It was rainy and windy when we got up, but it was a great morning nonetheless.  Crystal finally got her final paycheck…plus some.  For whatever reason, she didn’t get her final paycheck on her last day of work, and in fact on her last day checklist provided by the company, she made a point of indicating that she hadn’t received her paycheck.  They didn’t respond to multiple requests, and her requests kept getting a bit more pointed.  So yesterday she wrote one last email indicating that she expected to be paid her salary, plus any “appropriate fees and penalties under California law,” or she was going to go to the Labor Relations Board.  Lo and behold, she got her check, plus - as required under California law - her salary for every day late the company was with the final check.  So she effectively got paid for two extra weeks, one spent packing up our place in San Diego, and one spent on holiday in Canada.  Technically, today was her first unpaid day of retirement.

At breakfast we saw blue sky coming from the north, and hoped we wouldn’t have the rain for too much longer.  At breakfast, Scarbrow came right up to the window outside where we were eating.  On the inside of the window, there were several herbs that the chefs were growing in a place where they’d get some sun.  Crystal made the mental connection that Scarbrow was right next to the rosemary and thyme.  Justin and the others at breakfast were envious.  Scarbrow continued south a bit, right outside the tiny breezeway between the dining room and lounge area.  We hadn’t been out there as of yet because it’s so tiny, but since Scarbrow is 15 and is used to being around people, the guides let a handful of us out there.  Justin went out on the breezeway to take photos, and Crystal stayed in the lounge and got some great video of the encounter (see below).  Scarbrow was just on the other side of the fencing from Justin, no more than 2-3 meters away.  He was so close he could hear him breathing, and the photos are so close you can make out his scars drops of water on his lips.

After breakfast, at the 09:15 meeting time, it was still very windy, but the rain was gone and there were impressive cloud formations to the south.  There were 3 bears right outside the window to the east just before we went outside, so we knew we’d have some bears to spend time with.  We walked out onto the intertidal area just south of the lodge.  There was a bear lying out on an uncomfortable looking rock formation, seemingly trying to will the sea ice into existence.  As we were watching it, another bear came right up to the lodge, on the ridge above us.  They were about 50 meters away, on both sides of us.  Neither bear was acting aggressively, but it was a weird position to be in.  It was also bitterly cold, and Denice (from Perth) asked to go inside since we were so close and she was freezing.  Justin couldn’t feel his left fingers, so he understood where she was coming from.  

After Boomer came back from taking Denice in, we split between the two bears, went up the ridge, and headed southwest on the road.  We got some shots straight into the sun, practicing our overexposure skills that we learned from Boomer the night before.  We walked down back into the lowlands and all the willows, and happened upon a giant male.  This wasn’t Scarbrow, this was a different massive male.  He was super lazy, very chill, and almost never raised his head.  We were freezing our asses off standing still waiting for him to raise his head to look at us, and maybe he took pleasure in taunting us.  Crystal noticed that he was panting, and also breathing incredibly quickly.  We hoped he wasn’t in ill health, especially after hearing the story about Bob yesterday.

On the way back towards the lodge, there was a bear between us and the front gate.  We were sort of walking straight towards it (and/or maybe it was walking straight towards us), and kept having to pivot our single file line - we finally used the lessons they’d taught us on day one.  At its closest, it was probably only 25 meters away from us.  Back at the lodge, Barb mentioned that this was her favorite encounter of the trip so far.  The cameras fogged up big time upon getting back inside, and Justin had to take them into the changing room breezeway to dry them out.  We had lunch with Neil, Denice, and Marko.  We asked Marko about how tides work (e.g., why do some places have much larger tides than others), and also how he got oriented with the folks for the Ellesmere trip he’d told us about last night.

Crystal decided to skip the afternoon walk, and she spent the afternoon reading and taking a shower (not at the same time).  Since she wasn’t out walking, she was offered wine by Nicole (Ben’s partner), but turned it down, deciding to wait until Happy Hour.  She didn’t miss many polar bears, but she did miss some more educational stuff.  The bears were seemingly all sleepy, enjoying the sunny afternoon (with now very little wind).  The giant male was still being lazy, but at least it wasn’t quite as cold when we were standing there trying to get his picture.

One of the things we (Justin and the rest of the group) learned about this afternoon was Isostatic rebound.  In a nutshell, when there was far more ice in the area during the ice ages, the weight of the ice pushed down on, and sunk, the ground underneath it.  Once all of the ice melted, the ground has slowly risen back up, somewhat akin to removing a book from on top of a wet sponge.  Accordingly, a lot of the area we were walking on used to be under water, and somewhat recently (just a couple hundred years ago in some cases).  We forget the exact rate of rebound, but it was something like a centimeter a year.

The guides took the group past Swan Lake, which is where the Lodge’s water comes from.  Tyler, one of the staff members, comes out frequently to pump water from the lake towards the lodge.  Once the pipes freeze (which thankfully hadn’t happened yet), Tyler has to spend a big chunk of every day literally transporting giant jugs of water from the lake to the Lodge.  Jess showed us pixie cup lichen in the area.  Marko showed us actual permafrost.  There was one spot where there was a hole in the ground, and if you got down low to the ground and reached your arm down into the hole, you could feel the top of the permafrost.  It was very weird feeling it, and we had no idea that’s what was meant by permafrost.  There’s only about half a meter of soil above the ice, which explains why there are few to no trees around Seal River - there’s nowhere for the roots to go.  Also, bears can’t build dens where there is permafrost, as there’s not enough room.  So most of the dens are further south, by Nanuk.  The guides also showed us some plants in the Rhododendron family (not like any rhododendrons Justin had ever seen), and some sandy areas that are used by foxes for dens.  

The highlight of the afternoon excursion was seeing tent rings that had been built by the Thule people several hundred years ago.  Thule people were the precursors to Eskimo and Inuit, and lived in the Churchill area for a while.  It was somewhat easy to date things because of the isostatic rebound - the areas where the tent rings were present would have been underwater more than 1000 years ago.  Best as anyone can tell from what has been “discovered” to date, this was the southernmost Thule community in the world.  A researcher who was in the Seal River area a few years back estimated that this was a winter encampment of 30-40 people.  There was evidence of food storage areas (the permafrost could act as a giant freezer), grave sites, and more.  The Thule were maritime people with kayaks, but they also had dogs and dogsleds.  They hunted bowhead whales, which would have fed people for weeks or months.  The guides showed us a kayak (or umiak) rack made from rocks, so that the boat wouldn’t tip over when on land.

While permafrost acted as a refrigerator for the whale meat, the smell nevertheless would have attracted other animals.  On the other hand…it also meant that other animals came to the Thule, making hunting easier.  They built traps for foxes and bears, and ate them and used their hides.  The tents, which were held in place by the rock tent rings that we were looking at today, were built on the leeward side of a ridge, and thus were insulated by snowdrifts on the windward side.  After explaining everything to us, the guides told us to just find a comfortable spot to sit, and then urged us to just sit in silence for a few minutes and imagine what it must have been like to live out here, away from everything, with no sounds and no/few trees and just flat ground for as far as the eye can see.  It was a moving experience.

We were quite a way from the Lodge, and some of the guests asked if they could catch an “Uber” back to the Lodge.  The guides radioed it in, and Ben came a few minutes later with one of the carts, picking up 3 of the guests.  The rest of us walked back, going past a bird's nest on the ground (again, there are no trees), but not much else.  We did get to see 1 more lazy bear about halfway back to the Lodge, and everyone was back at the Lodge shortly before sunset.  Since this was the last longer hike, everyone put back their rain pants, rain jackets, boots, and bama socks that we’d borrowed when we arrived.

At Happy Hour we were given the long-promised polar bear quiz.  When they passed the tests out to us, they told the two of us not to help each other out.  We told them “we’d compete before we helped each other.  That’s a joke…mostly.”  There were 15 questions, with one potential bonus point available.  Crystal got 12, Justin got 15, and Amy won by getting 16.  Justin missed the weight of the newborn cubs (0.6 instead of 0.5 kg).  We had dinner with Lin, Amy, and Nicole.  Most of the discussion was about dogs, dog rescues, and how Lin and Amy met doing martial arts in the Bay Area around 40 years ago.  Then we went into the lounge to watch the slideshow video that Jess had painstakingly put together with pictures from all of us as well as the guides and staff.

Almost immediately after the video had ended, Ben told us northern lights had started, so we all went outside.  Tonight the lights had a rainbow-type arc across the entire sky.  While the colors were more vivid, again they were more static than the first night.  The moon, however, was very cool.  Also cool was a red light in one of the sheds in the courtyard, which made an interesting foreground for several of the photos.  Also, Boomer and Marko “painted” red light on some of the buildings as people took their long exposures, and Justin ended up in one of these, as he happened to be in the observation tower when they took the picture. 

After watching the northern lights for quite a while (maybe 45 minutes), we went into the lounge and had drinks with Glo and Kathy and Ken.  We discussed First Nations, Hawaiian, and Indigenous groups generally.  Among the topics were that white people seemingly always assumed the worst/least of the people they conquered, and the (sad) irony of indigenous civilizations having good transport networks that inadvertently helped rapidly spread disease.  We had a really cool discussion for an hour or so, and then we realized it was quite late, that we were flying tomorrow, and that most of the wine was gone.