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Train to Churchill

Ecotourism in the famed Hudson Bay outpost isn't just about polar bears
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The first European visitors to Churchill, Manitoba, are forgiven for not recommending it as a destination. In 1619 Jens Munk's Danish expedition wintered where the town now stands — only three of 64 crew members survived to journey back to Denmark.

Numerous better-prepared expeditions similarly failed the rigours of nine months of ice, snow and isolation, and it wasn't until 1717 that the Hudson Bay Company established a permanent post upstream from the mouth of the Churchill River. Capitalizing on the fur trade just out of the reach of the rival North West Company's York Factory 200 km to the south, it dealt mainly with taiga and barren lands Chipewyans who delivered fur from as far as the Rocky Mountains. The original log structure was eventually replaced by Prince of Wales Fort, a low stone edifice closer to the bay, which English and French colonials promptly began trading like a hockey card (well, a stolen hockey card). Between the decline of the fur trade and the rise in agriculture, Churchill's relevance phased in and out, eventually landing in as a Prairie grain terminus and Canada's only subarctic port. The military, hunters, and rocket scientists (really — they were studying the atmosphere) came and went. In the 1980s, Churchill reinvented itself as an ecotourism destination where binoculared pilgrims dropped as much as $10K to safely view polar bears from massive 4WD buses known as "tundra buggies."

In the three-week window during late October and early November when hundreds of bears lounge around Churchill waiting for the ocean to solidify so they can return to the business of hunting seals, thousands of bear-mad humans also await, so I've decided to visit in less-crazed summer when the town's natural charms — Belugas, birds, wildflowers — are more subtle. There's even a chance to see bears as they debark from the dwindling ice. I've also chosen to approach in languid comfort — by train from Winnipeg on the track that opened in 1929 after some 15 years of halting construction. VIA Rail now plies the 1,700-km route thrice weekly, a journey of 40 hours (give or take a day). After a night at the historic Fort Garry Hotel in the third week of June, I drag my bag across the street to the station for a noon departure. The train pulls out at 3 p.m..

It takes forever to escape the city. But once we break from the muddy meanders of the Assiniboine and Red Rivers, then the graffiti of underpasses and industrial parks, the transition is stark: Prairie so flat you could see a tent pitched a kilometre away — despite rippling oceans of soy, rye, wheat and canola. It has been a wet spring and is still teeming rain when I turn in, clouds low and black like they're begging for an oil change.

By morning — if this pale light isn't just another whistle-stop like The Pas — we're in the boreal forest, a rush of streaking vegetation. Aspens sway along the tracks above shrubs hedging tea-coloured water. Behind this palisade, black spruce with their odd little top-knots lurk amidst peaty bogs. Midday offers the familiarity of shield country — frost-shattered granite, beaver ponds with enormous lodges, big rivers. On the trip's only real stop we have three hours to kick around Thompson (two hours too many) but leave on time at 5 p.m., augering well, it seems, for reaching Churchill on schedule. By now I've finished all the work I've carted along, read a book, and contented myself with nursing beers in the dining car and staring out at the landscape.

My sleeper is comfortable enough, engineered with a self-contained bathroom and a Murphy bed that I keep open in the day because it's infinitely more comfortable than the compartment's chairs, which oddly don't recline and lead to spinal deformity. A sunset silhouette of spruce with fuchsia-brushed clouds on the mirrored surface of a pond is interrupted by the largest black bear I've ever seen, standing blithely by the track squared against the insult of our passage, head cocked toward the intrusion. Falling asleep I spy a bald eagle on an enormous nest in a scrawny riverside tree, the most obvious thing on the land in all directions.

When I awake at sunrise — 4:15 a.m. — we're on a land eviscerated of most upright elements: an occasional sprinkle of dwarf spruce and tamarack signal we've hit taiga on the march toward treeline. And "march" it truly is as we creep along most of the day at walking speed, stopping on occasion behind the "Geometry Train" that has run ahead of us since Thompson. Because the railbed is soft above the permafrost in spring and higher speeds can lead to derailment, the Geometry Train measures parameters such as rail alignment, curvature, gauge, profile and warp. With good reason: a parallel abandoned railbed dips and arches like a low-level roller coaster; in some places rotted ties are suspended over water running underneath them, in others the line is completely submerged.

Despite treeless tundra spackled in lupins and other wildflowers as we approach Churchill, a mirage appears on the eastern horizon — a thin line of trees standing in water, the apparition thrown up by the ice on Hudson Bay. This means the bears will still be out on the ice. No matter, there's still plenty to see: birders, several of which ride the train, have collectively recorded more than 270 species here and, as the grain terminals and fort come into view beside the river, I see dozens of the 50,000 Beluga whales that come to calf in the estuary each summer.

Like me, they've just arrived in historic Churchill.

Resources

For information on train travel between Winnipeg and Churchill visit the Via Rail website at viarail.ca