Yes, it’s the midnight sun, but, even more importantly, we have the magic evening light of the arctic that lasts for hours as the sun slowly passes across the northern sky. This photographically “cool” light produces great colour in wildflowers, especially when you are able to backlight your photos. On the first afternoon or evening after arrival, we do a short wildflower hike from the lodge along the shore between the community and the airstrip. These flat areas by the sea are a tapestry of wildflowers, with the display changing by the week.
We’ll introduce you to the flowers, providing a chance for everyone to spend time lying on the ground, communing with a lupine, few-flowered anemone, or a patch of mountain avens, getting up close and personal with the tiny bells of arctic heather, or the urns of the bearberry. The first week of our season often offers the woolly lousewort, like pink candles in the evening light, and later weeks, great shows of liquoriceroot, yellow oxytrope, bog rosemary, and the small northern bog orchid, false asphodel, arctic lousewort, Sudetan lousewort, arctic cotton, large-flowered wintergreen, and butterwort. Least sandpipers and semi-palmated plovers dash about along the path and the beaches, and sometimes come to settle on a nest at your feet.
