McSnowWriter's Pamphlet: 12.0 - Land of the Polar Bear

Land of the Polar Bear

Tue, 24 Apr 2007 05:43:40 GMT

Land of the Polar Bear

The muffled roar coming through my headset changed to the more familiar “whomp-whomp-whomp” of a helicopter as the pilot, Joe, adjusted the pitch of the rotor blades with the collective-stick that he controlled in his left hand. This allowed the Bell 206L Long Ranger helicopter to lose height and thus begin our descent to the helipad at BAF-4A. He adjusted our forward direction with small movements of his right hand on the cyclic-stick that extended up between his legs in front of him, and the two pedals under his boot clad feet. We circled the site to get the wind direction and speed indications from the windsock attached to a pole near the helipad; then landed scattering dust, dirt and loose material in all directions. We got out of the cockpit as the rotor blade whirled slowly to a stop and walked to the small crowd of people who had assembled to watch our arrival.

We had just spent two hours flying southeast from Iqaluit, formerly Frobisher Bay, along the northern shore of Frobisher Bay on Baffin Island down to Loks Land where this North Warning System radar site was located. We had come to Loks Land to overnight at the camp. We were flying from site to site repositioning 45 gallon barrels of “jet-B” fuel from our fuel caches at BAF-3 on Brevoort Island and BAF-4A to other strategic spots where we could refuel the helicopters. The choppers were to ferry Canac/Microtel’s men and material to their next worksite at LAB-1 on the Labrador coast via the site at BAF-5 on Resolution Island.

I was there because I worked for Canac/Microtel (C/M). The company had been awarded the contract to modernize the satellite communications systems on the Distant Early Warning system. The DEW-Line provided early radar detection of incoming enemy planes and missiles from the Soviet Union. There are 51 sites stretched across the Canadian north from the Alaska border to eastern Baffin Island and then on down the coast of Labrador to Goose Bay. The system is now called the North Warning System (NWS). I wore two hats; first as the Civil Installation Manager responsible for all of C/M’s Outside Plant construction and installation, and second as the Transportation Manager responsible for the movement of all telecommunication crews, equipment and material into the sites that make up the NWS. I was also there because I enjoyed flying around visiting the crews and seeing the country. The job was a paid holiday to me.

The work camp at the site consisted of prefabricated “Atco” trailers joined together as one unit. It housed a kitchen, small dining room, washrooms, lounge and bedrooms for up to twenty people. Once the construction and installation was complete the Short Range Radar (SRR) site would be commissioned by the Canadian Military and become operational. At that point, there was no longer a requirement for people on site so the work camp would be de-mobilized and shipped out of the North via barge.

Tonight there were eighteen of us on-site. The excitement or ”buzz” of the day was still being bantered about at the supper table. An incident had happened last night. A big male polar bear had come prowling around the camp in the middle of the night. After sniffing around he reared up on his hind feet and bashed in the Camp Supervisor’s bedroom window. He tried to crawl up through the three foot by three foot opening but the commotion and yelling of the sleepy, frantic Supervisor must have spooked him. Scared the sh*t out of the sleeping Supervisor and got the camp into an up-roar. The bear scurried away into the night amidst the noise and turmoil and before anyone could get the 30-30 rifle out of the storage closet. It made for a good story and the crew could laugh about it now and remember it for later.

The camp settled into its normal routine after supper with the voting on which VHS movie was to be played on the TV in the lounge. Others, not interested in the movie ended up in the kitchen playing bridge or reading in their room. I watched the movie and then retired to my allocated bunk in one of the bedrooms. Upper bunk again and in REM sleep by midnight.

The sound of a loud “crash” and the shaking of the whole trailer woke me at 1 AM. The sound and racket persisted for at least a minute as my sleepy head cleared and I realized that I was also listening to the violent growling of a polar bear. He had bashed through the 18 inch by 18-inch window that was set into the upper part of the main door; and was trying to get into our building through the front door. I didn’t know if he was in the complex’s hallway creating havoc. A flimsy wood door to the bedroom, partially open, separated me from the hallway and the rest of the complex.

“Stay put,” I said to myself, “if he’s inside he will probably sniff out the grease and food in the kitchen.” Minutes passed with no further noise so I cracked open the door and looked into the hall. I saw two other heads poking out of the other bedrooms. We talked and conclude that the bear was not in the building. I ventured over to the door that had sustained the damage and saw that it was still upright but was barely hanging on to the lower hinges. The upper hinges were ripped from the door jam and cold night air was streaming in. One more push and the bear would have been in and prowling around.

We searched the complex and the immediate area around the camp before we declared “all clear”. Everyone had assembled in the lounge area. Emotions were running high. The camp Supervisor was standing in front of the assembled group. He had the loaded 30-30 by his side. He had just sent his camp attendant up on the roof with a powerful spotlight to try to locate the bear. It was interesting to observe the reactions of the people. My unscientific poll indicated that a third of the group wanted the bear “killed” outright, a third wanted him “scared off” and a third wanted him to be “left alone”. Their rational was that we had invaded his domain and we had to respect his company.

It was well after 2:30 before most people were back in bed. The camp attendant was still on the roof with the spotlight. He was to remain up there for the rest of the night.

I woke at the regular time to get in for breakfast. The talk at the dining table involved heated discussions on what had to be done with the polar bear. No consensus had been reached. Joe and I finished our breakfast and prepared for our departure over to BAF-5. One of the workers came in to tell us that he had found a good set of bear tracks. We went outside to the location and looked down at the largest paw print that I have ever seen. “Hope to hell he doesn’t come back again,” the worker said, “it will be pretty hard to out run him if catches us in the open.” The standard joke these days was to tell people that if they went for a walk to “take someone with you that was slower at running than you were” in case you came across a bear.

It was our intention to sling 9 barrels of fuel over to Resolution Island this morning. It would take three trips with the barrels slung in a cargo net under the helicopter.

I was sitting in the left hand front seat of the helicopter waiting for the machine to reach operating temperature. I put on my headset and pushed my transmit button, “when we get airborne let’s do a couple of circles around the camp to see if we can pick up any more tracks”. Joe Powers, my pilot, looked at me and smiled. I think he was going to do it anyway but it was nice that I made it “official”.

Official because I was responsible for the movement of the helicopters. I had 4 under contract to move men and equipment; two Bell 206L long Rangers and two Bell 212 machines. Each machine was guaranteed 90 hours of chargeable flying hours per month. The 206 could lift 1500 pounds and was charged out by Canadian Helicopters (CHC) for $1000 per hour and the 212’s could lift 3000 pounds and was charged out at $2500 per hour. One of the 212’s was presently hopping from site to site, having started at the Alaska border, and was working it’s way eastward to Baffin Island. The other 212 and the 206L that I was aboard were flying around the sites on Baffin Island and the northern Labrador coast. Another 206 was flying the Labrador coast with Ivan Foss, my senior Project Manager/Site Supervisor, responsible for the coordinating the site builds in the LAB sector. We joked one time that we were almost as big as the Canadian Air Force since we had 4 helicopters, 2 Twin Otters, 1 Navaho, 1 Boeing 737 and a C130 Hercules under contract one summer.

We found the bear two miles from camp. He didn’t seem to be moving away from the camp that was positioned on top of the largest hill in the area. We easily picked up his white fur clad body lumbering slowly across a rocky outcrop of dark gray rocks. We could see him look in our direction as we got closer but he wasn’t spooked enough to run. We hovered 150 feet from him but that didn’t intimidate him.

“ I don’t think he wants to leave the area”, I said over the intercom.

“We can shoo him down the hill if you want,” Joe responded.

“You’re flying,” I said insinuating that he was in control.

Joe moved the chopper in closer with small delicate movements to the sensitive controls. A helicopter pilot had once told me that landing a helicopter was like landing on a beach ball. The downdraught from the blades got more intense as you approached the ground and rebounded back up to the chopper causing instability. Joe Powers had lots of load slinging experience, and more importantly, I trusted him with my life. He was a likeable Newfie from St Anthony on the northern peninsula of Newfoundland. He was one of our two regular pilots who had flown the helicopter up to Baffin Island for the summer. We closed to within twenty feet of the bear. “Look at his feet, they are massive,” he said.

“I need to get a picture of this,” I said scrambling through my pack for my camera. We were now almost on top of him when he reared up and swatted at the helicopter. His paws slashed within a couple of feet from the landing gear of the machine. A little too close - we backed off. The bear was now agitated and frustrated. He looked around, back up at us, then roared and bolted away over the rough rocky terrain. Joe got him heading in the downhill direction and then backed off enough to gain height and distance. The bear had slowed to a fast loping stride and it looked like he would continue in that direction. We watched for a couple of minutes until he finally slowed to a fast walk. We were happy that he did not over heat himself during this run. Joe punched the coordinates of the bear into the Global Positioning System (GPS) mounted on the chopper’s control panel and then we flew off to work.

We made one sling load trip to Resolution Island before we returned to check on the bear. The return trip had taken two hours. We went and checked the coordinates of the bear. We found him again and got behind him. He heard us coming and looked back but did not stop his slow steady pace down the hill.

“I don’t think he will be back, we really spooked him,” Joe ventured.

“I’m glad he is still alive”, I said nodding my agreement. We punched in his coordinates and monitored his progress for the rest of the day as we made two more return trips to the BAF-5 radar site.

PHOTOS:

1) Brian McLeod "On the Beach" at Loks Land (BAF-4A)

2) Polar Bear heading over hill near BAF-4A

3) Polar Bear on the move near BAF-4A

4) Polar Bear looking up at helicopter (note the size of his feet)

Land of the Polar Bear (Continued)

Mon, 23 Apr 2007 17:07:15 GMT

Land of the Polar Bear (Continued)

The radar site, BAF-5, on Resolution Island could be seen from twenty miles out to sea as it was perched on the highest point of land on the island. The three glistening white radomes, that housed the radar and satellite dishes, acted like a beacon in the sunlight. We could also see the old radar site as we got closer. The radar radome was gone now but it’s concrete supporting structure still dominated the highest point. The two massive Troposcatter billboard antennae stood silently facing the Greenland coast while the parabolic Troposcatter dishes were shooting back to the deserted communications site overlooking Iqualuit.

. This site was part of the old Pinetree Line (www.pinetreeline.org/backgrnd) that tracked and controlled all air traffic for the military of Canada and the U.S.A. This site housed hundreds of military personnel from both nations. The communication system linked sites from Alaska’s Aleutian Islands to Greenland

The building trains, housing the men, were sitting parallel to each other. All buildings were joined by covered walkways. It was an eerie sight to see the site from the helicopter. Deserted for years, the buildings were showing serious deterioration from the long winters. And the new NWS site sat in the middle of it all.

It was in this environment that Darrel Kryvenchuk, a C/M Installation Supervisor, was working. He had just finished the “bit-error” test on the new installed communication equipment in the equipment room and was walking back to the camp from the Technical building nestled among the old buildings at BAF-5. He was rolling a cigarette as he turned a corner and came face to face with a polar bear.

Resolution Island was at the junction of the Davis Strait and Hudson Strait and it was late September. There was no ice on the sea. All the hungry bears were eager for the Labrador Sea to freeze over so they could hunt seal on the ice but in the mean time they traveled their island stomping grounds looking for food and that included the old radar site.

Darrel had no choice but to run for it. The safety of the camp was 100 yards and he had a ten-yard “head start” on the bear. The epic run finished with Darrel as the winner by three feet. The bear swatted at him as he slammed the door in the bear’s face.

Sitting there panting Darrel realized that he had thrown his tobacco pouch at the bear to try to distract his attention…maybe the tactic worked but he didn’t have a smoke. After a half hour of vigilant observation Darrel decide it was safe enough to reclaim his precious tobacco pouch so he ventured outside to retrieve it. Wrong move. He barely made it back again with the bear hot on his tail…but he had the makings of a new cigarette.

Darrel had told me his bear story earlier in the summer as we were moving him and his team into a site. Joe and I were flying across the wide mouth of Frobisher Bay with Darrel and two others. The Labrador Sea had just broken up with lots of flat ice floes drifting in the current.

“Polar Bear,” Darrel yelled through the intercom. Sure enough, fifty miles from land was a bear swimming from floe to floe, heading southward. He was at total easy in the water paddling to the next floe where he would scramble up onto it, shake himself free of water, trot over to the far edge and jump in again. Quite a spectacle to watch from a helicopter hovering just a hundred feet over the Davis Strait.

Davis Strait in the summer was iceberg alley. The current was such that the calf-ing icebergs from the Greenland glaciers were swept from the Greenland coast over towards Baffin Island then south down the Davis Strait and the Labrador coast past St. John’s Newfoundland and on into the Atlantic Ocean.

*****

On another trip, Ivan Foss and I had chartered Aero Arctic’s 206L helicopter for a visit to BAF-4A (Loks Land) and BAF-2 (Cape Mercy) in early summer. We departed Iqualuit on a clear day but encountered fog two thirds of the way to Loks Land. The pilot, ex-military, had to go on instruments to get us to the site. He stayed with the chopper and had a “nap” as we inspected the site.

We departed Loks Land, still in the fog, and headed for the BAF-2 radar site at Cape Mercy. It was situated on the north shore of Cumberland Sound on Baffin Island’s east coast.

We were flying low using the blue of the water between the break-up of the ice as our only horizon. The altimeter read one hundred feet and we were flying blind with only the GPS to guide us through the fog.

“Keep your eyes open will you”, said the pilot rhetorically. I was a little bewildered about that statement until fifteen minutes later I caught a movement in my peripheral vision. A big, mother of an iceberg went whizzing past the left hand side of the chopper. All I could say was “Did you see that” and Ivan answered from the passenger position in the rear “Yup, it was f**king big”. I looked over at the altimeter and we were cruising at one hundred forty knots over the ice at a height of one hundred feet. I don’t think we missed it by one hundred yards. Survival on the iceberg floating down Davis Straight and into the Labrador Sea did not appeal to me but in my heart I knew that the pilot was concentrating on not slamming face first into the side of a big berg.

It was unbelievable to watch the GPS at work. It plunked us within a half mile of the site at Cape Mercy. We could see the cliffs along the coast and we made our ascent to the high point of land where the site was situated. We took an inventory of our material lying on the beach below the 1000-foot cliffs where the site was located.

The ride back to Iqaluit was unbelievable. The fog had blown off Cumberland Sound and onto the land between Cumberland Sound and Frobisher Bay, directly in our path back to Iqaluit. The problem was that we were flying VFR (Visual Flight Rules) and had to visually see the ground and we had only 2 hours of light left to fly. If we didn’t get back to Iqaluit by sunset we would have to land on the tundra and wait until morning to continue. Air Traffic Control (ATC) would not let the helicopter fly at night. We were in a race with the night and the pilot acted accordingly.

The best way to describe the flight was to say “it was like being strapped onto a cruise missile skimming over the land while hugging it’s contours”. We would crawl up the hillsides sideways through the fog then creep downward until we got underneath the fog then the pilot would push the nose of the chopper down and we would roar across the open clearing until we reached the next fog bank where the pilot would then pull up the nose to slow the chopper down. We would then swing sideways again to crawl up the hill with the helicopter’s skids barely 15 feet from the ground and then another short run at 140 knots into the next fog bank to again creep sideways up a hill. Most of our two hours time was spent within fifteen to twenty feet of the ground. The pilot was in contact with ATC every few minutes stating our position as “one hundred miles back”, “fifty miles back”, “forty miles back”, etc. At “twenty miles back” we didn’t think we were going to make it, at “ten miles back” we knew we were not and at “five miles back” we came out of the fog to see the lights of Iqaluit in the dark but we continued.

I believe ATC chose to ignore our arrival well after sunset. They could plainly see us since we had the helicopter’s landing lights on for the past hour, as we needed to see the ground in the dark.

Although I was a passenger sitting in the co-pilot seat, I went through the same “two plus” hour adrenalin high as the pilot. I was wound up and had a hard time getting to sleep that night.

*****

BAF-2, Cape Mercy, was one of the sites that my brother Keith and Brett, his sixteen-year-old son, visited on their epic expedition around Baffin Island. I had two helicopters flying around the site and a fixed wing “Beech” waiting at Pangnirtung. We were moving the equipment installation team and their equipment out of site and down to BAF-4A. They wandered around the site and watched the 212 Bell helicopter load up and struggle off with a full load of equipment in the cargo area and slung under the chopper. I had sent a helicopter load of C/M personnel to Pang to wait for the rest of us to continue their trip to Iqaluit on the fixed wing Piper Chieftain aircraft of Air Baffin. When the 206L piloted by Joe Powers returned two and one half hours later Keith, Brett, Loyal Branson and I hopped aboard for our trip to Pang.

Pangnirtung, famous for whaling in the late 1800 and early 1900’s was my favourite northern village. It is situated halfway up the Pangnirtung Fiord near the head of Cumberland Sound. It is the southern gateway to the spectacular Auyuittuq National Park that features Mt. Asgard and the Penny Ice Cap.

We approached Pang and the Park from the south and could see Mt. Asgard on the horizon. I told Joe that we wanted to see it close up so we veered 15 degrees to the east and went on a sightseeing tour. The razor back mountains falling a thousand to two thousand feet straight down to the glaciers are awesome to fly over in a helicopter as it was literally skimmed the peaks with its landing gear. We were flying into the setting sun so we circled Mt. Asgard, at an altitude of 6600 feet, to be presented with a picture postcard view of the mountain with its massive cliff plunging down to the ice glacier far below. The mountain had two flat tops with a saddle between them so I asked Joe if he would fly between them.

His answer was to dig out a movie camera from his personal bag lying by his feet and handed it to me. It was thrilling and scary to fly through the saddle with cliffs on either side at a speed of 30 knots then have the nose of the chopper pushed down to swoop down at 140 knots into the Pangnirtung Pass thousands of feet below….. just to be confronted with the awesome view of Mt.Thor jutting over the Pass. We flew past its looming cliff while twisting and turning along the floor of the Pass following the river. We were low enough to see the faces of startled hikers and wave at them as we flew by them. They would be hiking on through to Broughton Island, a five-day hike through the Pang Pass.

The sun was close to setting when we reached the airport at Pang and the waiting Piper Chieftain aircraft. A day I will always remember in a most rugged and awesome part of northern Canada where few people have been and few will ever get to. Mt. Asgard and its sheer cliff to the glacier below was used in the James Bond movie “The Spy Who Loved Me”.

*****

To say that we were just flying around was half true. I had to get a helicopter to Pangnirtung from Iqaluit so I took Keith and Brett with me in Canadian Helicopter’s 206L piloted by Joe Powers. We had lots of time so we stopped at Kekerten Island in Cumberland Sound just south of Pangnirtung Fiord.

Bowhead whaling was big business in the Cumberland Sound area for British, European and American whaling ships during the early and mid 1800’s but then died completely in the early 1900’s. Up to 30 whaling ships would visit the sound each Fall during the 1850’s and 1860’s. Scottish whaler William Penny built a station house on Kerkerten Island in 1852 for the Arctic Aberdeen Company where they would boil the blubber for the oil. The building(s) are gone now but the government has turned the site into a historical site complete with wooden walkways and information plaques. You can still see old foundations, rusted out cauldrons and other rusted equipment scattered around the site.

I stopped at an old elongated box made of driftwood and planks and lifted a two-foot plank from the top and looked in. I called Brett over and we took all the planks off the top to expose a complete skeleton of a human being. Obviously someone from a whaling ship who died on the island. A very interesting historical site preserving the whaling history that went on in Cumberland Sound.

*****

The fog stopped us from continuing down Frobisher Bay to Resolution Island so I decided to go sightseeing over to Lake Harbour (now Kimmirut). I was flying with pilot Joe Powers, Keith and Brett in Canadian Helicopter’s Bell 206L that I had on a monthly charter. I had to use up 90 hours of flying time on the choppers I had chartered, or pay for those hours anyway. Joe swung the chopper around in a right hand turn and off we went.

We flew through a deep fiord with sheer cliffs plunging to the water’s edge on route to our destination. As we neared Hudson’s Strait on Baffin Island’s southwest coast we could see the outline of a large ship at the mouth of Lake Harbour. As we closed in we saw it was a Canadian Coast Guard ship in its red colour with the coast guard white strip. We circled the ship a couple of times at low height and then continued down the harbour to the Hamlet. It was one of the earlier Hudson’s Bay Company and RCMP posts on southern Baffin Island. It had a small airstrip with hills on two sides and village on the other two. We landed in the school’s playground and went for a cup of coffee and a little tour.

We returned through what is now Katannilik Territorial Park Reserve. The main feature of the park is the Soper River valley where the environment allows a stand of the tallest willows on Baffin Island and wildlife such as caribou. We flew low snaking around the bends of the river. At times the river’s original banks were above us. We startled a group of caribou and took pictures of them in full flight as we flew along at the same level as the bank of the river. We flew along the Itijjagiaq Trail that was the traditional dog-sled trail used by Inuit to travel to Iqaluit. Present day snowmobilers say they can reach Iqaluit in 5 hours. It’s a distance of 75 miles. Ian Wright, the traveler on the “Lonely Planet” TV series featured this trail on one of his episodes.

*****

Air Baffin, operated by Jeff Mahoney, was a colourful little charter airline trying hard to get established in the eastern Arctic at Iqaluit. The first time I flew with Jeff was in 1988 when Canac/Microtel chartered Air Baffin to fly down to LAB-2 at Saglek, Labrador to pick me up and fly me out to Kuujjuaq. I had been sitting waiting for a week at LAB-2 for the weather to clear in the south. He arrived from Iqaluit in his twin engine Piper Navajo and off we went with me in the co-pilot’s seat. We hit it off right away.

I used Air Baffin wherever there was a landing strip at site and I had to move minor things and personnel on inspection trips. His fleet was a Piper Navajo, Cessna 337, Cessna 185 and then a Piper Chieftain to fly scheduled runs to Pangnirtung and Broughton Island.

I flew into FOX-3 at Dewar Lakes with my boss, John Knapp. I was facing forward in the Navajo’s four-seat cabin and John was sitting across the aisle facing backward. It was at night so when I finally spotted the site’s searchlight on the horizon I told John. He wanted to see better so unbuckled his seat-belt, got up and turned around.

At that moment both engines went dead. All you could hear was the wind whistling over the fuselage. Everything else had gone silent. The instrument-lights were still illuminating the cockpit in an eerie greenish light. John scrambled unceremoniously back into his seat and hastily buckled up. I watched Jeff intently as he scanned the instruments in front of him. I envisioned crash-landing on the barrens, thirty to fifty miles from FOX-3, in the late Fall with fresh snow on the ground. We had winter gear but no food. As I watched, Jeff looked up at some overhead toggle switches, reached up and flipped one. One engine then the other roared back to life. He calmly sat there and adjusted the controls to achieve the steady drone then pulled back on the stick to gain back the height that we had lost.

In the twenty to thirty seconds that the engines were stopped I had time to reflect on many things. We landed without further incident.

*****

I needed to get to LAB-2 at Saglek on the Labrador coast. I phoned Jeff at Air Baffin and he checked the conditions. Weather was good but the runway still had one third of its length covered with deep snow banks. We decided to go. The reason we hit it off was he liked flying low as did I. When I mean low I mean fifty to one hundred feet in a twin engine Piper Navajo.

We crossed Hudson Strait to Port Burwell on Killinek Island at one hundred feet and then went “feet dry” by skimming the ground at 250 miles per hour, past abandoned buildings and radio antennas poking up everywhere. We stayed low as we barreled along the narrow waterway that separates the island from the mainland. The cliffs and steep hills were spectacular and we poked out into Grenfell Sound in the Labrador Sea.

We continued our flight down the Labrador coast at 500 feet while watching the massive cliffs and deep fiords tower above us off to our right a short distance away. The northern coast of Labrador is as awesome and beautiful as the east coast of Baffin Island. We flew past LAB-1, where we could see the work activity of the general contractor as they built the site at Cape Kakiviak, and then to Saglek. The wheels of the Navajo stopped twenty-five feet short of the snow-bank on the runway.

PHOTOS: (clockwise from top)

1) Air Baffin's Navajo getting loaded

2) Iceberg floating down Davis Strait

3) Polar Bear swimming from floe to floe across Cumberland Sound

4) Old deserted radar site at Resolution Island (BAF-5)

5) Mt.Thor (picture courtesy of Louise Wholey at wholey.net_auyuituq website)

6) Mt. Asgard (picture courtesy of Louise Wholey at wholey.net_auyuituq website)

7) Bell 212 on landing pad at Cape Mercy (BAF-2)

8) Brian McLeod beside Canadian Helicopter's Bell 212 at Pangnirtung (looking north into Pang Pass)