The overall difficulty rating takes into account that you have probably driven up the Dempster and ITH highways to get here. Congratulations! Get your certificate at the visitor's centre.
Pingo Canadian Landmark is 5 kilometers west of the community of Tuktoyaktuk on the Beaufort Sea in the Canadian arctic and consists of 8 pingos.
The Tuktoyaktuk peninsula is home to almost a quarter of all the pingos in the world.
A pingo is an ice-filled mound erupting from the flat frozen tundra. Ibyuk (thick in the Inuvialuktun language) is the second-largest pingo in the world and the largest in North America. It is 300 meters (1,000 feet) wide at its base and rises to a height of 49 meters (160 feet) and is still growing. After about a thousand years, pingos begin to collapse under their own weight, but leave patterns in the ground that can be seen from the air.
The Inuvialuit people and their Thule ancestors used pingos as navigational landmarks and lookouts to spot whales passing by before heading out in their kayaks. Whale meat is still an important part of the local diet.
The best way to see Ibyuk up close is to walk the boardwalk to the pingo. If you drove up the Dempster Highway to get here, you already have seen a grizzly or two and a few black bears, so you know to be bear aware when hiking up here. Last summer, a hungry polar bear visited the streets of Tuktoyaktuk.
The region is an important habitat for nesting and migrating birds. In late spring you can see migrating geese, including Brant, lesser snow geese and greater white-fronted geese, tundra swans and loons. Ducks such as mallard, green-winged teal, king eider and long tailed duck are also common to the area. The shallow waters of the landmark’s bays and coastal areas support a variety of fish species, including Pacific herring, Arctic cisco, least cisco, burbot, broad whitefish and inconnu.
You can see the pingos from the roadside pullout approximately 5 kms west of Tuktoyaktuk on the Inuvik–Tuktoyaktuk Highway jutting out from the flat, tundra landscape.
Access by motorboat or canoe is easy if the weather cooperates. Local guides can take you (arrange at the Visitor's Centre), you can use your own boat, or you can borrow a club canoe at the RCMP station in town. T-shirts purchased from the RCMP support projects for local children!
For those with a scientific bent, here is an article from Quaternary Research on the Growth of Ibyuk Pingo
In keeping with the virtual cache guidelines, please post a photo of your GPS showing the location or a personal item with the pingo in the background to prove your visit to the location.
Virtual Reward - 2017/2018
This Virtual Cache is part of a limited release of Virtuals created between August 24, 2017 and August 24, 2018. Only 4,000 cache owners were given the opportunity to hide a Virtual Cache. Learn more about Virtual Rewards on the Geocaching Blog.