August 10th

Today was my favourite day that we have had on this trip. I was woken upat 6:40am by someone saying “get up there is a bear at the fence”. With my camera and not quite awake, i used outside and saw that I was 2 meters away from a fully grown polar bear. We took pictures of the bear for about 20 minutes and eventually it walked away from the camp and moved in to the willows to take a nap. Since it was an early start to the morning and everyone was excited because they just saw a polar bear; we decided to make breakfast and start packing our gear for the last day of field work. Once everyone was packed up and ready to go we left the camp and started on our hike on the beach ridge. The polar bear that was seeping before now was awake and walked beside us for quite a while. It was a beautiful sunny, warm day and i couldn’t have asked for a better way to start it. Our site went really well and everyone was extremely efficient with getting all the work done. Once we were finished with the site we met up with some of the people visiting goose nests and hiked to the beach for a fire, lunch and exploring. The beach was one of the best parts of the day, everyone was really excited to get some time to hangout and look for fossils, take a nap, or just sit and talk around the fire. While we were sitting and eating lunch we were able to sit and watch 5 polar bears off in the distance, which was very neat. After the beach our group split up, most of the people went with Jim to go look at fox dens while myself and a few other students went with Jill back to camp. The walk back to camp wasn’t long at all, we passed the time with riddles and getting to know each other better. Once we were back at camp some people started cooking dinner and preparing breakfast for tomorrow while others took a nap, or burnt the garbage. Dinner was ready when the whole group was back, so we had one of our family style dinners outside and talked about highlights from the day. After dinner we all gathered our cameras up and walked over to the foot den, where we saw all the pups playing outside. Scott, the junior ranger on this trip talked to all of us about some of the expeditions that he goes on with the junior rangers. Now we are sitting around the fire making smores, and waiting for the northern lights to show up in the clear sky.  

Leah Hicks, Kelvin High School 17'