A new look for the Apex Trail?

The City of Iqaluit wants you to help them choose the best way to spruce up one of the community’s prettiest places: the Apex Trail.

Starting just past the graveyard and ending at the old Hudson Bay Co. buildings on the Apex beach, the Apex Trail has served as a foot path between Apex and Iqaluit since at least 1955, when the federal government built Apex to house Inuit living in the Frobisher Bay area.

Three generations of walkers have worn the path into a packed-down trail. Most of it winds along the rocky hillside that slopes sharply down to the sea between Iqaluit and Apex.

Though most of the land above the trail is now developed, thanks to the Apex Hill and Tundra Valley subdivisions, the hillside looks much as it did 55 years ago, covered by boulders dropped by receding glaciers and cut by narrow streams of melt-water.

As many Iqaluit residents know, it’s a prime spot for berry picking in late summer and fall. About two kilometres from Iqaluit, the land flattens out into a small meadow, a favourite spot for building fires from scrap wood to boil tea.

Now, the City of Iqaluit wants to find ways of improving the area by turning into a kind of municipal park. They hope to create a more useable recreational space for Iqaluit residents and a point of interest for tourists.

Michele Bertol, the city’s director of planning, says the project is still in its consultation stages. To help them figure out how to fix up the area, the city hired Trow Associates Inc. of Ottawa to suggest improvements.

Bertol says the city is looking for simple structures that could attract more people to the trail and make it more accessible to older people.

Steve Burden, a civil engineer with the Trow firm, walked the trail with surveyors seven or eight times this past summer. Over the fall, he worked out a set of options using computer-generated graphics.

Then they displayed the options on a set of posters that they brought to an open house in Iqaluit last Monday night and to a table set up at the Northmart store. Residents who viewed them were invited to express their opinions in a questionnaire.

Some of the choices include:

* a stone entrance at each end of the trail versus a wooden entrance at each of the trail;
* converting the trail into a gravel path, similar to those at Sylvia Grinnell Park, covering the trail with a wooden walkway, or keeping it in its natural state;
* wooden or rope hand rails to protect people along the steep hillside;
* small bridges to cover ditches and streams;
* picnic tables and barbecue facilities;
* wooden viewing platforms where people can stand or sit;
* trail markers of wood or stone.

Bertol and Burden presented these various ideas to Iqaluit City Council this past Tuesday and heard a variety of opinions. But the biggest debate is likely to be between those who want the trail kept as close as possible to its natural state and those who want a more developed area.

Bertol said it will likely be several months before her department will present final proposals to council for a decision.