Through a fine mesh.

As two researchers from the University of British Columbia and I pull our truck into a gravel packing lot 20 kilometers south of Inuvik, Justin, the project's research assistant, comments “the bugs don't look so bad today.” He still passes me his extra bug jacket and dons his own, while Xan, the principle investigator, pulls hers over her head. The bug jackets are a combination screen house and fencing outfit. Our heads are encased in canvas hoods, a fine mesh surrounds our faces. We jump out of the truck into the dim gray light, light that has hardly changed in the last 24 hours, Justin clips bear spray to his belt (“Just in case.”), we grab a few rucksacks of field equipment—measuring tapes, hollow augers for taking cores from tree trunks, notebooks—and head directly into the bush. We are immediately up to our knees in willow and birch shrubs, hardly a meter high , stunted by the harsh arctic winters. Xan and Justin are here to study the only tree in sight, Picea gluaca, the white spruce. Scattered around us are a few dozen spindly specimens of this familiar conifer which ranges across northern New England and the Great Lakes in the United States and north through Canada to the arctic tundra. Here, slightly west of the Mackenzie River ,we are roughly 90 km from the northern limit, or treeline, of this great northern forest. Xan and Justin are here collecting data that will contribute to a circumpolar study of the effects global climate change could have on the growth and range of the arctic treeline.

This close to the treeline the trees grow incredibly slow and deal with some of the most extreme weather on the planet, temperatures below -50º C, months with little or no sunlight, intense winds, floods, droughts, and permanently frozen soil. As we walk towards one of the taller trees in the study plot Xan explains "most of my study sites are further north along the delta, where we would never see a tree of this size," there most of the trees grow in mats, twisted along the ground--a growth form known as Krumholtz. She estimates the tree in front of us, roughly as wide around as my calf and only about 10 meters high, could easily be 150 years old, and the waist high “seedlings” scattered around us, well into their 30's.

For the next several hours we take measurements—diameter and height, note surrounding vegetation, and collect tree cores. Xan and Justin will analyze these cores in the laboratory to determine the age and growth rates of the the trees in their study plots. Justin's bug report for the day turns out to be just a little off—not long after we begin working the mosquitoes, three different types with three different attack strategies, begin to fly at our faces and hands. As it warms up their numbers double and black flies arrive to support their attack on any piece of ourselves we are foolish enough to leave exposed. When reading measurements or recording data it is hard to tell what distorts your vision more, the mesh of your bug net, or the cloud of insects flying around you. At times we are visited by wasps who dive bomb mosquitoes and flies, eating them on our shoulders, we begin to regard them as heroes.