Northern Sights

Skagway To Prince Rupert (Sorry for the delay)

2012-01-21T17:38:00.001-07:00

Hello everyone,
After much delay and procrastination Here is the section of our vacation that involved our ferry journey from Skagway Alaska to Prince Rupert BC. This is a trip I would recommend everyone take, it was absolutely amazing.

Skagway to Prince Rupert

2011-09-05T20:53:00.002-06:00

2011-08-25T00:31:00.000-06:00

Dawson to Whitehorse

2011-08-16T22:54:00.003-06:00

Dawson Yukon

2011-08-15T19:09:00.004-06:00

Vacation 2011

2011-08-14T20:30:00.000-06:00

Tsiigehtchic NWT to Dawson YT

Break-up Video

2011-06-05T16:47:00.000-06:00

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=g3rXePTp0qw

Hello Everyone,
This is this year video.... However apparently Nickleback didn't like my 'borrowing' their song last year so now it had to be swapped with some generic Utube POS. Anyways here it is :)
1 photo every 2.5 seconds for for days starting May 22.
CG

My story

2011-06-04T13:17:00.006-06:00

Hello everyone,
I've been waiting to tell this story until all the facts and tests were in.... and they are. On January 22 of this year I suffered a Status Non Epileptic Grand Mal seizure that resulted in a compression fracture of of the L2 vertebra and possibly L4 as well. What this means is that I suffered a twenty minutes seizure (a extreme Grand Mal seizure could last 5 minutes, once they exceed that time they can result in heart attacks and strokes due to the unregulated electrical activity), This seizure was Status, meaning it neither gradual in beginning or ending but remained intense throughout the time of activity. It is Non Epileptic as I do not have epilepsy The intensity and duration of the muscle contractions caused the compression fractures in my lower back. All of my doctors and medical advise and my personal belief it that this event was caused by my consumption of a energy drink 30 minutes before the event.
For the last three or four years I have enjoyed energy drinks, usually in the afternoon when my energy lags at work I would drink a Monster drink, I'm not really susceptible to caffeine and never really got a big kick out of them but I enjoyed the taste and I figured they certainly wouldn't diminish my energy level. I only drank them on work days and on Sundays I usually wouldn't bother with them. I am a 43 year old healthy man, with no pre-existing conditions, no medications, no history of brain injury or any other factors that might have caused a seizure.
On January 22 I had a long day at work and was expected in Inuvik to attend a Fire Instructors course for the weekend. On the way out I grabbed two Monster energy drinks as I wanted to ensure I was alert for the drive. I drank one in the first forty minutes of the drive and the other during the last half hour it took me to get to Inuvik. I hadn't had time to eat since the evening before so had a thoroughly empty stomach. I went to the store to buy something for dinner and while shopping started to feel a little dizzy, so I took a knee waiting for the feeling to pass. Two hours later I awoke in the hospital. My mind having experienced something like a hard reset, I did not know who I was, where I was, or for that matter what I was. Everything I knew was gone, it was truly terrifying. There were tubes and machines all around me and doctors and nurses running everywhere asking me questions that sounded like some alien language. After about ten minutes my ability to understand English came back and I could understand the words but was unable to speak, as I knew the words but didn't know how to make my own voice work, I didn't know which muscles controlled that and couldn't make a sound.
About twenty minutes later everything clicked and my muscles knew how to do what I asked them and I started answering and asking all the questions that had been running around in my mind for the last half hour. I had a lot of pain everywhere in my body, at least everywhere with large muscles, it felt as if I had had a extreme workout that was immediately followed by a severe beating of the Mike Tyson type. The doctors explained that this was expected after such a traumatic event as I had experienced. I was assisted at the store by a security guard and a gentleman from Northwind industries until the ambulance arrived for my body about 15 minutes after the incident began. The ambulance EMT had attended the seizure for 5 minutes as well before my body was able to be moved to the ambulance and to the hospital.

Thirty minutes after I had regained awareness I was released from the hospital and grabbed a taxi to my hotel for the evening. I was in a lot of pain and had a lot of difficult phone calls to make and just wanted to sit down and sleep the pain away. The next morning when I tried to get up for my course the pain was now localized to my back and I was unable to sit up in bed, I ended up rolling onto the floor and slithering to the bathroom where I was able to use the toilet and vanity to hoist myself somewhat vertical after about 15 minutes of struggling and excruciating pain. I hobbled my way to the living room and started googling my condition to see if it was normal, it felt as if the pain would kill me. I found that after seizure pain was normal so I spent the next hour trying to put some clothes on. I went to my course as I was intently focused on achieving Fire Instructor status, and spent the next 10 hours sitting in a hard plastic chair desperately trying to focus beyond the pain on the lessons being taught. I endured, that evening was much the same but to my surprise there was not relief from the pain, not laying on a hard surface, not sitting on the couch, not on the bed, absolutely nothing helped. This was actually something of a relief as I knew I had to live with the pain, therefore the course was easier knowing that wherever I was I was going to be in pain, so therefor I might as well be at my course.
Five days after the seizure the pain had not decreased. The nurse was in town so I went down to see him to make sure this lingering pain was normal. It wasn't and he immediately shot me up with something and called for the ambulance to take me to Inuvik. 5 hours later I was diagnosed with a compression fracture of my back and given a wide assortment of pain pills, this offered me hope, maybe I could manage the pain as the doctor had explained to me that the nature of the break meant there was nothing they could do other than pain management. I returned home with my assortment of pills looking forward to taking a couple of morphine and finally getting some sleep around the pain. The pain apparently exceeded the ability of morphine as the effect was negligible. All the pills did nothing, so I lived with it, continued to work and survived. after a month I was sent to Yellowknife to meet as Internist and Neurologist, both of which failed to find a reason for my seizure other than the energy drinks. The wanted me to get a MRI as soon as possible so two months after the seizure I was in Edmonton getting my MRI. And the results are finally in, there is not physical reason for my seizure other than the energy drinks.
So the moral of the story would be, I guess, that sometimes, caution is the better part of valor. after drinking hundred of the damn things Energy drinks had a drastic effect on my life, three months of constant pain and all the fear and concern over what caused the seizure in the first place, next time I'll just have a Coke and as Snickers. I'd never have believed it before this incident, I don't hold a lot of faith with extremists warnings, lawyers or media but sometimes they get it right. My personal view is I will never drink another of these products again, my advise to my friends is be very careful, these thing almost gave me wings literally.
Take Care
CG

Dog Breed contest.

2010-10-31T11:41:00.001-06:00

Hello Everyone.... Ok, to the both of you apparently.
Seems like my hiatus from the blog has diminished my readership to a couple of people, C'est la vie.

Cody's make-up is:
Level 3 Labrador retriever 20-30%
Siberian Husky 20 to 30%
Level 4 Chihuahua 10-20%
English Springer Spaniel 10-20%
Level 5 Pomeranian less than 10%
There were only three entries, one of which did not have a name and didn't win anyways. Cathy Got 2 of 5 and Betty takes the prize with three of five, by guessing the lab, husky and ENGLISH SPRINGER SPANIEL??? Explain that one to me please. Thanks for playing along, and in the future I guess I'll remove the line, Hello Everyone, and change it to Hello Betty and Cathy. Thanks for reading. We'll post your prize just before we send it :)
Take Care
CG

Global Warming

2010-10-31T01:05:00.004-06:00

Hello everyone,

For about 20 years I've been hearing various environmental theories that attempt to justify a whole bunch of junk science that amount to little more than a attempt to scare the public into following a specific agenda. The thing that first drew my attention to this "theory" was attending a lecture by David Suzuki at the U of T. His topic for this lecture was the upcoming Ice Age. Two years later I went to see him again (he impressed me the first time) and his topic was essentially global warming (Greenhouse Effect). The obvious contradiction between these two apparently strongly held positions confused me greatly. Since then we all know the story, try to live a single day without hearing the words climate change or global warming.
There are a group of environmentalist wandering the north, spending lots of money, gathering information from the elders and scientific research stations supporting global warming. They don't want to hear about other opinions. With all due respect accorded to the elders, human recalled data is incredibly inaccurate, just ask a police office who spoke to someone 24 hours after a crime, there are very good odds that the description given by the witness will actually have very little resemblance to the actual perpetrator of the crime. I remember when I was young a snowstorm we received in Kincardine in the winter of '76, I've heard others recall this event as well. That year we received a snow dump of over 6 foot in a three day blizzard, I know it, I believe it, I was there. However, if you look back into the snowfall records for that region, for that year you'll see the largest 3 day accumulation of snow was 22 inches.
The elders will tell you its warmer today then when they were young. But then again they will also tell you about the year the rivers didn't freeze over till well into January, somewhere around '65, and before that in '57. My parents will tell you about walking uphill both ways to school as well, the memory of a person is a very susceptible storage device and shouldn't be trusted. If you walk into a room and everyone is told we will be discussing Global Warming, how many people do you think will stand up and say," huh, its been a lot warmer than this before and nothing happened". No one will.
True science is proven by fact, each and every time. A theory is a set of rules that apply to every occurrence of a set of parameters is going to produce a predictable result. Such as the theory of Gravity, in order for this theory to be accepted it must be right 100% of the time. It cannot be proven to be right 99.9999% of the time, if that is the case, the theory is thrown out as wrong.
Global Warming is not a fact, it is not a theory, it doesn't even qualify as a hypothesis as it, in its current state can be proven wrong on any given day. If this was a fact or a theory, it would be able to PREDICT the outcome with accuracy. These people can't even predict the weather three days from now with any better than guessing odds. They can't predict the severity of events such as El Nino, which has been known of for hundreds of years. The data they use is cherry picked, locations, days, years that do not support their theory is discarded as aberrant.
True science can predict the orbit of a star 12,000,000 km's away to within a couple of feet at any given moment. Junk science will blame a increase of certain gasses amounting to less than one quarter of one percent of our total atmosphere as being a planet ending crisis. One they can neither quantify nor explain. While I believe leaving a clean planet is important, some of the recovery efforts put forward by environmentalists border on lunacy that could very well endanger the planets ecosystem and throw off the delicate balance of nature.
In conclusion, don't worry about planet earth, one way or another she'll survive just fine, but don't just sit on the couch and accept the pablum being spoon fed to you everyday by people who are only being employed to find a single result, not to evaluate a problem.
Take Care
CG

"A zebra does not change its spots." - Al Gore, attacking President George Bush in 1992.

''I decided I just had to call because you've printed a picture of the Earth upside down on the front page of the paper,'' Gore said.

"When my sister and I were growing up," Mr. Gore told a small audience made up mostly of women, "there was never any doubt in our minds that men and women were equal, if not more so."

"He is proposing to privatize a big part of Social Security and he's proposing to take $1 trillion, a million billion dollars out of the Social Security trust fund and give it as a tax incentive to young workers." - Al Gore

Milwaukee, WI - "I'm very familiar with the importance of dairy farming in Wisconsin. I've spent the night on a dairy farm here in Wisconsin. If I'm entrusted with the presidency, you'll have someone who is very familiar with what the Wisconsin dairy industry is all about."

--- Yeah right, I trust this guy to know what he's talking about.

2010-10-30T22:19:00.000-06:00

Thor the mighty

Its all in the eyes.

Donkey Kong relived

Best friends

Thor

2010-10-30T21:42:00.000-06:00

   Hello everyone,
     Christopher won $50.00 for having the best homemade costume in todays halloween party. Thanks for the late night making this Melissa.
   Take Care

Dog Breed Guessing Game (win a prize, step right up)

2010-10-15T13:48:00.009-06:00

Hello,
Melissa and I have been wondering what exactly we invited into our home. So we found a company that will do a DNA sequence on you dog and match it against know breeds, then provide you the results.
The results are in, So take your guess.
This is a except from the DNA report explaining how they judge the %'s of a dog. Cody has NO level one or two properties. The winner or closest will get either a piece of hand carved woolly mammoth ivory jewelery or something else representative of the north of the boys. Another hint is that he has 5 breeds represented in his make-up. We'll decide the winner on Halloween. Please include your name in your reply so we know who gets the right answer, Thanks.

What your dogs breed composition means
Level 1
This category is intended to help owners recognize when their pet's DNA contains a majority of a specific breed (75% or greater). If your dog has a strong match to one of our validated breeds, then it is categorized as Level 1. Most mixed breed dogs will not usually have a breed in this category unless one or both of their parents are purebred.

Level 2
This category reports breeds that are easily recognizable within your dog. While these breeds may have a strong influence on your pet, each breed listed makes up less than the majority of your dog's DNA, between 37%-74%. This usually means one of the parents was a purebred.

Level 3
This category identifies breeds that have between 20%-36% of the listed breed(s), usually coming from a grandparent.

Level 4
Represents 10%-20% of the breed DNA, usually coming from a great grandparent

Level 5
This level represents the lowest level of breed in your dog occurring at 9% or less. However, they still appear at a low and measurable amount in your pet's DNA.

Good Luck
CG

Mommy & Christopher

2010-10-13T21:28:00.000-06:00

Literacy Week Event

To whitehorse

2010-10-07T11:55:00.001-06:00

Waiting for dinner.

The river around Dawson

40 miles from Dawson heading south

Road to Nowhere

Nowhere

The other side of nowhere.

Overlooking nowhere.

Dawson

2010-10-06T20:41:00.002-06:00

Jack Londons house.

Some guys cool house

Robert Service's house

Yukon Order Of Pioneers cemetery

Overview of Dawson

Some guys interesting car

Learning how to pan for gold.

Entering the wilderness

One wrong turn lead to a hour of driving around the countryside on some wild mining roads

A couple of interesting derelict buildings

Fall colors

Fall colors in the area of Dawson.

Dawson area

Hello Everyone,

Theses are some photo's from Dawson City and area. Dawson was a fascinating place, gold was found there in 1896, by that fall the population had risen from under 100 to 40,000. The rush was over two years later and everyone left.

Take Care

5 Years in the Arctic

2010-10-06T00:20:00.000-06:00

Hello Everyone,
Melissa, Christopher and I have now been in the Arctic for over five years and over the last few months I've been ruminating on what that has meant to us as a family and as individuals. Its lead to some interesting insights but those are fodder for personal rumination rather than fuel for the blog. One thing I recently realized is that it takes a long time to know the Arctic, its not like a city where you can get a feel for the community by showing up to a few scheduled events because life in the Arctic does not have a schedule. Many people ask about or visit the Arctic but they can never really know it because the people and life of the north does not follow a schedule, it follows seasons, it follows years but doesn't follow hours or days.
You can fly to Repluse Bay in the summer and maybe you'll meet a carver and watch him work or maybe he'll be on the land for a month hunting, maybe you'll see a narwhal harvested, most likely though you'll wander around town as a outsider as amazing things happen around you without realizing what is occurring. The people of the north are timeless and do not adhere to any timetable.
Anyways, enough rambling. Hope you like the photo's of our vacation this year where we drove to Dawson City, then to Whitehorse and return.
Take Care.

CG
P.S. Apparently I take too may photo's. This is just the first leg of the journey, Tsiigehtchic To Dawson, more tomorrow.

Vacation

2010-09-10T11:16:00.000-06:00

Hello Everyone,

Just a few of our photo's from vacation. Tsiigehtchic to dawson to Whitehorse and back. Lots more to come.

Its Hot... Damn Hot

2010-07-10T18:18:00.005-06:00

Hello everyone,

I had a couple questions on FB examining the veracity of my claim yesterday that it was 42.9 C here in the frozen North. Seems Enviroment Canada believes it to be 24. And this thermometer is in the shade for crying out loud (this ia one of three thermometers giving the same reading including a digital calibrated infrared thermometer). Someone please kill me. Welcome to the Arctic.
Since my wife was inquiring after reading this post, when you add the current 44% humidity that works out to 57.7 C or 136 F.
Take Care
CG
P.S. We are currently cooking a egg on the balcony, literally.
P.P.S. The cooking failed, it evaporated faster than it cooked. And I think a raven or two might have had some dinner.

Track and Field VS. Circumpolar games

2010-06-16T00:18:00.000-06:00

Hello Everyone,
    I was just looking at the line-up for the Circumpolar games and realized we live in a very different world.
   The events are:
Kneel jump
Alaskan high kick
bench reach
head pull
1 foot high kick
one hand reach
2 foot high kick
swing kick
arm pull
musk ox push
airplane
knuckle hop
seal skinning
goose plucking
tea boiling
bannock making
muskrat skinning
sewing
fiddling
jigging
canoe races

Just thought someone might find this interesting, I have to get some photo's of some of these events to better explain.
   Take Care
   CG

May 15-18 DN_0001.wmv

2010-05-24T17:24:00.000-06:00

Finally, It's done.

2010-05-24T16:44:00.006-06:00

I've been working on this for days now. 24 hours of attempting uploading, lost video with bad memory cards (You get what you pay for, my fault, Ebay $15.00 32 Gig) Anyways this is what I have left and I still thinks its really cool.
It has the first day without a sunset and the beginning of the ice movement on the river. And its really cool, again please Chad do not sue me, It was all my wife's doing and she has loads of money ... Ok she has some really rare bottlecaps and a neat tattoo you can take a picture of. I hope you enjoy.
Take Care
CG.

Our new Family member

2010-05-08T19:47:00.001-06:00

This is Indy meeting Cody for the first time

This is Cody.

Jamboree 2010

2010-04-27T23:45:00.000-06:00

Inuvik

2010-04-27T22:51:00.001-06:00

This is a portable housing unit, presumablely for a oil company, frozen into the river.

some pictures from the Ice road from Inuvik to Tuktuloyatuk