July 24 – Canol Trail Day 1

(I’ll add photos later when I have a good internet connection and the time to put them in.)

Today we left Yellowknife for Norman Wells, a small town up on the Mackenzie River, at to 0 mile of the Canol trail. The temperature here when we arrived was 29^o with a clear blue sky.

This town is extremely busy this visit, there seems to be a lot of work happening on the oil fields, so there is no vacancies at any of the hotels. We did manage to get into our 4^th choice for hotel, the Yamouri Suites, the building reminds me of some of the institutional type dorm buildings, and the smell is….like mothballs in an old coffin! we did manage to get a 2 bedroom, one bath with a very small kitchen. The décor is old looking but comfortable and there is a large flat screen TV as well as lots of room for us to work in.

Our wildlife monitor is a 27 year old from Tulita on the Bear and Mackenzie rivers. He seems to be very well qualified for the position. He has courses in wilderness first aid, wildlife monitoring and management, heavy equipment operator, environmental monitoring and sampling. He works on the ice roads, has fishing nets in the rivers.

Tomorrow we head out on a Canadian Helicopters, Bell 205 chopper, to mile 222 to start our sampling program. Our chopper pilot is from a small town call Novar, just south of Powassan. the real funny thing is that Claire is from Springdale, which is next to Novar.

Cheers form On The Land.

Pat