Week 1 (May 10-16)

After a day of training on the workshops and meeting up with the other workshop instructors at Actua head office in Toronto, it was off to the North West Territories. Danielle and I must have drawn the short straw as we had the earliest flight and the latest final arrival time. We arrived at the Ottawa airport at 4am for a 6am flight to Toronto, then to Calgary, Yellowknife, and finally Fort Simpson by 8pm local time. My first view of Northern Canada was of the frozen Great Slave Lake, which, after taking plane window pictures of the Rocky Mountains, only made me nervous for workshops the next day.

Our plane to Fort Simpson was the smallest plane I’d ever been on (although I’ve been on smaller since!). The pilot was pretty much my age and we shared the remaining ten seats with a couple of mining consultants scoping the area for Enbridge (either nickel or zinc), and some Fort Simpson locals coming back from two week on two week off shifts at a different mine site. We arrived in the rain and were promptly told how happy everyone was that it was rain not snow. Fort Simpson sits on island right at the point where the Liard and Mackenzie rivers meet. Apparently the ice had broken just the night before which is the generally recognized sign of summer. (According to our hotel manager, there is no spring. It’s winter until the ice breaks, then it’s summer). We missed seeing the ice break, but got to watch the massive chunks float by in the current.

Fort Simpson is the largest town in the district with just over 1200 people. As such it has the

district school board office (where our community contact, the self proclaimed district Science Guy works) and the largest of the districts two high schools, students who go to the high school from other towns either board with someone in the community, or stay at the school residence (kind of like a dorm, but with a live in “house parent” to keep an eye on everything). One of the residences is currently empty, so Danielle and I were put up there for the week. It was pretty sweet.

We were scheduled to head out to Jean Marie River on Friday, but were surprised in the morning by freezing rain, which no sensible pilot of a 5 seater plane will fly in (pffft, safety). The back-up plan was to drive, but as the ice had just broken that week, the ferry over the river wasn’t in yet. Well, it was in, they just needed the federal inspector to sign off on it (pffft, safety). We’d already done our scheduled workshops to the schools in Fort Simpson (7 workshops, 10 grades, 2 days. Champions of science!!!) but since we were apparently stuck, we asked if maybe there was something else we could help out with. The answer: Kindergarten!!! Bad weather is no match for these kids!

The snow was winter’s last hurrah. By Saturday morning it was blue skies and the snow had melted. Things picked up so much, that by Sunday the kids in town for high school orientation were in shorts and bare feet when we dropped by for a rocket activity. We did mentos and diet coke, then helped out with a water balloon fight.