The old goat

Well my first two days  here have been splendid! Yesterday mum, dad and I just wandered around the hill behind my uncles for the afternoon - a little cloudy, but still nice. Not cold, probably 1c, and hardly any wind. Still snow, but no big deal. Pretended I was a caribou crossing all the various snow patches across the hill, trying not to sink up to my waist in it. Mum and I did pretty well.

Wont budge.

I'm loving all the boulders here. They're so spectacular! The force that was needed to move all those boulders, and they are massive! And there are so many, it's not like one random boulder across a vast espanse, its like hundreds littering the land.
Anyways, after our little walk we made our way over to mums friend Hannah's. I showed her the liners I had made from copying the ones she made for us all way back when. She was pleased, but said they looked too small... of course they do, I have mini feet.
Inspired by her praise, I came back to start sewing my duffle liners for the seal skin mitts I'm going to make when ITI gets their act together back home and has more seal skins in stock... I digress - I worked on the liners and hope to have them finished so I can show them off to Meeka when I pass back through Frob on Wednesday.
Today we set off down the Duval River - so many boulders! It was a nice little hike up the river, we started off at 71m above sea level (asl) and made our way over rocks and hummocks, which was crawling with spiders! I'm so glad there are no other creepy bugs here, blah.

Water!

Mum and I stopped for a little water break, dad objected, he had a smart tea break - the water wasnt that great.
Soon after dad returned back along the river, so mother and I ventured up, reaching eventually 389m asl.  The farther up we went the more snow there was. Down in the river valley there was no snow, or only in the deep crevasces, up there it was vast snow and still heavily skidooed across.
Dad left us radios, so we tried to check in with him, only worked when I was up on one of the massive bouders... from there we decided to to turn around and head back to town. We were promised BLTs when we got back to the house.
We stopped for a little tea break with a lone inuksuk and then followed the skidoo highway back down.

I also just dropped down as I was taking a photo of mum falling through

BAD idea, the snow was so rotten, we keep walking then suddenly drop down to mid thigh through the snow. Hah, pretty funny at the time, every couple steps we'd sink and just giggle away.That small stretch probably took us an hour alone to cross because we kept having to stop and empty our boots after pulling each other out.
After four or so hours we made our way back down the hill to uncle Jeffs, where we were served BLTs on our arrival :)
Tomorrow I'm hoping to go up Mt. Duval, but the forcast is changing rapidly and now it's nothing but clouds forcasted for the rest of the week. This means terrible photos - clouds blocking the views :( and that there will be tons of snow to make our way over again. Not that I'm too concerned about that. Just the lack of sun which would help with the melting and the pretty photos...
All the more reason to come back! As we were hiking we covered so many berry fields that went unpicked last year. No one picks berries better that me! (I like to think, obviously there are much better seasoned pickers than myself). So I'll have to come back in the fall! Or realistically next summer.
Fingers crossed for clear skies tomorrow.