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Showing posts from August, 2018

In the land of the shape-shifters

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I have convinced Neil to abandon our important fall chores of hunting, building and berry picking to head north to the Arctic Ocean in search of pingos. Poor Homer got left behind in Dawson. He knew what was coming                             Setting off I couldn’t spend another year in the far north without seeing a pingo. It’s hard for us to travel. The river’s either freezing or breaking and we can’t get off our property, or the truck’s in the wrong place, or snowed in or something’s going on. So unless a pingo wanders past the house during its annual migration, we’ll have to go to them. We packed up our camping gear and drove all the way to Tuktoyaktuk on the Beaufort Sea, where pingos graze on the golden tundra.                           Pingos in the wild No they don’t. Pingos are land forms, conical hills that are created when a pool of ground water sits on the permafrost and freezes slowly, pushing the land above it i