The journey is about 200 kilometres. The group will fly into Baker Lake, then take a chartered plane to a place called Kittikat. From there, they plan to hike in a roughly southerly direction for three weeks until they reach Amarulik, which Uyagaqi Kabloona said means “the place where there are wolves.”
Amarulik is near Agnico Eagle Mines Ltd.’s Meadowbank Complex. Thomas Kabloona, with the help of Agnico Eagle, plans to pick the group up and return them to Baker Lake once they are finished.
Historical migrations were well planned, Uyagaqi Kabloona said.
“I’m not shooting myself into the middle of nowhere,” she said, describing glacial eskers that will take the group more than halfway along the route.
Eskers are “glacier-made highways” of sediment ridges left behind by the polar ice caps when they retreated after the last Ice Age.
The group has deposited a cache of food and fuel about halfway along the route. Uyagaqi Kabloona said she picked an arbitrary spot “in the middle” of the journey for the cache, but when her family members went to drop it off they discovered there were already inuksuks almost exactly in that area.
“It’s really important to Gayle to do this trip,” said her partner, Erik Reid. “If it’s important to her, it’s important to me. It’s something that no one has really done for like 60 years.”
Reid said he has never embarked on such a long hike but looks forward to the challenge.
Uyagaqi Kabloona’s father, 75, was born on the land. He’s provided the co-ordinates of his birthplace to the group, and they will hike to that spot along the way.
Once finished, Uyagaqi Kabloona plans to write a book about the trip and the history of her family’s migrations.
It will involve “telling stories about what people’s lives used to be like,” she said.
