Baffin Island

On April 10th, three Canadian adventurers will be embarking on an exciting, though rather unexpected, journey. It began back in October 2006 with Nat filling out a simple contest entry on the Salomon Women Will website www.salomonwomenwill.com. The Live Your Dreams contest is meant to encourage women to take on a leadership role on expeditions around the world. On January 13th, we got the word that Nat had won and immediately began making plans for an expedition to the Sam Ford Fjord on Baffin Island. We spent weeks surfing the internet, making countless phone calls (complicated by Nat and Cory not having phones or internet), getting a rifle license (polar bears roam the Fjord) and dealing with the logistical nightmares of planning an extended trip on Baffin Island. Through it all, we managed to hammer out a plan we are all stoked about and with the help of Salomon, contest co-sponsors Saab and Ozone, it was better than any of us could have imagined.

On April 10th, we’ll leave from Calgary Alberta in a Saab Bio-Diesel car and begin our journey across Canada to Ottawa, Ontario. We plan to take about five days to make the trip, visiting family, friends and cool sights along the way. From Ottawa we’ll catch our flight on the 15th and fly to Iqaluit on Baffin Island where we’ll hop on a flight to Clyde River (pop. 758). There we’ll be picked up by snowmachine and head 110km to the Sam Ford Fjord. With our fingers crossed for good winds, our Ozone snow kites will transport us into the Fjord where we’ll find peaks 3000 to 5000 feet jutting straight up out of the Arctic Ocean. We plan to use our kites to gain access to the base of couloirs that slice through these granite peaks so that we can climb and ski them.

We don’t know how to put our excitement into words but we can’t wait to tell everyone about how it goes!

Nathalie Gervais, Cory Boschman, Stephen LeMaistre