Pushing out of Booth Point

After 3 days storm bound we push out of Booth Point into a dying wind. A 35-km blow overnight eased to a steady 20-km out of the northeast by morning, and we take our window. The paddling is still challenging enough with waves whitecapping just beyond the lee of the coast.

The land here is low and barren. Gravel shorelines give way to a carpet of green tundra that runs unbroken to the horizon. Because the coast sits so low, the wind shadow is thin, and we hug the shoreline hard to hold what little shelter it gives us.

Tent rings dot the ridgelines above the beach, distinct circles of stone that speak to lives lived here long before Franklin’s crew stumbled through their desperate final chapter. The lichen crusting the rocks around them is thick and undisturbed. It’s a slow-growing organism that can take decades just to spread a few centimetres, which tells me these stones haven’t been touched in a very long time.

The rolling green tundra reminds me of Ireland. Treeless, open, and strangely inviting. Tundra like this is really a thin skin: a shallow active layer of soil that thaws each summer sitting on top of permafrost that never does. Nothing here has deep roots. Everything, be it plants, moss, or lichen, grow low, tight, and slo. They've adapted to a growing season that might last just six or eight weeks per year.

Then the wind shifts and you’re jolted back into Arctic reality. Brooding skies, and animal bones scattered across the ground everywhere you look. Out here, things don’t decay the way they do further south. Cold temperatures and permafrost slow microbial and insect activity to a crawl, so bone and antler (or human bones) can sit exposed on the surface for decades, or even longer, with barely a mark on them. There’s no way to guess the age of what you’re looking at. A bone could be from last winter or it could be from one hundred years ago.

We make camp after eight hours on the water.