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Go north, and then keep going, to where wind peels the paint off your cabin walls, and the wolves are on your doorstep Story & photography by Margo Pfeiff Winter 2015 cottagelife.com 53 Sarah and Eric McNair-Landry rattle in their dogsled along the lumpy shore ice of frozen Frobisher Bay, past beached boats and houses half-buried in snow- drifts. Sarah rides on the Inuit wooden sled, while Eric, her brother, drives the team of eight dogs. At a sloped embank- The McNair-Landry siblings, Eric, 31, ment, Sarah jumps off, with the sled and Sarah, 29, grew up in Iqaluit (pop. still in full flight, runs up the rise, and 6,700), with the Arctic Ocean in their stands with arms outstretched, halting backyard. As youngsters, they shuffled the traffic of cars and snowmobiles. The on skis behind polar explorers training vehicles do stop, remarkably, their driv- on Frobisher Bay. They raised and ran ers clearly accustomed to Nunavut’s dog teams, pulled gear-loaded “pulks” offbeat traffic conventions. Eric shouts on skis, and backpacked and camped “Hike! Hike!,” the dogs surge, and the year-round with their world-renowned sled crosses the frozen road. Sarah expedition-leader parents, Philadelphia- waves thanks to the drivers, sprints to born Matty McNair and Ontarian Paul Out here, snow is catch up, and leaps back on as the sled Landry. At least they did when their friend, not foe. glides down the opposite slope, then The lumpy Arctic parents weren’t taking turns guiding alongside Iqaluit Airport’s main runway, tundra is easier to adventurers to far-flung destinations to the roar of a landing First Air 737. travel through in like the North and South Poles. The low winter sun is the colour of winter than in the Passionate about adventure them- warmer seasons. butter, and an icy wind has whipped up selves, the siblings joined their mother Siblings Eric and over the tundra by the time they turn into Sarah McNair- in 2004 on a 10-week Antarctic ski and Sylvia Grinnell Territorial Park. They ride Landry (opposite) kite-ski expedition, during which Sarah, through swirling ground snow broken by get to their “shack” then 18, became the youngest person ever glimpses of snow-covered picnic tables. by snowmobile, to reach the South Pole. Since then, she ski, or dogsled. An hour later, after the sled negotiates and her brother have guided dozens of When the weather the ridges and the blue ice of the Sylvia is decent, some expeditions on their own to both Poles, Grinnell River itself, a cabin comes into keen swimmers Ellesmere Island, and Greenland. In view, tucked in front of a rocky outcrop tackle the Sylvia 2007, their exploits earned them a nomi- on high ground. “We’re home!” Eric says. Grinnell River to nation for National Geographic’s presti- get to the cabin, His voice echoes to silence. It’s -32°C gious Adventurers of the Year award. with boats carrying on a clear Saturday morning in January, their gear. That same year, the pair formed as clear a day as most Canadians have Pittarak Expeditions, with the goal of ever seen. Both siblings are obviously embarking on global trips to inspire very happy to be out of town—Sarah to youth to become active outdoors. They give her dogs a run, and Eric to fulfill his spread the word via live web postings recent obsession of building an igloo to and through speaking engagements that sleep in. Like Canadians everywhere, made full use of Sarah’s skills as a pho- they’re looking forward to a much-needed tographer and filmmaker. Among their overnight respite from their busy lives. many escapades were a 2009 kite-buggy And like Canadians everywhere, they’ve crossing of Mongolia’s massive Gobi come for that respite to their cottage. Desert and 3,300 km of kite-skiing, Winter 2015 cottagelife.com 55 “With wilderness within 30 minutes’ walking distance of town,” says Joshua Armstrong, an intern architect living in Iqaluit who wrote his master’s archi- tectural thesis in part on Iqaluit cabin country, “cabins are burgeoning.” A few, says Armstrong, are deluxe outposts, but most are basic. He calls the cottage coun- try around Arctic communities “shack- land.” In these areas it’s not uncommon for friends or families to build multi- cabin compounds. The cottages closer to town are largely for recreational purposes, while Inuit—with a long tradi- tion of spending summers on the land— tend to build farther afield to fish and hunt. Some cottages are even dragged on skids to different locations. In Iqaluit, so strong is the impulse to get out on the land that some Inuit have been complete with polar bear encounters, known to pitch tents just beyond the through the Northwest Passage in 2011. town dump, on a peninsula that juts out The year before they formed Pittarak, into Frobisher Bay. Sarah and Eric met Will Hyndman, The three young would-be cottagers, a young Edmonton-born policy analyst mind you, were thinking of something now working out of Iqaluit. The three more permanent. of them skied, backpacked, dogsledded, and kite-skied together, spending much While Eric unhitches the dogs, Sarah of their free time on forays into the local carries supplies into what appears at wild. One summer afternoon, at a “veggie first glance to be a small, no-frills, two- burger barbecue” they’d convened when level plywood cottage—the trio’s dream their outdoor plans had been rained out getaway. She feeds the stove with chopped yet again, they realized there was some- In the Arctic, you shipping pallet wood—an essential com- thing missing from their recreational life need to fuel up. With modity above the treeline—then fills a in the Arctic—a getaway destination of the cabin as home big kettle with snow to melt for water and base, Sarah (oppo- their own: a cabin, a shack, in the famil- starts laying out lunch. site) and Eric often iar parlance, a cottage. head out on one- or The cottage warms quickly. Its main To a lot of “southerners” (bear in two-day adventures. floor is a single 8- by 16-foot room. The mind that residents of the Northwest They fortify them- “kitchen” is a propane-fuelled camp stove Territories consider Edmonton “the selves with steel-cut atop a cupboard that Eric—a skilled oats for breakfast South”), the idea of people already living handyman with an engineer’s mind— and pack bags of in the wilderness needing a more remote snacks: nuts, cheese, crafted from hardwood scraps. Twin getaway, especially from such a small sausage, crackers, benches containing storage space face town, can seem counterintuitive. But, in and every traveller’s four picture windows with spectacular fact, community life for northerners on go-to, gorp. Little views across Frobisher Bay’s jumble goes to waste here; the tundra can actually be as stifling as of ice slabs, each heaved by the rise and Eric and Will score urban life is in the South. It’s not that sweet finds from the fall of the world’s second-biggest tides. the communities are so unpalatable as Iqaluit dump, the A ladder leads to a four-person, that they are unnatural, especially with source for many proj- sloped-roof sleeping loft. There is no the wilderness so nearby. Inuit histori- ect building materials electricity or plumbing. “Our goal was (previous pages). cally never lived in communities, and the to keep it rustic and uncluttered,” says non-native people who have moved to Sarah. “We just wanted a simple, well- the North and love it are often keen to insulated shelter, out of the weather, get “out on the land.” It is as much a where we could come to do lots of outdoor great relief for northern dwellers to get activity.” Eric hastens to show off his to the cottage as it is for someone in latest project, a mere 30 metres from the Quebec, Ontario, or B.C. cottage: a compact, partially completed 58 cottagelife.com Winter 2015 60 cottagelife.com Winter 2015 Winter 2015 cottagelife.com 61 “Habitat for Hyndman.” The journey from concept to Habitat, as Will recounts it, sounds both weird and haz- ardous—i.e., normal, in Northern terms. Their first attempt involved Eric’s old 6- by 10-foot uninsulated plywood greenhouse with two windows. They took it apart, lashed the panels on top of a raft, and paddled it across the Sylvia Grinnell River—the last part of the trip in the darkness of a September night. Since no one had remembered a head- lamp, naturally, they had to assemble it with one person holding a candle while the others hammered. Defying the odds, the reconstituted greenhouse was so well used throughout the following winter eight-sided sauna. “It’s loosely based and summer that they decided to enlarge, on a yurt’s shape,” he says, sounding winterize, and relocate it. “Taking it momentarily like a 15-year-old working back across the river on a raft we briefly on a treehouse. He designed the sauna lost control,” recalls Eric matter-of- on his computer and then brought it factly. “The cabin nearly ran the rapids.” to life in miniature with his new 3-D For months the trio scrounged for printer, the result a bright orange model materials. They frequented building sites, complete with a removable roof and little collecting contractors’ toss-offs, gather- benches inside. “The outward-sloping ing insulation panels that blow around walls,” he points out, “are perfect to town during windstorms, combing yard lean back against.” Sarah, who arrives sales, and picking up discarded shipping at this point with sheets of Styrofoam pallets (many made of Brazilian hard- insulation brought from town, rolls her wood) from the airlines’ cargo hangars.

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