Temperature: 34 F Weather: Cloudy, light rain, 35 knot winds and 12+ foot seas

After motoring around the western Beaufort Sea for the last few days, today we entered Canada on our way to Amundsen Strait, the easternmost point on our journey. Honestly, it wasn't the best day at sea.

(Photo: the Healy pounds through rough seas)

This map tracks the Healy's route.

We're transiting far offshore across the deep Canada Basin, where wildlife is scarce. The only creatures all day long were a few Glaucous Gulls. The bowheads, belugas, and seals that do migrate through these waters are not here now—they are on their way west and south for winter. The weather today was the roughest yet. We slogged through 10 to 12 foot seas and a 35 knot headwind. The occasional 15 foot swell would crash hard against the bow, making a mesmerizing halo of spray around the ship, carried far by the intense wind.

But this place does not need sunny weather or wildlife shows to be worthy of today's post. This place has a story much bigger than that. Where we're headed, and will arrive during the night, is a place people have been trying to find for 500 years: an entrance to the Northwest Passage. Beginning around 1500, European explorers started searching for a trade route around North America. This search for a "Northwest Passage" spurred European exploration of the coasts of what is now the US, Mexico, and Canada. They were looking for a rumored route through the middle of the continent which did not exist.

Then explorers began looking for an Arctic route. Off they went, party after party, getting lost and returning home or getting iced in for the winter and trying to survive. Some parties had multiple ships, large crews, and extravagant items; one ship had its own four-piece orchestra. Many died, and others were so starved that they were reduced to eating terrible things like candles or leather boots. These explorations led to the realization that the lands of northeastern Canada were rich in furs, and thus the Hudson's Bay Company was born. Over a 100-year period beginning in the late 1700s, the company sold over 10 million furs of fox, lynx, wolverine, bear, wolf, mink, badger, and beaver.

Between 1850 and 1854, Robert McClure found the route for the Northwest Passage, but his ship was locked in ice for three winters near Banks Island, where we are headed now; the strait north of the island is named after him. Starving, and found by a search party, he finished the route on foot. Because he didn't sail the whole passage, he was not credited with being the first.

The strait south of Banks Island was named for Roald Amundsen, the first explorer to sail the complete Northwest Passage from 1903-1906. Since then, others have made other firsts: the first to do the Passage in an open skiff, the first icebreaker, the first cruise ship. One hundred years later the Passage is ice-free enough in late summer to pass through in one season. The Northwest Passage is closer than ever to becoming the international trade route explorers envisioned 500 years ago. Today I'm following in the footsteps of McClure and Amundsen, and tomorrow I'll get to see it for myself for the first time.

Melanie Smith, Landscape Ecologist, Audubon Alaska