beautiful weather today

Temperatures are finally warmed up. We took the baby sliding today in to Little Everest. For those of you who don't know, Little Everest is a gulsh about half mile outside town limits named because of its high steep sides. Temperatures are supposed to warm up up to plus 2 Wednesday, which is too warm. Rain is also forecast for Wednesday.

In Captain George Cartwright's time many or most of the southern Inuit died, at least in the Sandwich Bay area. When English settlers started coming over no European women came with them so the men married Inuit women. This is where the Labrador Metis came from. This trend continued well into the 1800's and probably early 1900's. Today we (Labrador Metis) can trace our Inuit ancestry back hundreds of years to the earliest setlers and our Inuit ancestors inhabited the south coast as late as the early to mid 1900's at least up around Spotted Island and Batteau area where my family is originally from. If you look at some of the people around here (Cartwright) you can easily see their Inuit features. It is intersting to note here that in the 1950's when there was an American radar base at Spotted Island the Americans called the villagers "Eskimo's" even though they weren't Inuit or settlers of purely european descent.

The Wonderstrands (also spelled Wunderstrands), Porcupine Strand, or simply The Strand, is a 40 km long beach just north of Cartwright. It was named by the Vikings who passed by there 1000 years ago. It was so striking the Vikings called it Wunderstrand. It is actually composed of four separate beaches broken by points of land. It is a unique area of Labrador. Inside the beaches you have either boreal forest, tundra, marsh land or sand dunes. It is home to the endangered Mealy Mountain Caribou Herd and is an important staging area for waterfowl. It is also part of an ongoing research project called the Porcupine Strand Archaeological Project. Several ancient peoples inhabited this area including Thule, Dorset and Paleo Eskimo if I am not mistaken. It was also home to our Inuit ancestors(who intermarried with English settlers to create the Metis we know today)

Two points of interest, it is rumored that the Vikings landed somewhere on the Strand to repair a broken keel most likely Cape Porcupine. Porcupine Strand was also the site of military activity in the 1940's as far as I know, particularly Cape Porcupine and Sandy Cove. I will elaborate on that more later.

Pretty cold again today. Julie had to go over to the clinic for a mask. Turns out she got pneumonia and got to go to Goose Bay for another chest x ray. Mom and Dad will be going back to Eagle River any day now. They had a couple weeks off work. They are the care takers for Goose Bay Outfitters lodge on the Eagle River. The bay is froze over good now including North River Run. North River Run was froze over a long time now but only recently was safe to travel on.

This is my first blog. I am from Cartwright, Labrador. I will be adding more info about me and where I am from later. I will also add local news, events and attractions, and some photos of Cartwright and the surrounding area including the Wonderstrands.