Two skiers embark on trip from Ulukhaktok to Kuujjua River

John Dunn and Paul vanPeenen have done over 40 Arctic self-supported trips combined, but this is the first time either of them will travel to the western Arctic islands.

“It’s such a wonderful time to be there when the land is coming alive after the winter,” said Dunn.

Dunn said he and vanPeenen are planning to ski a 350 kilometre loop from Ulukhaktok to the Kuujjua River valley and back, but whether they can canoe the river will be “a lucky dip” if the snow melts.

“Not so much to keep it interesting, but to make it different from the previous ones, we’re going to go right on the shoulder season,” said Dunn.

“It’s kind of fun trying to sort out where you may be able to get to.”

One thing vanPeenen wants to see is wildlife, particularly muskox and caribou.

“It’s always special to see animals and spend time with them on their land,” vanPeenen said.

Dunn said the two would have considered a longer route down to Cambridge Bay, but they are getting older and the weather would have made it too dangerous.

Dunn and vanPeenen were introduced in the late 1990s by a mutual friend. Their first self-supported trip together was a canoe trip up the coast of British Columbia, and their first trip to the Arctic was to Ellesmere Island in 1998.

VanPeenen immigrated to Canada from the Netherlands in 1980 when he was 16 years old. He said he has been interested in exploring Canada’s North since high school.

“I was fascinated by the mix of cultures, the Indigenous culture and the European explorers who came and the Hudson Bay Company and the Northwest Company,” said vanPeenen.

A man from Alberta introduced him to canoeing and vanPeenen was hooked. Self-supported ski trips felt like a natural next step for vanPeenen because it “seemed like the same thing as canoeing, except on snow and ice with a sled.”

In the early 2000s, vanPeenen capitalized on his long canoe trips in the North to complete “basically a master in canoeing” from Simon Fraser University, retracing British naval arctic explorer George Back’s trips through the territories.

Dunn said he started going on ski trips because he was “seeking out real wild areas” after growing up in the United Kingdom. He has done self-supported ski trips in the eastern Canadian Arctic islands, Greenland, Norway and Iceland.

Last year, he skied in the NWT as part of a plan to travel 8,000km from the south to north of Canada.

Dunn said he has done too many expeditions to pick a favourite, but if he was forced to, he would choose Ellesmere Island.

“Somehow further north is cooler,” Dunn said.

The last ski trip Dunn and vanPeenen went on together was a return to Ellesmere Island in 2019, almost two decades after their first trip. 

“To go back to the same area 20 years later was pretty interesting to see how things have changed. There was definitely evidence of global warming with glaciers retreating,” said vanPeenen.