After we arrived in Tuktoyaktuk the first thing we did was wade into the Arctic Ocean. The water was warmer than I expected. It was like our backyard pool on cold days.
Next we walked around town and found a playground. I had a lot of fun playing tag and other games with some kids. There were a lot of things to climb on like a rope ladder. There was also a big swing set and a slide.
The next day it was Canada Parks Day. We joined the celebration at the Pingo Landmark. A pingo is a big mound of earth and ice. A pingo is formed when a lake mostly dries up but there is a disk of water left behind that freezes the lake bed and expands, pushing up the earth making a hump in the ground. This is the starting of a pingo. It keeps growing until the unfrozen ground turns to permafrost and the pingo has a core of pure ice.
As part of the Parks Day celebration we got to take a boat across an estuary of the Arctic Ocean to see Ibyuk, Canada’s tallest pingo and the second tallest pingo in the world. Wow!
