Nunavik will see its first provincial park sometime in the spring of 2001. The proposed Pingualuit Park will protect an the Chubb Crater near the community of Kangiqsujuaq, known as Pingualuit in Inuktitut.

OUTFIT 102: News that Quebec will designate a provincial park (see below) near the Chubb Crater in Ungava brought back memories of the region. The crater remains one of our favourite campsites and most unique landform we've seen.

Pingualuit is one of three Quebec provincial parks planned for Nunavik, the Inuit-administered area of northern Quebec. Another is slated for the Richmond Gulf and Clearwater Lake region, while a third will be located around the Korok River and Torngat Mountains which lie on the oft-disputed Quebec-Labrador border.

The parks' creation will lead to some changes, both in the park and within the Nunavik. For example, access to the park area by non-residents will be controlled, and within the park's borders Inuktitut names will replace the French-language names which have been given to waterways and land formations in the region for many years.

But before any of this goes ahead, public hearings on the park must be held. The James Bay agreement will also have to be amended before Pingualuit becomes reality. The agreement identified a specified area for the creation of the park, but the the locals have lobbied for the park's proposed borders to be slightly enlarged so they include the Puvirnituq River.

Quebec was to spend $5 million on developing new parks in Nunavik, but ended up receiving only half that amount in its budget. Corporate sponsorships from big companies such as Hydro-Quebec, Falconbridge Ltd. and Bell Canada are being solicited to make up this difference.

An indelible memory, the southern rim of the Chubb Crater; still showing ripples, in bedrock of the mind-boggling impact.

A Norwegian adventurer was found dead; sitting in his kayak on remote Melville Lake in late September. It was unclear what caused the death of Roy Willy Johansen, a 37-year-old Norwegian kayak champion who had crossed the ocean from Greenland two months earlier. The police report said there were no wounds, sores or scratches of any kind. It is believed he likely died of a heart attack.

Johansen had hoped to reach L'Anse aux Meadows, Nfld., by Oct. 9. His goal was to retrace the voyage of Norse explorer Leif Ericsson -- a punishing 1700 mile trip that started in Greenland on July 16. This final leg was by far the easiest of the journey. After crossing Davis Strait from Greenland to Baffin Island, the lone kayaker was met by five-metre waves, ice, dense fog, high winds and a polar bear.He tried to sleep in his big kayak, but the boat flipped when he dozed off. Soaked and freezing, he used a satellite phone to call for help., and incredibly it came.

A Canadian Coast Guard helicopter plucked him from an uninhabited island August 1. Johansen was taken to a hospital in Iqaluit, for treatment of severe frostbite to his hands and feet. He spent the next five weeks recuperating in Florida before flying to Happy Valley-Goose Bay in Labrador in mid-September. He later picked up his kayak and paddled east to North West River which lies at the end of Lake Melville.

Two boaters found Johansen's body five days later on Sunday, about 10 miles east of the tiny settlement on Lake Melville. He was still sitting in his kayak, which was stuck on the big lake's shoreline.

Author Farley Mowat's new book, Walking on the Land, is about the famine and relocations that devested the Barrenland Inuit of the Keewatin during the 1940s and 1950s, and left their mark on subsequent generations.

With few elders still alive who can remember this era, Mowat, now 79 himself, wanted to write again because "the world has forgotten what very little it knew about the Ihalmiut."

Nowadays, the media would have quickly descended on the Keewatin region to record the misery of the Inuit struggle to survive. But when Mowat went to the region in the 1950s, it was still a remote and difficult place to reach. As a writer with no official business in the region, he was obliged to hitch rides with the Hudson's Bay company, RCMP and missionaries simply to get around.

Mowat takes another shot at the outside forces that nearly destroyed the Ihalmiut and other Barrenland Inuit. "In 1958, while travelling through Keewatin, I learned of an equally grievous catastrophe that had befallen another and related Inuit group. This calamity proved to be so dark and terrible that I forebore from including it in The Desperate People for fear a surfeit of horrors would cause readers to shut the book and turn their hearts and minds away," Mowat writes. His previous two books on the subject were published during the 1950s, The People of the Deer and The Desperate People. Walking on the Land is published by Key Porter books, and sells for $29.95.

Deadly toxins in Nunavut have been traced to specific sources thousands of kilometres away in the South. A new study links dioxin contamination at eight sites in the Canadian Arctic to more than 44,000 polluters, mostly located in southern Canada and the United States.

Dioxin is believed to be a carcinogen, is classed as a POP, or persistent organic pollutant. In the Arctic, POPs build up in the fat of game animals like walrus and seals, and are passed along to people who eat country food. Past studies have found Nunavut mothers' breast-milk to contain twice the dioxin of that of mothers in southern Quebec. While airborne dioxins can travel anywhere in the world, they tend to concentrate in the North, where colder temperatures cause the contaminants to settle out of the air. There they pose a particular danger to humans because Northern diets are so high in animal fats.

This story first appeared in Che-Mun Outfit 102 in 2000.