Vacation Time!

Well after one full year of not leaving, we are headed out on vacation today!

We will be down on Vancouver Island to see some family and celebrate my grandparents 50th anniversary! Then off to Edmonton/Dawson Creek to visit friends and family. Then back up here on July 19th. We definately need this vacation as we are both feeling a bit run down!

Have a great month!

Buildings and such

So we do not have much for stores and such up here! Here is a bit of a tour of the town!



This is the Coppermine Inn. I guess you could call this our restaurant as well, but you have to book a day in advance. You can smell their amazing brunch all over town on the weekend!

This is our one and only gas pump in town! We are paying $1.07 a litre, cheaper than most folks down south!


Our RCMP station- those poor cops need a bigger, better building!

This is the high school. This year we had 3 students graduate from high school. With such a high dropout rate- this is a success that really needs to be celebrated!

The Health Centre staffed mainly by nurses and once in a while a doctor!

The Northern Store- Groceries and everything else.

Nunavut Arctic College where I work as the Community Adult Educator. While the building looks plain from the outside, it is beautiful on the inside!

The Co-op- our other choice for groceries and other items.

Spring, early summer and other random stuff!

A nice evening at a lake close to town on the 1st of June.

A tent set up near town.
A quad stuck pulling the komatik from the ice to shore. It took a few other quads to get him out.
Early June on the Arctic Ocean!
My quad full after going to the post office to get the mail! I also have groceries hanging off of the handle bars! I love my quad!
A skidoo coming in on the dirt to town. Poor skidoo!
Skidoos and komatiks on the ice in late May.
Matt with me and my first caribou that I shot in April! It was very tasty!

Oh, the fun we had in winter!

Winter was looooong! It started to snow in the middle of September and it finally stopped in May! We saw windchills go down into the -60'sC. We also didn't see the sun for over 6 weeks. If it wasn't for good friends and good jobs I am sure we would have cracked up!


Skidooing in February and seeing the sun!

Matt all bundled up on a day trip. No caribou seen this day though. His poor nose got a bit of frost bite and he cursed a lot because his glasses kept fogging up under his goggles!
A beautiful Arctic Sunset at 2 in the afternoon.
Kara out skidooing on a mighty frost -30C day. But with my super cute fur hat, superparka, snow pants, boots and heated handle bars I am snug as a bug in a rug.
Matt in his caribou kamiks.
Matts caribou became part of our outdoor Christmas lighting. A friend referred to it as the Nightmare Before Christmas!
We stayed here for Christmas and had a great time! Our tree made those long sunless days seem bright!
We bought nice new sleds. Gee Polaris sure makes a nice skidoo!
Damn I am just sooo cute in my little fur hat!
Matt checking the mail! We really love doing this! Parcels really excite us! PLEASE SEND US MORE!

Fall 2005

The fall was beautiful up here! We were both working full time at this point, but we still managed to get outdoors a lot.

Here is Matt with the closest tree to town. Someone planted it here.




Here is Matt with his first caribou! He was pretty excited to shoot his first one. It tasted great and we made a lot of homemade sausage and pepperoni!



Here is the barge arriving with all of our goodies for the year! It was so exciting to see it coming in. We had over 4000lbs of supplies arrive. That is a lot of toilet paper and flour!

This is all of the cargo being unloaded from the barge. The orange boxes are called sea cans and are full of pallets of supplies for people in town. We place our "barge order" in June and it arrives late August or early September. Bringing items in on the barge cost about $0.30 per pound and if we fly supplies into Kugluktuk it can cost upwards of $5 per pound.

Matt and I exploring the area near our community on a wet day!

Summer Pictures 2005

Well since we are only starting this blog now, we have a bit of catching up to do! We arrived here last June 16th and you could still see the ice out in the Coronation Gulf. On the right you can see our Northern Store. It has everything from fruit, to tools, to moose hide, to diapers!

Late in August we took a quad trip out to Bloody Falls with some friends. This is Matt and I with the Coppermine River in the background.

Here is a neighbours skidoo and a komatik parked for the summer.

This is a view of town from on top of some hills to the west.

The flowers come out quickly at the end of June, but they don't last for too long!

Looking out over the Coppermine River on a cold summer day!

The view from our front porch on a beautiful evening in the late summer.

Well we were asked enough times to start having a blog that we finally sat down and did it! We are going to try and put a lot of pictures on here to share about lives up here in the Arctic.

We have been living up here for a year this month and love it! The winter was long, but now the sun is here and we cannot believe how fast the year went along.

We hope you enjoy the pictures and updates on our entertaining lives! Feel free to ask any questions about the north and we will try and answer them!