Parks Canada seeks visitors, volunteer cooks for Nunavut’s Quttirnipaaq park

Experiments carried out by early researcher A.W. Greely at Fort Conger on Ellesmere Island included building a vegetable garden, fenced in with barrel hoops. In the foreground stand the cozy wooden houses, which explorer Robert Peary later salvaged from the original Fort Conger built by Greely. (PHOTO BY JANE GEORGE)

Grise Fiord is the only community now on Ellesmere Island, but ancient tent rings are a common site. (PHOTO BY JANE GEORGE)

If you’d like to see Tanquary Fiord, where the headquarters of the Nunavut’s Quttirnipaaq National Park are located, there’s a way, Parks Canada says. (PHOTO BY JANE GEORGE)

If you’re yearning for adventure and have a spare $8,000 to spend, or even better, if you can cook: the High Arctic awaits you this summer.

Parks Canada is looking to boost the number of people who visit Nunavut’s huge Quttinirpaaq National Park, located on Ellesmere Island.

“See a stark land of mountains and glaciers. Stand 800 km south of the North Pole as muskoxen graze near Arctic wolves. Hear tales of ancient hunters, polar explorers, and military scientists. Hike at the Top of the World,” reads a recent news release from Parks Canada about the 37,775-square-kilometre park established in 2000.

You can go as a visitor with an outfitter, but you can also go as a volunteer cook, with skills in “extreme cuisine,” as somone who yearns to become the “top Chef at the Top of the World.”

If you opt for this kind of volunteer job, you will prepare three meals a day for two to seven people June 10 to June 22 or July 8 to July 22 in Tanquary Fiord or July 22 to Aug. 5 in Lake Hazen, where the park’s headquarters are located.

To apply, send Parks Canada a one-to-two page cover letter and any questions to nunavut.info@pc.gc.ca, along with your choice of dates and location, by March 27.

Basic First Aid/CPR is required. Experience as a camp cook, working in remote areas or traveling would be a bonus, Parks Canada says.

Parks Canada will cover the cost of your charter from Resolute Bay if you’re accepted as a cook, and you’ll be able to use your spare time to hike and perhaps spot some of the many Arctic hares, muskox and wolves that live within the park.

Otherwise, you can travel to the park on a charter from July 3 to July 17 as a regular visitor.

But this journey will set you back $8,000 for the return-trip charter out of Resolute.

If you want to learn more, you can email david.rodger@pc.gc.ca. He’ll walk you through your options for a park visit, which range from life in a fully-catered base camp to guided and independent trekking.

And, if you’re a scientist or a journalist, there’s also a third option: every year researchers, as well as a few journalists or documentary producers, head to Quttinirpaaq to study or film the environment and wildlife there, with the support of the Polar Continental Shelf Project, which runs its own support charters out of Resolute.

At best, the park gets about 135 tourists per year, mostly on cruise ships. Some years, the park is quiet: five years ago Quttirnipaaq saw only two visitors to the entire park.

Among the sites of interest to visit within the park: Fort Conger, an important staging point for polar expeditions more than 100 years ago.

The sailing boat, the Discovery, which wintered there in 1875 is long gone but wooden plaques commemorating two sailors who died over that winter still remain, as do small wooden structures and other remnants from later explorers’ visits.

Here, in 1881, A.W. Greeley and 24 men were dropped off for the winter to carry out research for the first International Polar Year.

But after two full years passed with no resupply ships able to reach Fort Conger, Greeley expedition members abandoned their scientific collections and headed towards a more accessible point, ending up at Camp Clay on Pim Island where few survived after cannibalism and violence erupted.

Explorer Robert Peary, who came upon the building a few years later, said in his 1917 book “Secrets of Polar Travel” that Fort Conger was “grotesque in its utter unfitness and unsuitableness for polar winter quarters.”

Peary eventually tore it down and built several smaller buildings, three of which still stand.

Peary used Fort Conger as a base from 1901 onwards, until he finally reached — or came close to — the North Pole in 1909.