Your Authentic Artic Experience

We suppose it’s a sign of the times. We’ve got it on very good authority that cell service will be unrolled in Churchill on April 1st, 2010.

We’re not sure how we feel about this. If service reaches into the Churchill Wildlife Management Area, where most of our Tundra Buggy adventuring occurs, there are at least two potential outcomes:
1) We may better fulfill our guests’ expectations of available services at a tourism destination, or
2) We may negatively impact the integrity of our adventure tourism product.
Again, we’re not sure how we feel about cell phones ringing in the background while a guest first locks their gaze with a polar bear…

With upwards of 10,000 international guests visiting the community of 800 people on an annual basis, whichever way you slice it, MTS is going to make a mountain in roaming charges. What are your thoughts on cellular service in Churchill? We welcome your thoughts.

Before Christmas, we blogged about Andrea, a Frontiers North guest that shared with us her photos of a beautiful gingerbread house she created – complete with polar bears and Tundra Buggy.  We have since found out that Andrea has been building these houses for over 27 years, and donates each one to the Concord Free Public Library.  Her work is so unique, it was actually featured in the Concord Journal!

Some fun facts: Andrea used 32 double batches of gingerbread in this year’s house and 100 pounds of gingerbread and candy.  Yum!

Click here to read the full story from the Concord Journal and view the photo slideshow!

As Dr. Peter Ewins detailed in a WWF-Canada recent blog post, WWF-Canada’s Polar Bear Tracker has verified that Churchill’s polar bears departed land, making their way onto frozen sea ice in December 2009 about seven-14 days later than normal, between November 29th and December 7th.

In a recent conversation with Dr. Andrew Derocher, Polar Bears International Scientific Advisory Council member and University of Alberta Biological Sciences professor, he helped us better understand break-up and freeze-up of ice on Hudson Bay.

“Ice break-up in spring is when 50% of ice has disappeared. On the other hand, from a behaviour perspective, freeze-up in autumn is when the ice near shore is thick enough to remain permanently on the ice and not return to land. In most years, this means a thick band of coastal ice and then most bears head north. The females wait a bit and seem to head more directly north east into the Bay…  I have a PhD student working on this very topic.”

We hope to share more information on this topic as it becomes available to us.