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Letting Go on Baffin Island
Text by Tim Beaman
Photos by Dave Boyden
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We have lost control. After five months of planning and preparation, we have, in a moment, totally relinquished command of our fate and placed our trust for the safe success of our adventure in a stranger whom we only just met at the airport. If you want to call the small strip where they land planes at Clyde River an airport.
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But getting to Sam Ford Fjord on Baffin Island is no simple endeavor. Dave and I anticipated an exercise in self-reliance and survival skills in this remote region high above the Arctic Circle, but it seems like a cruel contradiction that our lifeline, our link to civilization is Levi. And our expedition's success will depend entirely on his knowledge and skill to safely traverse this stark landscape of rock, snow, and ice. We're passengers, sobered and humbled—preconceived ideas of our competence scrapped—as we load gear into Levi's 4X8 plywood box atop his tow-sledge or komatik.
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With only a brief glance backwards to see if Dave and I are settled among our gear bags, Levi unceremoniously throttles his snow machine northward, dragging us out of the small village of Clyde River on Baffin Island toward skiing's Capitol of Couloirs.
The five-hour komatik ride to our destination is wildly rough. We bounce and ricochet with our gear bags like pennies in a piggy bank wondering along the way if Andrew McLean and Brad Barlage—the ski pioneers of Baffin in 2000—went on this hay-ride. Levi concentrates on finding the path of least resistance across the coastal plain, but the snow's surface is anything but smooth. We strike out onto the sea ice at about the halfway point and are disappointed to find it even rougher than the land. The snow machine and komatik mire suddenly in a stretch of rotten snow. As Dave and I hop off our gear to assist with the extrication, expecting hours of backbreaking effort to free up the rig, we can only stand by mid-thigh in the mealy snow as Levi unhooks, rocks his snow machine out of its hole, drives forward and backward multiple times to firm up a track, then pops the komatik out easily with a long loop of dynamic rope as a towline. He has obviously done this alone before, and our willingness to help is irrelevant. He says with a rare smile, that he has been "driving" for 45 of his 52 years. |
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Underway again, we finally enter Sam Ford Fjord proper and race down the center of its long, wide ice sheet bounded by impressively large rock walls. The first couloir we spy from our tortuous perch looks fantastic, a true trophy, rising steeply straight up from the ice edge through a weakness in the cliff to a prominent notch at the skyline. It's not on the McLean/Barlage tick-list map, and we name it "Cloudsplitter" on the spot, ego-tripping about a possible first-descent. As the miles fly by, more magnificent couloirs of varying sizes adorn the towering walls on either side of the fjord like white pickets on a dark fence. Some are irregular with bends, doglegs, branches, dead-ends, or drop-offs; not all look skiable from our perspective on the ice. We wonder euphorically, and, as it turns out, naively, how many of these big lines we can ski per day. |
Lighting a cigarette, Levi announces bluntly: "This is your camp," when we stop around 10 p.m. on the snow-covered ice about a quarter mile out from where a blue-nosed glacier kisses the frozen sea and the massive 5,000 foot high bulk of the Polar Sun Spire blocks the sky westward. Bruised and battered, Dave and I stumble numbly off the komatik at the epicenter of an encircling ring of huge rock walls and mountains with snow clinging to their sides and glaciers carving valleys between them. According to McLean/Barlage, this is Couloir Central with a host of classic lines nearby quietly awaiting the caresses of our ski edges. The air is calm and cold, and a half moon shares the sky with a dim sun now traversing low on the horizon. We fumble with our gear bags trying to remember where we packed what we need to set up camp.
"There's a seal," Levi observes casually while he boils water for tea and Ramen and we puzzle-piece the components of our new tents. The motionless dark animal far out on the ice evokes immediate visions of hungry polar bears stalking their victims, and we hurriedly unpack and load the forgotten 12-gauge. When asked whether this is a bad spot for bears, Levi responds with a shrug and a noncommittal, 50/50 back and forth twisting of a flat hand, then sweeps his arm in a slow, 180 degree arc over the ice indicating that everything we see around us is polar bear habitat.
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| Although I had originally thought Dave's proposal of 12 days for this trip too short, living among seals for that length of time suddenly seems way too long. I brave Levi's seeming indifference to our consternation and ask for advice. He says don't make noise in your tent if you think a bear is near. The bear may just grunt and go on its way. But if the bear is wondering what is inside the tent, he will slowly rip a slit in the wall with his claw and look in; then you must shoot him in the body before he can pounce, never in the head because a bear can get back up from such a wound in a short time. "Of course," he says with a sly grin. "The bigger fellow can also push the skinny guy out the front of the tent for the bear then run like hell out the back." |
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Humor seems only slightly more palatable than fear in our grim situation. "I'll return on the 14th," Levi promises over his shoulder as he guns his rig back toward home in Clyde. We return to camp setting, wishing for hackneyed phrases like “have a nice day” or “good luck.”
We sleep well in the 24-hour light in spite of seeing three more seals near us before crawling into our thin-walled tent and lying with the shotgun between us. After breakfast, we fix skins and head off down the ice of the Walker Arm in pursuit of our first prize, the Polar Star couloir, called by McLean, "the best I've ever skied!" Distance and size are difficult to judge without any familiar references, and it requires a two-hour shuffle from our camp to a point on the ice where we can finally look into this incredible line. From a small debris fan, the couloir soars upward through the heart of the dark, gigantic wall before us. Its slightly sinuous course is guarded by its own twin phalanx of vertical rock, and terminates abruptly at a summit col. The snow stability of the 100-foot wide run-out pitch seems o.k., so we switch to crampons and begin boot-packing through six inches of recrystallized 35 degree powder. We estimate an ascent time of two hours.
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So we climb. The repetition and rhythm of our steps suspend time, and with each placement, the slope angle and our effort imperceptivity increase. The dark, slightly curving sidewalls squeeze our visible universe down to a tennis court-sized segment of snow. The sunny fjord recedes to a bright, vertical slit behind us. The couloir starts to assume mammoth proportions. Although feeling good about near-surface conditions, we talk often about possible deep instabilities and unseen hazards above and try not to dwell on the feeling that we are continuously moving at the bottom of a large, smooth-sided funnel without protection from falling objects or sliding snow. High up, we probe and shovel furiously when we suddenly feel vibrations from each other's footsteps while 20 feet apart. It's only a thin, isolated fragment of old wind crust—not a dangerous, hollow hard slab.
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A four-limbed crawl over a final 50 degree-plus headwall lands us on the narrow and windy summit cleft five hours after starting the climb. We gaze out at miles of rugged mountains and ice fields and look back down to where our footsteps disappear into air at the headwall lip. Cold forces us to shorten our celebrations and prepare for the descent. The first few turns are ultra-cautious. New skis, unfamiliar snow, no-fall terrain, and no hope of rescue produce butterflies, but the feeling quickly fades as the instinctual flow takes over and carries us, one at a time, down the headwall. An hour later, we are back at the bottom. The turns are wonderful, if perhaps less memorable than the effort to reach their starting place.
It was fitting then that our dozen-day experience in the Sam Ford Fjord ended where it began: depending on Levi. It was another perfect day for the couloirs, cold and sunny with a light breeze and no fresh snow to create serious avalanche hazard, but Dave and I spent the morning organizing and packing in anticipation of his arrival. |
A daily regimen of eating, climbing, skiing, parasailing and resting in our fjord far above the Arctic Circle had hardened us. After miles of travel by skins and kite, thousands of boot-pack steps with axe and crampon, and an infinity of turns our adventure was fast approaching its conclusion.
We had wrestled with our demons—but no polar bears—and depended on each other to make safe moves in an unforgiving game. Now we had to trust and depend again on another for the important final step: getting home. We heard him coming down the fjord long before we saw him, a barely audible hum at first, then steadily growing to an assertive buzz as he rounded the nearby point on his machine and headed in our direction.
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Upon his arrival, and before he says hello, Levi stakes a long antenna from his komatik to the ice and listens to his emergency radio while he boils soup and waits for us to finish packing. His wife has accompanied him and she tells us they were forced to bivouac in their komatik halfway from Clyde yesterday when caught by high winds.
As we pack we tell Levi about our week. We never skied more than one couloir in a day, never bagged the trophy "Cloudsplitter," never fully relied on the frightening traction kites we had brought along, and even sat out a number of days when the weather or snow stability was questionable. We don't mention how glad we are to see him in what is to us a strange, elemental land—and his home.
"Seventy mph winds again between here and Clyde," Levi states over his soupspoon. "We will go but may not make it all the way to town if it gets bad." As passengers we have no choice but to believe that either way, he's right. |
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