Copyright 2000, Environmental News Network
December 4, 2000
By Dwane Wilkin

A new park in Nunavik in Canada's far north gets a thumbs-up from locals. The park will draw adventurers to the pristine Arctic tundra.

A crater lake is the star attraction of a vast new park being charted on the rolling tundra of Canada’s far north.

Pingualuk Lake was punched deep into the Earth’s crust a million and a half years ago by a meteorite the size of a small mountain. It's considered to be one of the youngest and best-preserved craters on the planet.

Under a conservation plan put forward by Quebec’s parks and wildlife department, Pingualuit Provincial Park could open to visitors as early as next spring.

The village of Kangiqsujuaq, which lies on Wakeham Bay about 60 miles northeast of the crater, has already received a small number of adventure seekers over the years, mostly from England.

Local Inuit even boast about a brush with Hollywood fame.

A letter, purportedly autographed by Sylvester Stallone, is on display at the village's only hotel where the American movie star is said to have stayed while scouting possible film locations.

“It says he likes the land and he really wants to come back,” villager Betsy Etidloie said.

The park’s proposed boundaries take in sweeping tracts of tundra along the panoramic Puvirnituq River Valley.

Local Inuits will still be allowed to hunt caribou in the new park in northern Quebec.

Public hearings on the park plan wrapped up last week in Kangiqsujuaq, one of 14 remote villages in Nunavik, the settlement region for 10,000 Inuit living in northern Quebec.

Pingualuit is the Inuktitut term for skin blemishes caused by cold weather, and refers to the goose-pimpled landscape of lakes and hills that make up the Ungava Plateau.

Etidloie said some Inuit were initially concerned that provincial regulations would interfere with their caribou harvest, but government officials assured them only non-native visitors would be subject to a ban on hunting and fishing in the park.

Construction of a tourist center, shelters and about 70 miles of access trails is scheduled to begin in the spring of 2001. New lodging facilities and recreational activities for visitors are also in the works for Kangiqsujuaq, which is serviced by air from Montreal via Kuujjuaq on the Ungava Bay coast.

Public hearings on the Pingualuit Provincial Park plan were completed in Nunavik.

Stranded by retreating glaciers thousands of years ago and cut off from other waterways, the so-called Crystal Eye of Nunavik sits about 2,000 feet above sea level and is a sort of geological rain barrel, fed entirely by snow and rain.

Raymonde Pomerleau, a spokeswoman with the Quebec government, said the main conservation goal in establishing Pingualuit Park is to protect the Nunavik crater itself, an ecological and geophysical anomaly that has attracted the interest of scientists from around the world.

The only fish living in the crater are an isolated population of Arctic char which feed on their own young.

With an average depth of about 470 feet, the cone-shaped crater floor dips nearly 900 feet in some places, making it Quebec's deepest lake.

“It’s the second-most transparent lake in the world,” Pomerleau said.

Because of its relatively pristine condition, the crater also promises to reveal much about life on the planet 1.4 million years ago, when the 400-foot-wide meteorite blazed through the Earth’s atmosphere and exploded with atomic force.

Layers of mud that have built up over hundreds of millions of years on the lake bottom likely contain traces of pollen, which should prove valuable to scientists hoping to piece together a timeline of early plant evolution.

It’s hoped the park will boost Nunavik’s fledgling tourism trade, too, and provide much needed employment for locals, who no longer rely exclusively on hunting and fishing for their livelihood.

Because the only way for the crater to discharge its contents is through evaporation, an exchange of water takes an estimated 330 years, making the lake extremely vulnerable to pollutants.

“It gives you an idea how fragile the lake is,” Pomerleau said. “Any pollution would take a very long time to evacuate.” Error: Unable to read footer file.