Nunavut: Return from Qikiqtarjuaq | Sybaritica

As I mentioned in my recent post, Prague vs. Qikiqtarjuaq, I was scheduled to be away all this week on Court circuit. The plan was to visit both Qikiqtarjuaq, a little island community just above the Arctic Circle, and then travel on to Clyde River a bit further north. I made it into Qikiqtarjuaq on Monday, as planned, but the Clyde River portion of the trip ended up being cancelled due to bad weather. Accordingly, much to the pleasure of all involved, we made it home a day early…

Qikiqtarjuaq has a population of somewhere between 500 or 600 people and the name means ‘Big Island’. This seems a little odd given that it sits only a few kilometers off the coast of Baffin Island, which is the fifth largest island in the world. I can only assume that, when it was settled, the original Inuit inhabitants were unaware that Baffin Island is not part of the Canadian mainland. In the above picture, which I took as we were landing on Monday morning, you can get a little bit of a sense of the community. I must apologize for quality of the picture, however, as the windows of the aircraft were not all that clean.

This is the hotel where we were all billeted during the circuit. It sits on a little spit of land that projects out towards Davis Strait and, if you look to the left, you can just make out one the several icebergs that were visible from the community.

Here is the slightly closer view of the same iceberg. It is difficult to say exactly how large it is from this vantage point. When we flew in, it appeared to be at least 4 or 5 kilometers from town, which may help you get some idea of the size.

As with almost ever community in the Territory, a below ground water and sewage infrastructure is not possible so these utilities are handled by trucks that deliver the former, and then haul away the latter. Thankfully, they don’t use the same trucks for these separate functions…

The hotel has ten rooms and, since the manager occupies one of them, and all the rooms are doubles, this means that the maximum occupancy is eighteen guests. There were ten people in the Court party, and quite a number of other guests, so this meant that almost everyone had to share rooms. I am happy to note that the Judge and I were both lucky enough to have rooms of our own.

This is the building where Court was held. The stop sign, as you can see is has both English and Inuktitut on it. French Canadians, apparently, can just drive right through…

Most Judges insist on sitting in the front seat of the truck for the drive to the airport, but Mr. Justice Mahar was quite happy to climb into the back with the luggage.

Flying by chartered aircraft has a lot of advantages even despite the fact that these small aircraft have no toilets. Unlike scheduled flights on larger airlines, we have the freedom to depart whenever we like and the pilots are not rigorously constrained to a particular flight path…

For the first 5 or 10 kilometers after takeoff, the pilots kept us at about 50 feet above the water as we wended our way through the nearby fiords. Once we got to cruising altitude, we briefly followed the Akshayuk Pass that runs all the way to the community of Pangnirtung and I gave my camera to one of the pilots to take the picture you see above. Pangnirtung, and the Pass, by the way, are both incredibly spectacular and I shall feature them in a future post…

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