Date: January 29, 2006
Weather: -38°C and Clear
Sunrise: 11:31
Sunset: 16:45


I woke up to a nasty side effect of the party last night. No I wasn’t hung over…well not much anyway! Last night when we went to set off the fire works, it was pretty cold, well below minus forty, I noticed that my nose was pretty hard when I got back to the house…as in frozen hard! When I woke up this morning it was coloured bright red. The colour was only a foreshadow of the pain.

I have felt this before, mostly in fingers and toes which had been partially frozen during play as a kid back home. This time it seemed to hurt more than I remember though. It took a good four or five hours for the pain to disappear and the colour to return to normal. One has to take more care in minus 41 weather!

We had no plans today so we decided to take a trip to Aklavik on the ice road. There was some shallow fog early in the afternoon, but that dissipated quickly. It would be Lorie’s first real trip on the ice road, but try as I might, I could not scare her with my horror stories of sinking to the bottom of the Mackenzie in the Jeep. I guess, that’s what you get when your spouse is an Engineer!

The sun was really bright today…brightest I have seen it since the summer. Unfortunately we couldn’t find the camera before we left and, as a consequence, we have no pictures for you. We wore sunglasses for the first time in months, though.

We cooked some Muskox for dinner and it was good. We are almost out of wild game now. It will soon be time to get more. It will be a long wait for the mandatory two year period to be up so I can go hunt my own big game. In the meantime small game and what fish we can catch this spring will have to do.

Cheers!