Victoria Perron is on Day 20 of a long ski-hike along the east coast of Baffin Island, and she’s just lost one of her two sled dogs.
With her hiking partner Alexandre Jakovljevitch she’s exploring the fiords and mountains in an area surrounding Kangiqtugaapik and the twosome brought along the Canadian Inuit dogs for safety and companionship. Now just as they are turning to go back to Kangiqtugaapik, one dog, Luna, has taken off.
Perron believes the dog saw a polar bear and decided she wasn’t hanging around to see what would happen. After a few days of backtracking and roaming the fiords to look for the dog, Perron and Jakovljevitch were confronted with warm weather which slowed them down. They were reaching the end of their supplies. That’s when they used their satellite phone to call friends and organize a snowmobile pickup out on the sea ice, returning without the runaway dog.
Ending a trip with a snowmobile ride to home base is not a way hiker extraordinaire Perron usually ends a trip. And in her 10 plus years since arriving in Nunavut, she’s completed nearly a dozen challenging expeditions in Qikiqtaaluk of Nunavut.
“I’ve always loved travelling between places,” says Perron. “It’s not an abstract route. There’s a beginning and an end,” says Perron. And the beginnings and ends in Nunavut were between distant communities, along river valleys and on sea ice.
Perron was born in Calgary and moved to Nova Scotia at age 13. She says she didn’t come from an outdoorsy family, although as a child she liked to hike and cycle and later surf. Eventually she became a lifeguard and in 2010 responded to an ad for a summer lifeguard job in Fort Liard. That summer experience in a small community prompted her to move North in 2012, this time to Nunavut, where her love for adventure took off.
“When I moved to Nunavut, that’s when I really started to like being outside. I had a 45 minute commute from Apex to downtown Iqaluit, so I had to walk in rain, shine, snow or blizzard,” said Perron. Shortly after moving to Iqauit she began helping local adventurer Sarah McNair-Landry with her dogteam and also got involved with the Alianait Arts Festival where she’s currently the artistic director. “The people I made friends with were very outdoorsy. You start with an overnight camping trip, buy a tent, then you get a bit more confidence and you go for five days, and then you get a bit more confidence and you do the Akshayuk Pass … and finally you realize that you can organize your own adventures,” says Perron of her progress into outdoor adventure.
Her first northern trip was in 2013. It was a nine day, 121 km ski trip from Iqaluit to the small community of Kimmirut. On this trip she simultaneously learned how to cross-country ski and winter camp from the friend who went with her. The trip was challenging and Perron says her limits were pushed, but she remembers that early trip as a great lesson in patience and endurance.
Two years later she walked with her adventure partner, Alexandre Jakovljevitch, from Igloolik to Sanirajak, about 70 km. Since that first community-to-community walk, Perron has completed a dozen expeditions between communities or in National Parks including a dog sledding trip around Qikiqtarjuaq on southern Baffin Island, and has logged at least a week of camping every summer and winter since she has been in Nunavut.
Perron’s most recent expedition in April 2023 was to the fjords and mountains in the area surrounding Kangiqtugaapik on the northeast coast of Baffin Island. Perron designed a 300 km route that started and looped back to Kangiqtugaapik while visiting Pilattuaq (a coastal Island), Revoir Pass, Kangiqtualuk Uqquqti, Naqsaalukuluk Ungalliq, Clarke Fjord and Gibbs Fjord. Most of the Sam Ford Fjord is 30 km wide with sheer mountains that rise a thousand metres from the ground.
“The landscape is just powerful around Kangiqtugaapik in a way that is different from Akshayuk Pass in Auyuittuq National Park,” said Perron. Her main memory of the trip was the variety of blues in the landscape and the vast mountains. She also noted that the area is now gaining recognition and is receiving more and more hiking and climbing visitors, especially in April when the sun is back but the temperatures are still cold, allowing for easier travel over the hard packed snow.
“We had incredible weather the first couple of weeks. We had so much sun. You’d wake up in the morning and it was cold, but you had constant sun.” Perron started her expedition with temperatures around -28C and ended it with -1C…almost shorts weather in Nunavut, but temperatures that made it more difficult to travel on the ice.
It was during this mild weather that sled dog Luna went missing. After Perron and her partner searched unsuccessfully for a few days, and their food supplies were getting low, they decided to call for pick up. And that’s when the storm rolled in and they had to wait it out delaying their snowmobile pickup and navigating yet another challenging situation.
Eventually they returned to Kangiqtugaapik where they were warmly greeted by sled dog Luna who was safe and sound and had found her own way back. A happy ending to another outdoor adventure.
While Perron says she does not think too far into the future, one of her goals is to ski 238 km from Arctic Bay to Pond Inlet. “Your whole life points to where you are right now. Wherever you are, you can look behind you and you’re like yeah. I get it. I can see how I got to where I am. I moved North and that was the place where I started to feel more comfortable with the outdoors. And that’s when I knew I wanted to spend more time being outside."
