mud season

They say Cambridge Bay has four seasons: ice, dust, mud and more mud. We are in our second season of mud right now.  I'll be totally honest. It's not Cambridge Bay's prettiest season.  Ice season in Cambridge Bay is pretty. Even dust season is pretty neat.

  

Wet,wet mud.

Mud season is just dreary.  The nights get dramatically longer. The temperature consistently hovers around 1°C, and it's just a bit too cold to go kayaking, even with a wetsuit.  It's hard to get the motivation to go outside sometimes, including hiking or jogging because, well, there's just so much mud. Wet, wet mud.  There has been a permanent blanket of clouds covering the sky. Sometimes it rains. More wet mud.  Sometimes it snows, and things are kind of pretty for a while with the light dusting of snow covering all the wet mud...but then it melts and we go back to wet mud.

We can't have nice things: Mud-speckled pants are the raging trend here in CamBay

It's not just the mud. Like I mentioned, it's been permanently cloudy and foggy.  Besides causing me daily pressure headaches at noon, it also means that the planes have not been able to land or leave Cambridge Bay - and that's a big deal for a fly-in only community.  Circuit court finished on Tuesday, but some of the staff and lawyers are still waiting to fly out.  Some visitors have been trying to leave town since Saturday but have been stranded here.  The town should put up a sign that says "WELCOME TO THE HOTEL CALIFORNIA".

   

You can check out any time you like, but you can never leave

 Also, the whole town hasn't received any groceries or mail all week, because the planes haven't been able to leave. This is going to be a big deal for me, because we're out of tofu in our house.  And they are forecasting that it's going to keep being like this for the next five or six days.  Looks like next year, September is the month to go for a tropical vacation down south!

On the bright side, the refueling ship did finally pull into port last week. This was another big worry that the community had for a while - the entire town had been running out of fuel, and there was some concern about whether the refueling ships would make it into the Bay in time before the entire Artic Ocean froze. There were reports of large icebergs all throughout the Northwest Passage, making navigating difficult, and if our fuel resupply ships didn't make it in before the Arctic Ocean froze, they wouldn't be able to come into port until it all thawed...like, in June next year. But our fuel arrived last week, hurrah, so we'll be able to keep our homes heated and trucks running for another season.