Nunavut school ponders land trip that went awry

Students from Kiilinik School in Cambridge Bay left May 16 on a day-trip to Kitiga Lake, 18 kilometres away from their school. (FILE PHOTO)

A May 16 day-trip outside the western Nunavut town of Cambridge Bay was intended to give elders and Grade 8 students at Kiilinik High School a chance to bond over a traditional activity — ice fishing.

Instead, the day’s experience turned out to be a test case for the school’s emergency response protocols.

And it left one mother, who called Nunatsiaq News, angry and alarmed about the possibility of disaster.

On the morning of May 16 about 15 kids and as many guides, elders and school staff headed to Kitiga Lake, about 18 kilometres away — an hour’s snowmobile drive from the school.

The group had set out on a day-trip organized by the school and the Kitikmeot Heritage Society.

As Kiilinik principal Lorne Penney tells it, the group became divided into two parties somewhere along the way.

When the wind picked up and erased snowmobile tracks, the two smaller groups ended up taking different routes to the lake.

One group ended up at the lake, but not at the spot they had headed for and they couldn’t find tents that had been left there for their use.

They didn’t know — and had no way of knowing — that the other group had ended up at the lake as well, but at a different place where the tents were located.

The group who ended up at the place with no tents knew their way back, so they turned around and headed for Cambridge Bay. This group arrived back at 1 p.m.

The other group stayed at the tents and went fishing. The school had no way to contact the group at the tents.

So the school alerted the RCMP detachment, search and rescue and wildlife officials.

Penney said the unaccounted-for group who’d stayed to fish by tents had three knowledgeable elders with them. So that was a plus.

Everyone decided to hold back on mounting a search until about 3:30 p.m.: “we won’t panic until then,” Penney said about the decision.

As it turned out, the missing group returned on time.

“When we heard the sound of skidoos at about 3:15, and someone said ‘they’re here,’ it was a relief,” Penney said.

“There are some good things coming out of it,” he said.

While the organization of the Kitiga Lake fishing trip had followed the Nunavut education department’s policy for accountability and risk management during excursions, other ideas to beef up safety came up during a debriefing, Penney said.

These included keeping one snowmobiler in front and another at the back to make sure everyone stays together, making trips to lakes that aren’t so far away and buying satellite phones.

Jonathan Bird, the KSO’s executive director, said organizers have been reluctant to integrate too much technology and strict regulations into these kinds of land trips.

That’s because that could defeat the purpose of the trips, which are aimed at using elders to pass their traditional knowledge onto the young people

“Elders are trying to promote traditional experience and we’ve got them going out with satellite phones,” he said.