Grise Fiord, Canada's most northerly community | Hacker News Reader

Grise Fiord, Canada's most northerly community

o.canada.com

65 pointsmykowebhn71 comments

I'm not sure how to word this so forgive me if it doesn't make sense. I was born 'up north' in a very remote community where my parents had to drive two hours (down awful roads) to reach the hospital where I was delivered. It is far enough north from where I live now that I could not drive to that community in one day.

However, when I look at where that community is located and compare it to Grise Fiord, it is very far south. Heck, it is so far north of where I was born that if you went to where I was born and went a comparable distance south, you would end up in Mexico...

Canada is so big that I have trouble imagining how big it really is.

My spouse had family from Holland come visit us. They told us they wanted to see Niagara Falls and the Rockies. When we explained it would take a week to drive from Niagara to the Rockies they boggled. It's hard to conceptualize just how vast Canada is when back home you can drive for an hour and pass through three different countries.

I lived above a pizza guy in Padova Italy and would occasionally go down to get a slice if I didn't feel like cooking and chat with him a bit.

When he realized I was from the US, he went "oooh, America is really big isn't it... what, it's got to be at least 1000 km across, right?!". Try almost 5!

Lets not forget Brazil, the mercator projection makes it seem much smaller but in reality it's surface area (8,515,770 Km2) exceeds that of the continental US (8,080,464.3 km2).

What I've found useful to convey the relative sizes of countries is to use a website that allows dragging country outlines to somewhere more familiar [0]. That way it's easier to say that driving from one end of the country to another in a few hours isn't really doable because it's the same size as California or the distance from Zurich to Madrid.

[0] https://thetruesize.com/

This is super fun to play with. I was surprised to interactively discover that South Africa was bigger than the Nordic countries.

When I was in University, I had a roommate from Germany. He was blown away how if he wanted to drive east from our place to Montreal, it would be around 2900 km. Had he driven that far east from where he is from, he could have ended up in Asia.

He joked that if he made that trip in Europe, he would see hundreds of different cultures and hear languages he could barely recognize as language. But here, he could drink Tim Horton's coffee "and hate his life" the whole 2900 km trip. He wasn't big on Tim Horton's.....

Yup, Toronto, Canada (where I live) is closer to the equator (in South America) than it is to the North Pole.

Oh, I love that comparison. I moved to Toronto from Chicago, and my family and friends are bewildered that I haven't had to buy some sort of exotic encounter suit to survive the tundra.

Lol, the weather in Toronto and Chicago is practically identical. The average temperature difference is a whole two degrees.

"But it's Canada!"

Anyway, yes, growing up very close to the border the weather was predictably virtually identical (usually a degree or two warmer in Toronto, actually) and this seemed to confuse everyone, including Canadians.

Right now in Chicago it's 51 degrees, but in Toronto it's only 14!

I just had to confirm this with a distance measuring check in Google Earth and yep, looks like it's true. Had no idea.

Just look at the latitude: Toronto is about 43.6 deg north, so about 100 miles or 160km south of the halfway line (45 deg N).

Toronto is also further south than a good chunk of the U.S. About the same latitude as the Washington/Oregon border

Yeah, the way that the border juts upward around the Great Lakes makes for interesting equi-latitude pairs. I grew up near Portland, OR, which is at essentially the same latitude as Montreal or Ottowa, though the climates are nowhere near similar. Seattle is north of Quebec City! And, of course, going east across the pond, Toronto is at around the same latitude as the south coast of France, on the Mediterranean. Very counter-intuitive.

This seems like a fun math game. Grise Ford is at 76.4 deg north, and the northernmost point of Mexico (near Yuma, AZ) is at 32.7 deg north, for a difference of 43.7 (45 would be half the distance from the equator to the pole). Round up to 44 and split in half, add 33+22, and your hometown is at most 55 deg north.

I guess it depends on what part of Canada. In Ontario and Quebec, 55N is the middle of the Canadian shield, a maze of lakes with no roads and almost no settlements (looking at satellite view, because I don't know the area). But out west on the prairie, Edmonton is 54N and while as a USian, I consider it the great white north, it has roads and towns all the way there. And settlements continue further W and N into BC. I have a friend in Ft St John at 56N. Ultimately, there are several roads (more recent) going up to the arctic Ocean (69N at Tuktoyktak, NT, and 71N at Barrow, Alaska).

I do get your point though, Canada stretches far north and has lots of empty areas and small communities with low connectivity to the rest of the country. After all, Canada is the second largest country by land area.

I really like this reply - that is some seriously good work and you made me laugh. You just about nailed it. Had I done the math, you would have found me to within a few km. Instead, I eyeballed it and we’re about .2 degrees apart.

The answer is Pelican Narrows, Saskatchewan.

Throwaway account.

I live in northern Canada, have been to most communities up here in both Nunavut and Northwest Territories. It's GREAT, life is extremely different, but it's extremely rewarding and fulfilling.

Most people move up and either move away within 2 years, or they end up staying for a long time. I've found it to be very binary -- either you love it or hate it.

Any questions, ask away!

How do you make money and/or acquire resources?

Service work. Government work. Mining and natural resources are the major employers.

It's really not as barren as it comes across, hell, Amazon Prime ships here -- it'll just be 3-4 days instead of 1.

How's the internet up there?

Surprisingly good in larger cities. 100mbit in capitals fed by fibre. DSL is an option, though many communities are ultimately fed via satellite. So you'll get LTE, it's just limited to 3mbit and 600ms latency.

Pricing isn't great, and all plans have bandwidth caps of less than 500GB per month. It's do-able.

What is great about it?

Genuine question, not saying that it isn't, just curious what exactly makes it great for you.

I was in Whitehorse, YT for 4 years, loved it. Can't wait to get back North. Once it's in your blood, it's hard to stay away!

>I’m Canadian enough to know the horror of minus 40, but anything beyond that is daunting.

I'm Canadian too, and I was surprised to read that line.

I've spent winters in Northern Quebec where the temperature regularly hovered around -40C and it was glorious.

Everything sparkles. Everything.

In fact, -40C feels warmer than +5C because there is no humidity in the air to make your skin feel the cold.

If you are unprepared for the weather, trying to get by in shorts and t shirt, you're absolutely going to have a bad time.

But so long as you're bundled up and your house has good insulation, a -40C day is usually much more enjoyable than a +40C day.

I'm a moderate-temperature Vancouverite most of the time, but - does windchill factor in here?

In my limited experience, negative X is one thing, and usually quite manageable if, as you say, you bundle up properly. Once windchill gets involved, though, things can get miserable quickly.

It doesn't really factor in here, because the wind just isn't that bad and we have elevation. I'm also a Vancouverite, but from Winnipeg, so I'm very familiar with both. I'd also say that a night on Salt Spring with no heat is insufferable in it's own way. The difference is bone chilling cold here in the worst of times, vs face on fire mode in the prairies.

Yes, but below -25 or so you don't have any exposed skin so it matters a lot less. Mostly just decided whether your eyelashes freeze in place or not.

This year Winnipeg broke its minimum wind chill temperature record for a full year, reaching lows regular lows of below -52 between Jan and Feb. Not fucking fun.

Hmm, i'm going to have to disagree with you on this:

"-40C feels warmer than +5C"

I've been outdoors in both, plenty of times, to hike or to engage in my hobby of landscape photography.

At +5C, it's perfectly possible to hike for hours in light pants and a t-shirt, with a sweatshirt or light jacket in your day pack in case it gets cold. At -40C, I was wearing multiple layers of wool, fleece, and a gore-tex parka, just to stay warm.

This is broadly true, but humidity has a huge effect which I think parent was alluding to.

Coastal mist at 5 degrees isn't remotely comfortable to hike in with the clothing you describe, unless perhaps you are trail running.

What's that old line about the worst winter someone experienced being a summer in San Francisco?

Yes, completely true - if it's 5'C and windy and damp, it's pretty miserable (I lived in Seattle for many years, so very familiar with this situation.)

But, given the same amount of wind, I'd still rather hike in 5'C vv -40'C.

>At -40C, I was wearing multiple layers of wool, fleece, and a gore-tex parka, just to stay warm.

You must have been trekking through some high winds, I imagine?

-40C ice fishing out in the middle of a lake with no barrier is much different than -40C walking around a small town with buildings and trees and barriers to block the wind.

It feels like you're walking in a void, really.

High winds increase the amount of moisture that does hit your skin, and also saps you of any warmth pockets in your garments much faster.

It's all relative I suppose.

Haerbin in China is typically at -40C or worse in the winter, and it isn’t that bad...except my digital camera battery died really quickly. I wonder how a modern smart phone would fare (that was...2005, we only had normal cellphones). Of course, Haerbin is a huge city with central heating, so its quite different from being in a small community or in the wilderness.

>except my digital camera battery died really quickly

Indeed!

Batteries still dislike extreme cold, afaik.

Never heard of Haerbin before, but the pictures are beautiful!

The ice sculptures are worth it, as is the huge frozen solid river. They also sell ice cream in the winter and don’t bother using freezers.

Not better. I live in Quebec City. When we get anything under -30C, my iPhone XS battery dies in a matter of seconds once out of a pocket.

Whoa there, did you have an especially horrible winter there? It's been closer to -20 C in my experience (which admittedly was only a couple of weeks). Maybe you're thinking of Mohe? Also smartphones don't fare well if you leave them out. I had to constantly warm up my phone in my pocket, otherwise the battery would often die if I was out and about and left it out in my (gloved) hand too long.

Maybe I’m misremembering it? I remember the digital thermometer falling from -30 to -40 on the bus I was riding on from Changchun, but maybe it was something like -20 to -30? Anyways m, Beijing felt absolutely balmy when I finished that trip.

True. Northern Ontario here. I was born and raised in Toronto, where a damp -10C + moderate windchill feels orders of magnitude colder than dry -40 and no windchill.

The coldest I've been in was -52C (off an alcohol thermometer) and I was fine beyond my eyelids and nostrils crystalizing. That being said, I've been frost bitten a handful of times, each time, the temperature has been near freezing and damp.

But at the end of the day, I'd gladly exchange locales down to the North Carolina/Tennessee area on a permanent basis.

> I was fine beyond my eyelids and nostrils crystalizing.

As a fellow Canadian from Québec, this is how I explain the degrees of coldness to people whom have never experienced it.

You know it's really cold out when your eyelids momentarily freeze shut when blinking due to the accumulated moisture on your eyelashes spontaneously freezing together.

> Everything sparkles

This is extreme rationalization.

No, it's a literal description. For example, at those temps snow becomes a very fine powder that literally sparkles in sunlight.

I grew up in Alaska and no. Absolutely not. -40C is so cold that your face hurts when you walk. Your pants get insanely cold in the places where they are away from your skin and then chill you when they touch again. It's miserable.

It is quite pretty though.

I rode my bike to work in -48C, and rode every day of the winter for 4 years.

I would never, ever describe it as miserable. I loved it, and can't wait to get back North (Yukon)

Anybody who willingly rides their bike in -48C is (by definition) an outlier. I’m sure you’re quite tough, but yours is not a universal experience.

> a -40C day is usually much more enjoyable than a +40C day

I can't believe I just read this :)

With an appropriately-sized and designed HVAC system, home, and fans, 40C is completely comfortable indoors. If your home is designed well, you probably don't even need a whole lot of energy to achieve this.

The difference is, in 40C you can also be outside at any part of the day, for any duration (especially in the shade). I haven't spent a great deal of time at -40C, but I can tell you my experience is that it was pretty miserable to be outside in, even bundled up.

I was curious to see whereabout this was, and while it is incredibly remote, google maps actually showed me another place that is even farther north: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Alert,_Nunavut

You are correct: Alert and Eureka are both further north. However, I believe that they are both research or defense installations. While I believe that they are both occupied year round, I don't believe that they qualify as "community" because people are assigned there; nobody is "from" there.

Yes - per wiki, Alert has Canadian a military SIGINT monitoring station and a couple of weather stations. Eureka seems to just be a research station.

Most residents aren't really "from" Grise Fiord either. Quoting from Wikipedia:

The settlement (and Resolute) was created by the Canadian government in 1953, partly to assert sovereignty in the High Arctic during the Cold War. Eight Inuit families from Inukjuak, Quebec (on the Ungava Peninsula) were relocated after being promised homes and game to hunt, but the relocated people discovered no buildings and very little familiar wildlife.

>> " partly to assert sovereignty in the High Arctic during the Cold War."

Just Wow: "We're afraid that another power might assert claim/dominance over this giant region, so we we'll get a few dozen people, who have no real skin in the game, to form a small hunting/fishing villiage. That'll stop another power from claiming this WHOLE area." ~Humans are weird....

This line really stuck out to me:

> Adventure Canada expedition leader Jason Edmunds always works with communities to develop a plan that’s about “connections and what they want to show us” instead of just what we might want to see. The company only goes where it is welcome.

If only more companies would operate that way.

If you're into winter sports, check out the video of the local snowboarder that was linked from the article: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tlc2G8Zsay4

Interesting to see this on the same day as the "overtourism" article shared here too

Even worse it involves a cruise ship.

https://foe.org/cruise-report-card/

https://www.npr.org/2019/06/04/729622653/carnival-cruise-lin...

I was under the impression that Alert was the most northernly, permanently inhabited, community. It is approximately 800kms from the North Pole, while Grise Fiord is approximately 1,500kms away.

Alert is primarily a military base, so perhaps that quality is making the distinction here.

Alert is permanently inhabited but has no permanent residents, if that makes sense. Everyone there is on an overlapping rotation.

It makes sense if one replaces "Alert" with "A hotel". Pretty much the same difference.

I sometimes go on Google Maps and explore remote areas and I always wonder what life is like in the bleak wilderness; and I think how helpless I'd be if I lived there. I grew up in the SF Bay Area and the thought of being so remote scares me. I crave being near humanity, or at least having a good enough internet connection to pretend I'm near. It's a fault, for sure, but I am what I've been made to be.

You might want to check out the nat geo show "life below zero." it follows people living mostly off the land near the arctic circle. the first few seasons are quite good before the producers started interfering.

I will check it out, also that analysis about producers interfering after a couple good seasons sounds like 95% of nat geo or discovery channel shows, hah.

Can anyone give insights into the written language used by the Inuktitut, which appears in the first photo? Can it be adapted to other languages/dialects? Is it used in Greenland or Alaska?

It is used in Northern Alaska as well as Greenland. See https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Inuktitut and https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Inuktitut#/media/File%3AInuk... for the map.

See https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Inuktitut_syllabics About the written language. It seems to have been adopted from Cree by a missionary, which itself was another missionary devised script with an influence from India Indian Devanagari.

TIL that Canadians spell fjord "fiord"

Funny, I read the name immediately as "messy fjord" (to make a mess is "å grise" in Norwegian).

I read it as "Pig fjord" or "Pig Bay", but that is in Cuba.

Edit: ah, I see from a sibling comment that is indeed from Norwegian. I guess I got confused about the fiord thing and though it was a local name at first!

We don't...that's the first time I've ever seen it spelled like that. The name of the town is Norwegian

>The second comes from Norwegian explorer Otto Sverdrup and means “pig fiord” for the grunting sound that walrus herds make and the fact this spot is tucked between cliffs at the mouth of a gorgeous fiord.

I don't know why the author spelled it like that throughout the article when talking about the landform.

https://wikidiff.com/fiord/fjord

Apparently fiord is a New Zealand spelling? >Alternative forms * fiord (New Zealand

We do! Sometimes. A lot of places in Nunavut use that spelling - just a historical oddity I suppose.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com