Mackenzie Mud.

Today was another rainy August day. The rain was not heavy—just a constant, dampening, gray drizzle. It was enough to saturate the ground and fill puddles and potholes. Puddles and potholes whose muddy waters flowed into one an other and formed miniature Mackenzie rivers. Pieces of litter—the ubiquitous cigarette butts and wrappers—sailed downstream between these tiny ponds, across the frozen ground, and into the east channel—the branch of the Mackenzie that flows past Inuvik.

In town the east channel is lined by banks of deep, slick mud. Mud that coats the hulls of boats and pulls unsuspecting boots deep into its clutches. Most boats along the shore are reached by balancing on long boards or pieces of driftwood, the boats are tied off to sticks driven deep into the dark mud. There are nearly no permanent docks—dramatic changes in ice and water levels constantly reshape the shoreline.

On one trip upstream I watched the shore—nearly four meters high—crumple into the river, carrying a decaying log cabin with it, while a newer camp further back in the woods kept watch.

Hidden in these banks are natural gas deposits and mammoth tusks, buried thousands of years ago by the rising mud of the river.