Penny Ice Cap, Baffin Island 1998

This weekend marks the 10th anniversary of a trip my friend Dave and I took to Baffin Island. It was without a doubt the most incredible trip I’ve ever been a part of. The overwhelming landscape, physical toil, and companionship came together in a very personal and profound way.

I’ve been meaning to put something together on this trip for years, but never really have the time to dedicate to it, but I’ve at least finally uploaded scans of the pictures we took to a Flickr set and slideshow in more or less chronological order. I still need to work on annotating them and arranging them more carefully, but the overall sense of the trip is there.

The major goal of the trip was to reach the Penny Ice Cap via the Coronation Glacier. We had arranged for an outfitter to bring us from Broughton Island to the foot of Coronation Glacier, but because of deteriorating ice conditions, we had to be dropped off a few miles north of the glacier on the fiord itself, so the first day was spent walking over the sea ice just to get to the glacier itself.

We really weren’t certain what to expect at the mouth of the glacier, but it turned out to be straight-forward to skirt up the left side and avoid the crumbling ice blocks at the terminus. For the next week we were never more than a rope length apart as we spent the days working our way up Coronation to the bizarre landscape of the Ice Cap itself. Not long after starting out, I went to pull the sun screen out of my pack only to realize that I had instead packed a tube of insect repellent by mistake… Nice. The sun on a glacier is unbelievably strong and we were getting so burned we were forced to smear ash from the stove on our faces, which actually worked rather well, although we ended up looking like maniacs.

Once we passed over the Ice Cap, we took a route down Highway Glacier to Akshayuk Pass in the Auyuittuq National Park then on to Pangnirtung.

This entry really just covers the most basic details of the trip; I’m still going to put something together that fills in the details (hopefully with Dave’s input), but I couldn’t let the anniversary go by without a least acknowledging it.