but instead we ended up on the rock at the Bush Pilots’ Memorial where there’s a magnificent view over Yellowknife Bay on the Great Slave Lake.
It was well-worth the climb because You could see for miles from up here over some really beautiful views.
Yellowknife is actually two towns in one.
The original settlement that was founded in the 1930s is down by the lake but when the North West Territories were incorporated in 1967 and the region’s administrative offices were located here, these buildings were constructed up on the hill away from the water.
A modern town, complete with all facilities, to house the staff who came here with the Government grew up around the buildings. Today, about 20,000 people live here.
We walked back down the hill towards town in the company of another couple of people who had spent some time in the town and who knew their way around.
There were several exciting things to see on the way down, including this little photo prop at the side of the road.
It’s the kind of thing that is always worth a good photo opportunity
On our way again, we hadn’t gone all that far when we were sidetracked by some of the most extraordinary people you would ever wish to meet.
Down at the edge of the lake we ended up at the old original settlement of the town. Here we met a guy who makes sculptures by collecting all kinds of abandoned objects and balancing them on top of each other.
Having lived here for a considerable number of years, he told us a whole host of interesting and exciting stories about life down here.
He also pointed out a route along the lake shore where we could see many interesting things, such as house boats that float on large iron pontoons.
Rents in the town are quite expensive, but the lake is actually outside the city boundary so people can live here on a houseboat without paying rent or any local authority charges.
This can on occasion lead to quite a considerable amount of controversy. There are of course no services available to those who live in the houseboats and so they take advantage of those available in the town – without usually paying for them of course.
Many of the local residents and indeed the town council are none-too-happy about this situation and on quite a few occasions the farces of law and order have been involved.
Access to the houseboats is of course by boat during the summer but in the winter the lake freezes over and access is on foot.
And the ice on the lake is so solid that residents can even bring their vehicles right up to the front door.
One of the most famous roads in the town is called Ragged Ass Road.
When the access to the waterfront properties was by water, what is now known as Ragged Ass Road was the rear limit of the properties and at was against this line that all of the outside toilets of the residents were situated.
However there are some people who reckon that this story is at best apocryphal.
Another famous street in the town is Lois Lane. In case you haven’t guessed, one of the houses in the street was for a number of years the home of the actress Margaret (Margot) Kidder.
While we were down in Ragged Ass Road we met a woman who told us that she was a computer programmer and that she had developed the computer program that Sue was using on her tablet.
In the garden of a house right by where we were talking, there were a couple of abandoned lorries.
I thought that this one was exciting. It’s an International Harvester R150 that was gradually being overwhelmed by Arctic Willow.
This is quite a rare vehicle because as far as I could discover, they were only made from 1953 to 1955. The whole range totalled about 250,000 of which well over half related to just one model, the R110.
That wasn’t all that was exciting around here either.
This is an old mining area and as well as the old Ingersoll Rand air compressor that was lying around, there were loads of old air tools and machinery lying around too.
Someone had taken full advantage of all of these to create a very interesting art-deco sculpture that spanned several gardens in the street.
I mentioned that the original site of the town was down here on the waterfront.
It consisted of loads of of old ad-hoc wooden cabins assembled by the miners who came here in the late 1930s in search of the gold that had been discovered in the area in 1934.
There are still a few of the original cabins remaining and this was pointed out to us as being one of them.
By now our little group of people had whittled itself down to just two of us and so we wandered off to the museum of local life, the Prince of Wales Northern Heritage Centre.
This was certainly quite an interesting place and there were lots to see. We certainly learnt a great deal about local life amongst the indigenous people.
I was very keen on the Polar Bears while The Vanilla Queen fell in love with a stuffed Muskox.
The Prince of Wales Northern Heritage Centre is situated in a very beautiful location on the edge of the city in a small park, in the same area where the Parliament of the Northwest Territories is situated.
We still had plenty of time after the museum closed and so we were able to admire the Government Offices in all their glory in the evening sunshine.
This isn’t the kind of traditional view that you would associate with life on the tundra so close to the Arctic Circle.
Our evening meal at the hotel across the road had been put back by half an hour and so we had plenty of time left on our hands. But there was a beautiful lake at the back of that hotel which looked very inviting so we went for a walk.
And I must have been very distracted because I don’t seem to have taken any photos of it. I’m sure that that can’t be right.
We had a nice buffet tea, with plenty of choice even for me which makes a nice change.
And after tea, we were entertained by some Inuit throat musicians giving a fine demonstration of their art. It was certainly different.
But the procedure was interrupted by an announcement from the admin of our trip that with a change in the direction of the wind we are going to try to go on tomorrow. But to where, we really don’t have much of an idea
So off we traipsed to our hotel and bed. Alarm calls at 04:00 and on the bus at 05:00
And where will we be stranded tomorrow?
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