Today we took a couple of skidoos out to Cape Broughton.  We can literally go straight from the doorstep onto the ‘water’. The ice is deceptively smooth here where it’s protected by a promontory of land, forming the bay.  Cape Broughton is about 6 miles due north of here, and as soon as you get any kind of distance away from the village the ice gets increasingly choppy until you get to the end of the island where the pressure ridges are enormous, some are as high as 2 storey buildings.  The Arctic ice is continually pushed south from the North by the sea currents, and when it hits land the pressure caused by the ice still being pushed south causes huge cracks and the ice just piles up on top of itself, causing these enormous walls of ice, quite staggering to see. They’re all different shades of blue and white. It was very cloudy today so the photographs don’t really do it justice.  We saw polar bear tracks out there, but no actual bears.  Apparently, there’s open water just on the other side of the island, and where there’s open water there’s seals, and where there’s seals there’s bears!  So they weren’t far away.