Nunavik Adventure Challenge

My Nunavik Adventure

Nicky Cameron (Team Bobkitten) / 08.05.2012

My Nunavik adventure began like most of my adventure races – with an email from my friend Leanne Mueller. A few years ago, Leanne formed an all-female adventure racing team called the Salomon Bobkittens, and included me as one of the lucky kittens.

The email had “Temptation?” as the subject line and a few details. Location: Kangiqsualujjuaq, Quebec. (Where?)  Activities: backcountry skiing, ropes, snowshoeing, sleeping in a real igloo.  “Come on, Nick,” she wrote, “It’s the next great Bobkitten adventure!”

As it turned out, it was more than just another chance to get really tired and sleep in the forest with Leanne, although I would have jumped at that, too.  The race in question was on the northern tip of Quebec, on Ungava Bay, and would involve meeting and racing with the Inuit community, as well as competing with other Qallunaat (non-Inuit) adventure racers for three days in the coldest environment I had ever been in, with one night spent outdoors.  “Don’t worry,” said Lee, “I have TONS of hand warmers.”

The race was the brainchild of Endurance Aventure, a Quebec-based adventure racing company.  For the past few years, Endurance Aventure has been working with communities in Nunavik to encourage outdoor physical activity. Inuit youth are introduced to adventure racing, provided with equipment and training, and then compete in a short race.  Winter 2012 would be the first time the race was opened to participants outside of Nunavik.

Daniel Poirier, the founder of Endurance Aventure wanted to showcase the region for international participants, and targeted his adventure racing contacts from around the world to come participate in the event of a lifetime.  He ended up with three teams from Italy, one from France, one from the United States (the world champion Mike Kloser and son Christian Kloser), and even a team from South Africa.

Despite our Canadian origins, Nunavik was almost as unfamiliar, exciting, and scary for us as for anyone there. Unreachable except by an extremely expensive flight, all we knew about the region came from depressing media accounts of third-world living conditions, paired with photos of polar bears and never-ending snow. As a child, I was terrified of the Inuit art section of the National Gallery – monstrous and fantastical animals and hunters contributed to my sense that the Arctic was more a part of Canadian mythology than real.

The reality of North is that it requires a lot of equipment.  March 24^th found Leanne and me in a small hangar near the Montreal airport, where we discovered that all of us had maxed out our allotted weight of 50 lbs. per person. Our plane was switched for one that could take 2000 more lbs of load, but needed to stop twice during our 4 hr. flight to refuel.   Each time we stopped to get off, it was colder, snowier, and the airport was smaller and more comfortless.  When we emerged in Kangiqsualujjuak, the world was white, and snowmobiles were waiting to take us to town.   The South Africans delighted the welcoming crowd by picking up snow for the first time, and throwing it in the air to watch it scatter.