Parks Canada Creating New Parks

Edmonton Journal feature writer Ed Struzik spent four months this summer trekking through Canada's national parks, from the High Arctic to Point Pelee, Pacific Rim to Gros Morne. He found a parks system adored by Canadians, yet crumbling due to neglect. Over eight weeks in the Edmonton Sunday Reader, Struzik explores the mounting challenges the parks face.

Difficult births: Creating new parks

Polar bears keep scuttling our plans

UKKUSIKSALIK NATIONAL PARK, Nunavut -- Shortly before midnight, the sound of someone yelling "polar bear" rousts everyone up out of their sleeping bags and on their feet in a matter of seconds.

It's late July in Ukkusiksalik, Day 2 of our trip to the new national park along the west
coast of Hudson Bay. The Parks Canada crew I am with is here to survey the park and to
determine what management options need to be considered before adventurers start pouring in.

Outside our base camp on the banks of the Sila River near the west end of Wager Bay, our
Inuk guide Chesley Ford points towards the big animal lumbering across the tundra towards
us, seemingly oblivious to all the sleepy human traffic it has set into motion.

Several gulls launch into a noisy spin of aerial acrobatics but fail to deter the predator
from plunging past their perch into the water and swimming effortlessly to our side.

Instead of going for us, however, the bear takes a detour along the shoreline towards the
broken-down boat that was supposed to ferry us around the big inland sea.

When it becomes apparent there is nothing worthwhile there, the bear swings back toward us with its head held high, sniffing the air from time to time to see what might be in store
our way.

Before it gets too close, Ford fires off a couple of cracker shells that explode in a flash
of smoke over the animal.

To both our dismay and secret delight, it doesn't go far. So Ford, who has lived with bears
all his life, kick-starts the quad, and chases the animal back across the river where it
fades into the dusky, moonlit barren lands like a ghost floating in and out of times past.

In the end, it's left to Elizabeth Seale, the superintendent of Ukkusiksalik (oo-koo-sik-sah-lik), to interpret what this all means for her crew's plans to survey the park in the coming days.

"Tomorrow's hike to the site where the coffin of the mystery man is located?" she says,
pointing in the direction of the now long-gone bear. "It's cancelled."

When former prime minister Jean Chretien announced two years ago his plans to create 10 new national parks and five marine conservation areas across Canada by 2008, Ukkusiksalik was at the top of the list.

Tucked just below the Arctic Circle, the massive 20,558-square-kilometre park is a treeless
wonder of swimming polar bears, reversing waterfalls, wolves, wolverines and lines of
migrating caribou that can stretch for up to two kilometres.

For the Kivalliq Inuit of western Hudson Bay, this is their Garden of Eden.

Its natural significance was established way back in 1975 in a Parks Canada survey. When the park was finally born in 2003, however, it was not what planners had envisaged.

Any hope of including the entire watershed was dashed when a mineral survey identified the
potential for a gold mine along the upper regions of the Brown River, which flows through
the west end of the park. To make room for a mine and other possible developments, about
5,000 square kilometres of territory -- nearly one-fifth of the park -- were removed from
the original plan.

Should a mine ever go ahead, a road would be cut through the park and a seaport would likely be built on one of the islands in Wager Bay.

Ukkusiksalik not only shows how difficult it is to create a national park in Canada, it also
highlights why similar compromises likely will be needed to establish other parks in the
future, including the East Arm of Great Slave Lake in the Northwest Territories, Wolf Lake
in the southern Yukon and the Manitoba Lowlands.

"It's a life's work, really it is," says Seale, who worked for more than a decade on getting
Ukkusiksalik established.

"We did have to make a number of compromises to get this park. Some people might not like them, but that's the reality we had to face. The days are long gone when Parks Canada can simply go in and set up a national park wherever it wants.

"The alternative in this case was to have no park and leave it all to mining or some other
form of development."

JULY 27, DAY 3

Our third day at Ukkusiksalik begins just like the first two -- grey, windy, bone-chilling.
But the weather was the least of Seale's concerns in trying to accomplish her goals for this
10-day tour of duty.

First, a small group of Swiss tourists went missing on Wager Bay, and the plane that was
supposed to fly us in from the Inuit community of Baker Lake was seconded for the search and
rescue.

Then, time was lost waiting for engine parts needed to fix the broken-down boat that we were supposed to use.

Now, a polar bear on the prowl is preventing us from taking the archeologist to a mysterious grave at Tinittuktuq Flats.

No one knows the identity of the man in a wooden coffin, partially buried beneath a pile of
rocks there. But initial analysis of the few bleached bones still there indicates they are
not the remains of an Inuk. The long length of the femur and the shape of the pelvic bone
suggest the occupant was likely a tall male European.

Just how this man died and what he was doing here in this remote spot remains a mystery.

It's been suggested he might have been one of the 129 men who went missing after British
explorer John Franklin set sail in 1845 to search for a northwest passage through the
Arctic. That notion is based largely on circumstantial evidence, however: the skulls and
bones of some members of the Franklin expedition have been found at the mouth of the Back River not far from Wager Bay.

Other archeologists, however, believe the bones are more likely those of someone associated with the Hudson's Bay Company, which built a small trading post here in the late 1920s, or those of a whaler whose ship might have plied these waters sometime earlier.

Margaret Bertulli, the Parks Canada archeologist on this trip, was disappointed when Seale
decided it was too dangerous to examine the site.

"I personally doubt the grave has anything to do with Franklin," she says. "But I can't see
it being that of a whaler, either. I don't think any of their ships got this far inland. At
least there doesn't appear to be any record of it. That's why I would have liked to have got
in there."

Bertulli and I are hiking along the north coast of Wager Bay, about 100 metres behind the
rest of the Parks Canada group, making our way to another one of the more than 500
archeological sites identified in the park.

This particular site was home to the Thule, ancestors of the modern day Inuit.

"The Thule were the great whale hunters of the Arctic," says Bertulli. "They would go after
beluga and narwhal, and the biggest whale of all in the Arctic, the bowhead" -- which could
go a long way in sustaining a small community of people through winter.

"The Thule did quite well throughout the Arctic until the little Ice Age began sometime
around the 1500s. The cold weather and changing ice conditions made it more difficult for
them to make a living from the sea."

Not 20 minutes into our hike, Paula Hughson, the Baker Lake Inuk who works for both Parks
Canada and the tiny Inuit-owned lodge at Sila River, stops to look through her binoculars.

"It's another bear, swimming out there by that island," she says.

We look at one another in disbelief and wonder what our next move should be. Unlike
grizzlies, polar bears will stalk humans and are not always deterred by larger groups like
ours.

"I think we should go back," Hughson says, after about ten minutes of heated discussion.
"We've never had to kill a polar bear here and I don't want to be the first person who has
to."

Nancy Anilniliak, manager of Ukkusiksalik, concurs. "If the bear sees us, it will come," she
says. "We're just asking for trouble if we go any farther."

Although a half-starved grizzly was shot and killed at Sila River a few years ago, it's
polar bears that are causing nightmares for Parks Canada managers.

As many as 130 of the animals are thought to be living here. But that estimate is based on a quarter-century-old survey that was dogged by bad weather, limited flying time and
relatively primitive counting techniques.

The truth is no one really knows how many bears are in the park and just how much of a
threat they will be to adventurers who will soon start trickling in.

What is known is that the bears here have more than enough to eat thanks to a year-round
open body of water in Wager Bay that is a magnet for seals and whales in need of a place to come up for air during winter.

"I'm not sure how we're going to deal with the polar bear issue now that this is a national
park," says Jane Chisholm, the park ecologist.

"Hikers and kayakers are going to want to come here. But without a gun to protect
themselves, they'll be nothing but bait for the bears. Right now, the only people who can
legally carry a gun in a national park are the Inuit and park wardens."

DAY 5

Summer finally arrives at Wager Bay, and the bugs are harassing both us and the caribou
hanging around our camp. The preparation of breakfast hasn't even begun when Chesley Ford suggests that I look through his binoculars at what he has been spying out at sea.

My instincts tell me it is a pod of belugas, or better still, a narwhal, the so-called
unicorn of the sea. But what I spot through the glass looks more like a piece of moving ice.

It's only when I detect the black dot of a nose, and seals bobbing up and down around it,
that I realize this piece of moving ice is a polar bear swimming back and forth about a
kilometre out from the mouth of the Sila River.

"I saw him doing the same thing last night before I went to bed," Ford says. "He hasn't
caught one yet, I don't think, but he's not giving up either."

When he's not working at the Diavik Mine northeast of Yellowknife, Ford lives in his
hometown of Rankin Inlet south of here. He spends his summers at Wager Bay as a handyman and guide, if and when the five-cabin, Inuit-owned lodge is up and running.

"If I could do this all year, this is what I would do," he says. "This is where I'm most
happy. It's quiet, the air and water are clean, and there's lots of wildlife."

As the great-grandson of Sam Ford, the Scotsman who built the Hudson's Bay Company buildings at Ford Lake near the west end of the park, Chesley Ford has more than an economic stake in this part of the world. So does Eric Tatty, who arrives on the plane with Roger Pilakapsi and the boat engine parts required to get us on the water.

It was Eric's grandfather, Robert, who made the last and final attempt to set up a permanent community at Wager Bay when he pulled up stakes and resettled his extended family at the Ford Lake trading post in the early 1960s.

Robert Tatty was the son of Iqumajuq, or Wager Dick, the first Inuk to manage a Hudson's Bay Company post. It was Wager Dick who took over the operation at Ford Lake when repeated losses, and a collapse in the Arctic fox population, convinced the Hudson's Bay Company to pull out.

The Tattys and other Kivalliq Inuit leaders of western Hudson Bay are the reason there is a
park at Ukkusiksalik. It was through their land claims negotiations with the federal and
territorial governments that the national park came into being.

In one way, the park at Ukkusiksalik is the Inuit's way of paying homage to Wager Dick and
the other Inuit people who once lived here.

The Kivalliq Inuit, however, did have their conditions. Among them was a $3-million cheque
for economic development, a $400,000 Inuit Scholarship trust, payments for polar bear tags
to compensate Inuit hunters for future emergency polar bear kills, and a commitment to
stabilize and clean up the buildings at the Hudson's Bay post.

The Inuit are also tentatively in favour of a mine on the west boundary of the park if and
when a company comes in and finds enough minerals to get it up and running.

DAY 6

Not long into the first leg of our day-long flight around the boundaries of Ukkusiksalik, we
spot a pod of narwhal just above the waterfalls at Ford Lake that reverse their course when
the 2.5-metre-high tides come in from Hudson Bay.

The single-engine Otter is being used to give the new Parks Canada staff an aerial view of
the country they will be managing in the coming years.

There are 10 in this pod below us, including a couple of newborn calves and at least one
male.

Male narwhals have a spiralling tusk jutting out from the left side of their mouths. The
tusk is actually a tooth that begins to grow after the first year and can reach lengths of
up to three metres.

No one knows exactly what the tusk is used for, though there's speculation it may be a
jousting weapon used in courtship and displays of dominance, or possibly a means of
collecting food.

Narwhal are rare in this arm of Hudson Bay but like the bowhead whale, which has been
spotted in recent years, it appears to be making a comeback.

Flying over the southwest shore of Wager Bay, we follow a line of high cliffs and hillsides
that plateau out into a broad expanse of tundra extending all the way to Baker Lake. Only
when we get to the Brown River at the west end of the park does the landscape start to green up.

Trickling out of the arid tundra, the river picks up enough speed and volume that Parks
Canada and Environment Canada commissioned a study to see how much hydro power could be harnessed from it.

Although no one in Parks Canada will say so publicly, most people within the agency are
troubled that a significant part of the limited budget for creating new national parks must
go towards studying the hydroelectric and mineral potential of any area that is targeted.

In the case of Ukkusiksalik, Parks Canada's share of the mineral survey bill was $1 million.
Indian and Northern Affairs and Natural Resources Canada picked up the other two-thirds. The mining industry didn't have to spend a dime.

Although Parks Canada lost a battle with the two federal departments to include the entire
Brown River watershed in the park, Elizabeth Seale notes the Inuit approved the final
decision.

More than a few people within Parks Canada have their fingers crossed that such a mine will
never come to be. Mines have been a giant headache for the agency and a drain on its budget. Big dollars were spent on buying out a claim in Ivvavik National Park in the Yukon, and a lot of time and effort is being devoted to an unwanted mine on the border of Nahanni
National Park.

Fortunately for Parks Canada, other Inuit and Dene communities have not been as enthusiastic as the Kivalliq Inuit about mineral and hydroelectric development.

A few years ago, the Dene at Lutselk'e were successful in getting Parry Falls on the
Lockhart River included in the East Arm of Great Slave Lake land withdrawal.

And just last June, the Inuit of Resolute Bay said no to any development in the area being
targeted for a park on Northern Bathurst Island in the High Arctic.

DAY 7

It's dead calm when we set off on our first boat trip towards the Savage Islands in Wager
Bay. Roger Pilakapsi slows and steers the boat around a group of caribou swimming across the Sila River, then points to another polar bear in the water ahead.

The plan is to set up camp at the Hudson's Bay post at Ford Lake about 60 kilometres to the
west, and hike around from there.

While scanning the glistening surface, we pick up another one of those dots of moving ice.
As it turns out, this polar bear is at least 10 kilometres from the nearest shoreline, presumably hunting one of the many seals that we see along the way.

From the boat, the Reversing Waterfalls at Ford Lake look no more ominous than a giant
riffle. The current here, however, is powerful enough to overturn a good-size boat like
ours.

It's not difficult to imagine why the Hudson's Bay Company traders were willing to risk
passing through this treacherous stretch of water to get to and from their post on the north
side of Ford Lake.

Tucked into a small bay surrounded by steep hillsides, the buildings they put up were
well-protected from the gale-force storms that whip through this country.

The post represents a major challenge for Parks Canada. Even if the buildings could be
repaired and stabilized, the cash-strapped agency would be hard-pressed to come up with the money required.

Then there's the question of what to do about the litter that has accumulated over the
years. What's garbage to some outsiders could turn out to be integral to understanding and
appreciating the human history of the area.

And what a history it is.

The Ford Lake post was established not so much for trading with the local Inuit, few and far
between as they were, as it was for keeping their coastal neighbours from heading south and establishing a business relationship with the rival Revillon Company that had set up shop at Baker Lake.

According to the accounts of trading post manager Buster Brown, it was a formidable
challenge getting things up and running in 1925. Construction of the wooden buildings that
first fall was repeatedly hampered by frigid temperatures and fierce winds.

Efforts to harvest food and fur were also sabotaged by wolves and wolverines that routinely
raided their traplines.

In one letter to the district manager, Brown described a particularly troublesome wolf as a
"huge white Grandfather, and cunning as they make them." Despite being shot in the jaw, the wolf kept coming back.

On one particularly cold January night, Brown noted how the wolf "carefully pulled away the
snow pan and laid the trap bare so that he could inspect the mechanism."

"After this was done," wrote Brown, "he gave a loud laugh and devoured the bait at his
leisure, and in a most casual manner wandered off to the next trap where he ate the bait
only if it pleased him. (Then) he pounded the snow all around with his big pads so as to
frighten off any fox that might come along. He did not miss a single trap."

Brown ruefully added that "there is no need to mention that the staff don't feel friendly
toward him though they are compelled to admire him."

It's hard to know what Wager Dick and his friends thought of these white men who would sit
around a radio at night trying to pick up the broadcasts of hockey games from down south.

But they must have been astounded when a tractor was brought in with the supply boat the
next year. The idea was to get Brown to drive the specially designed contraption to the
Arctic coast to make contact with the Inuit.

In reality, this was just your average farm tractor equipped with two barrel/corkscrew
wheels to carry the crew and supplies effortlessly over the tundra.

After the first run, Brown wrote to his boss, noting that he was "trying to be optimistic
about it."

"But a more futile and pathetic thing I never saw," he exclaimed. "Tried to cross this
snowdrift about 18 inches deep and about eight feet wide ... It merely wallowed into it like
a pig in mire, dug itself in, with its drums revolving impotently."

Brown dismissed the design as "the offspring of a weak mind and a distorted intellect."

In the end, Brown did make it to the Arctic coast, but with an altogether different machine.
The 320-kilometre trip took 20 days and 1,200 litres of gas. One of the participants summed
up its usefulness by noting it took the tractor 21/2 days to do what a dog team could cover
in five hours.

The tractor now lies at Moros Bay in the park.

DAY 9

We are in awe, struggling to describe what we are witnessing at Gate City, the Thule site on
the northeast shore of Wager Bay. Then archeologist Margaret Bertulli finds the words.

"This really is a powerful place," she says, as we look at the more than 100 tent rings,
caches, fox traps, hearths and other stone features that were constructed on this spit by
generations of nomadic peoples.

"The Thule really liked to move big rocks," says Bertulli. "Robert MacGhee (an Arctic
archeologist) once noted that their modification of the Arctic landscape as a geological
event was second only to the last continental glaciation."

Gate City is named for one enormous stone feature on the spit of land that remains somewhat of a mystery. No one knows what function its gate-like feature represents, but Inuit elders who have visited the site or seen photographs suggest they may have been used in aklungiqtarvik, a form of gymnastics in which a sealskin rope was stretched across the top of the opening to serve as a bar.

In the coming years, Bertulli will have her hands full if she gets permission from the Inuit
to excavate one or more of these 500 sites at Ukkusiksalik. So will the wardens who will be
responsible for making sure none of the sites are disturbed.

With polar bears, grizzlies, beluga and other species of special concern in the park, the
agency faces a struggle to find the money to do so much.

"Polar bear research doesn't come cheap," says Chisholm. "But it's going to have to be done to evaluate how we can reduce human conflicts with bears.

"We don't expect a lot of people to be coming to the park. But with all the bears we have,
we have to do something."

Towards the end of our final full day at Ukkusiksalik, Roger Pilakapsi steers the boat into
Douglas Harbour where the Piksimanik River flows out of the tundra. The plan is for Bertulli
to have a quick look at yet another Thule site that was also used by modern Inuit.

Once again, however, our plans are foiled by a polar bear. This one is on shore hunting
seals that are bobbing up and down in front of him along the mouth of the river.

Instead of running away as most bears do when they hear an engine, this bear just gives us a quick sideways scowl that seems to suggest we get lost.

Heading back to camp for the last time, no one is complaining about another lost opportunity to explore and survey the park. In the land of swimming polar bears and reversing waterfalls, it seems like the perfect way to end the trip.

estruzik@thejournal.canwest.com