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INUVIK
In many ways, travelling to Ivvavik National Park is like taking a step back in time.

Inuvik resident Jenny More looks at flowers during her four-day trip at Ivvavik National Park last month. - photo courtesy of Leah Byrne/Inuvialuit Communications Society

The Beringian Landscape remains largely unchanged since before the last ice age, when giant beavers roamed the area along with woolly mammoths and other creatures and plants long-since extinct.

The park, located about 200 km west of Inuvik, is normally very difficult for travellers to get to.

"You have to be a very decided kind of person to go and visit the park because it's not an easy sort of task," said Adriana Bacheschi, manager of external relations with the Inuvik-based Parks Canada Western Arctic field unit.

This year, Parks Canada launched a new, four-day trip to Sheep Creek from Inuvik in the hopes of boosting visitation to the area. This new initiative steps outside the federal department's mandate to "preserve and protect," but it was done to increase awareness of what the park has to offer – especially to those who live in the area but had previously been unable to afford to see it.

"To be the tour operator, yes, it's unusual," said Maria Stella Patera, visitor experience product development officer with Parks Canada's Western Arctic field unit.

Response to the trips was higher than expected and the two trips of eight visitors each that were originally planned filled up quickly. Because of the amount of interest, two more trips were added, and there is the possibility of a fifth trip in August, said Bacheschi.

Most of these visitors were Inuvik residents who are relatively new to the area, said Bacheschi.

"It was gorgeous. Very, very beautiful," said Inuvik resident Matthew Hamilton who travelled to Sheep Creek in Ivvavik from June 27 to July 1.

The itinerary of the newly-developed trip involves camping out at Sheep Creek – named because of the abundance of Dall sheep in the area – and taking multiple hikes into the surrounding mountains. The destination of the hike on the third day in the wilderness is the aptly named Inspiration Point, which Hamilton described as a peninsula that overlooks the Firth River Valley with a panoramic view of mountains from every side.

The cultural sites that can be found in Ivvavik date back as many as 8,000 years, from the ancestors of the Inuvialuit to more modern-day artifacts such as the remains of gold mining and tent rings and food caches.

Sheep Creek itself is home to one of the more modern historical sites. A mini gold rush along the Firth River in the 1940s inspired an Inuvik family with the last name Park to open a gold mining operation at Sheep Creek before the site was purchased by Parks Canada, said Bacheschi.

Trip organizers at the Western Arctic field unit are hoping that an Inuvik tour operator will eventually be able to take over the trips – increasing the number of people who get the opportunity to see Ivvavik and appreciate why the area needs to be protected.

Ivvavik is co-operatively managed by the Inuvialuit and a unique objective of Parks Canada in the Western Arctic is to provide economic opportunities within the parks to residents of the area. Parks Canada is better equipped to test these trips to see how viable they are, said Bacheschi.

"If you are a tour operator, making a profit out of offering trips to the park is pretty hard," she said.

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