Good and Bad Weather

Great weather today and yesterday. Went and got the baby yesterday. He spent a week up to Eagle River with his Nan and Pop. Mom and Dad were sad to see him go. He had a great time up there. He was outdoors a lot walking all over the place and sliding.We had a storm not long ago, a lot of snow came down. This was followed by two really good days (today and yesterday)and tomorrow we will get rain and after that it will get quite cold. The temperature is supposed to get up to plus 2 or 3 and later on in the evening it will drop to minus 22. Very erratic weather. A sign of global warming I guess.

There was a polar bear in the community of Black Tickle/Domino Feb 17/09. He attacked someones dog shaking it in his mouth and followed someone up onto their bridge being promptly hit on the head with a shovel. The resident then grabbed his gun and shot the bear to drive it away. The bear was not killed. Wildlife and DFO officials flew up to see if the bear could be saved or be put down but as of today they have been unable to locate the animal. He was last seen on his way over to nearby Spotted Island.

The following is an excerpt from one of my journals

Aug 23/06

Went out to Cape North and Gready this afternoon to see if we could get any fish. Still never got any. I got 3 rock cods and a sculpin and ***** got a herring. Passed **** Martin and ****** Dyson on the way in just past the Sisters. A few thunder showers on the way out and in. We stopped at Cape North for a while.

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.