Canadian Test Drive

Day 10: Pathfinders... 19.03.2022

Expedition through the eyes of Alexei Safonov:

It was the quietest sunny day. We got out to the bay, which was covered with fairly flat ice of 1.5 meters thickness. The speed was good, only in the joints of the ice half-meter hummocks made it drop. On one of the joints of ice the first car spotted something that looked like a seal. When we drove closer the animals had disappeared, and in their place we found a half-meter round hole in the ice and blood stains of probably caught fish. We moved on. An hour later we noticed the tracks of bears walking toward the pile of ice. Carefully approaching and making sure there were no furry animals nearby, we began to explore the hummock. There were two types of bear tracks: larger and smaller, so we concluded that it was a mother and a baby bears. There was also a hole in the hummock, and a large bone next to it, obviously not a fish-bone. Maybe it belonged to a seal... That's what the Arctic food chain is like, I thought, and wandered to the car. I didn't want to be in the middle of it.

The day ended with a bright sunset and a bloody full moon, which replaced the sun. It took a long time to rise from behind the horizon, transforming from a flattened red egg to a white, bright nighttime "sun".