Canada's Far North -- Tuktoyaktuk

"You go through ecosystems. You'll be in forest and valley, and then you'll pop up and you'll climb over a mountain range, but you're above the tree line."
"It's total unobstructed views of these huge valleys, right into summits."
"[As Canadians], we're so focused on Halifax, Vancouver and everything in between. There are great areas of our country that are north that we never get to."
Drew Mitchell, Callander, Ontario

Waves from an August 2018 storm that caused four metres of land to erode in Tuktoyaktuk, N.W.T.   Courtesy of Dustin Whalen, Natural Resources Canada

The finishing touches on the Inuvik-Tuktoyaktuk Highway was completed by construction workers in 2017, representing an ambitious and difficult project funded primarily by the Conservative-led government of Prime Minister Stephen Harper. The $300-million , two-lane, gravel road is Canada's first all-weather road to the Arctic Ocean. Under the Harper government, there was an unprecedented focus on Canada's far north, with a view to development and opening up the territory to more potential habitation.

Up to the creation of the two-lane highway, access to northern places like Tuktoyaktuk in the Northwest Territories in the Inuvik region was achieved by plane. In a typical year, about 1,500 tourists and others might make the trip. Since the opening of the highway, that number has soared to 7,000 visitors last summer. And with tourism heating up, the commercial potential of the hamlet has responded with the opening of several more businesses.

Hamlet officials say 30 to 50 vehicles are driving the Inuvik Tuktoyaktuk Highway each day to reach the community of about 900 people. (Mackenzie Scott/CBC)

Local Tuk artisans producing traditional Inuit arts and crafts now have a larger, more enthusiastic market for their products. Tuk has five bed-and-breakfast operations where Americans, Europeans, South Americans -- and Canadians -- come to look around, to touch the Arctic Ocean, to see pingos, mounds of permafrost topped with soil at a national landmark close by the hamlet.

When Drew Mitchell and his wife drove from Whitehorse in the Yukon, they did so with a twofold purpose in mind; to see a stretch of Canada not uppermost in the minds of most who want to travel to an exotic location, and to get married in Tuk. A visit to the hamlet, apart from being a visual revelation of life in the far north, can also become the stage for witnessing nature in the raw.

Local artist Joe Nasogaluak performed with the Siglit Drummers and Dancers at the recent wedding of a couple who chose Tuktoyaktuk for their destination wedding. (Mario De Ciccio/Radio-Canada)

The Inuvialuit hamlet of Tuktoyaktuk is a venue where the Arctic from July to September can be thrust into violent storm conditions where tempests suddenly appear and winds roar and waves thrash the coastline to splash off rocks and erode the shoreline. Seriously erode the shoreline. To the extent where those among the hamlet's 900 residents who prefer to live by the water have seen the ocean come perilously close to their back doors.

Powerful storms lashing the Arctic and thawing permafrost see the coastline eroding amazingly swiftly so that uninhabited islands begin to disappear under the sea. On the Alaska side, some villages have been forced to relocate their entire communities to higher ground moving inland; in 2003 a place called Newtok and Shishmaref in 2016.

In August 2018, a powerful windstorm caused four metres of land to erode in a coastal neighbourhood in Tuktoyaktuk, N.W.T. The storm exposed an underground layer of permafrost and brought the Beaufort Sea within a few feet of the area’s remaining homes. Dustin Whalen, Natural Resources Canada

Tuktoyaktuk is getting to that stage. For the past 15 years, government physical scientist Dustin Whalen has based his research on erosion in the north, stationed in Tuk, not the only community where the seas are encroaching and swamping buildings to the extent that people begin to consider moving; it happens even in Nova Scotia, according to Dr. Whalen, where his much of his research is also conducted.

Last August Dr. Whalen while in Tuk, in a rented house several hundred metres from the shore, was forced to hunker down for a few days inside that house, unable to venture outside because of a storm with violent winds. When it eventually subsided he and the ten scientists with him emerged to begin calculating how far the shoreline had receded from just that single storm and found the difference to be four metres, tripling the annual erosion recorded in previous years.

Tuk Housing

Where land had been, the researchers saw exposed permafrost, protruding from its usual underground presence and now susceptible to being washed away by succeeding storms as they continue coming through. Tuk's mayor, Merven Gruben has plans to sidestep any worst-case scenario by lifting the exposed houses on the shoreline on skids to be tugged away from imminent danger. And to ultimately be relocated elsewhere.

"You can't fight nature", he said resignedly. "All we can do is adapt. Our people are very good at adapting."