Eureka! A glimpse inside Ellesmere’s weather station

The Eureka weather station recently survived an invasion of outsiders of a size they’ve never seen before.

Well, sort of.

Late one Wednesday afternoon, a plane-load of reporters and cameramen, escorted by soldiers in green fatigues, flew into the remote colony of eight scientists, administrators and a cook – and wreaked havoc, using every bed in the compound, stretching water-capacity to the limit and increasing the local population almost seven-fold.

Besides witnessing 20 Rangers roar into the otherwise peaceful compound on skidoos as part of their sovereignty expedition from Resolute, reporters and army crew were privy to the slightly secretive world of

Eureka, a 24-hour Environment Canada station and internationally renowned research facility perched by the frozen ice of a fiord on the west side of Ellesmere Island.

Most of the visitors, some from as far away as New York City, took in the sights with awe, a few chills and a few giggles. Coming out of Eureka’s self-proclaimed “international airport,” consisting of a landing strip, reporters were exposed to high winds and a spectacular landscape of soft-rolling mountains in every direction.

Down the main road, past the sign warning of lemmings crossing, they found a clutch of yellow pre-fabricated bungalows, and heavy construction machinery, half-buried in snow drifts.

Rich DeVall, a metereologist who has been releasing weather balloons into the sky from Eureka since the mid-1990s, said most of his friends down South can’t imagine life “in the middle of nowhere” on the 80th parallel.

But he said workers are quick to adapt to the isolation, 24-hour darkness in the winter, and 24 hours of light in the summer.

Like others, DeVall takes advantage of the impressive recreational facilities, including a room full of exercise weights, a big-screen TV backed by hundreds of movies lining two walls, and an impressive lounge area called the Umingmak (Muskox) bar, complete with a well-kept pool table and a piano left over from the Cold War.

DeVall said he came to Eureka for the adventure, but mostly for the perks. Station employees are usually limited to three-month work stints, during which they earn enough overtime on their 12-hour shifts that they can afford to take three-month vacations, essentially paid for by the job. As a result, DeVall spends half the year fishing near his other home in Winnipeg.

Even though he offered to stay longer than three months at a time, DeVall said his boss won’t let him.

“They’re probably afraid of us going squirrelly,” DeVall said before heading back to his office to be surrounded by computers, dials, graphs and metres.

Down the hall from DeVall, a wiley woman in a smudged apron and greying pigtails zips back and forth through her sizeable kitchen, singing along with a country music station being piped in through her radio. Known to some as the greatest cook in the North, Debbie Clouthier prepared meals for more than six times her normal sitting, a full array of beef roast, basmati rice, apple pie, and other dishes topped with fresh mint grown in her bedroom.

Clouthier, a lady who won’t reveal her age, credits her passion for cooking and the outdoors for keeping her upbeat and loving her job.

Speaking with the cheery sing-song accent known to her farming community in the Ottawa Valley, Clouthier explained that she makes a point of walking out on the land every day, “to get a breath of fresh air and kiss of the Arctic wind.”

“Who couldn’t be happy here?” she exclaimed with a clack of laughter. “It’s a beautiful spot, it’s magical.”

And the spot, and the weather work done there, show no signs of disappearing.

Station administrators say the $2 million budget for running Eureka remains firmly in place, and will expand with the construction of a new building set to replace the main complex, some of which was first transported to the site in 1947, when the station opened.