Every morning, we write down the weather. On most mornings I do this just after seven, standing by the upstairs west window and the little weather station display, with a mug of hot coffee in hand. I write with the aid of a headlamp in the dark of winter, but for the past week there has been plenty of light, and the sun soon to rise over the ridges to the east.

Wind speed and direction, sky cover, temperature, dewpoint, pressure, high and low temperature, and “remarks.” On the back of the page, at random, notes and observations about animal sightings, leaves and buds on trees, water levels, and almost anything else under the broad category of “observations.” Usually I am the local resident (out of two nowadays) who does this, since I am more the weather nerd around here. We have a satchel filled with 38 years of these daily weather records, minus the several years of sheets that burned up in the 2014 fire, and minus some blocks of months in the winters of the 90’s when we went away to run sled-dog races and shut the place down.

It’s a great collection, replete with notes about arrivals and sightings of various birds and animals, notable dates in the yearly round, such as the onset and cessation of mosquito season, the freezing and melting of McLeod Bay and the inland lakes, notable storms and gales, and visits from big furry critters like muskox and grizzlies to the front yard. The morning ritual keeps me going, some days, and it never gets old. Maybe it is part of my life’s work. Maybe it is most of it. Remote sensing has come a long way, but I guarantee there is nobody else out here writing this stuff down nowadays, day after day, year after year, all backed up by the veracity of eyeball and eardrum.

This month, March 2025, is already locked into the Hoarfrost Weather Hall of Fame. It is today the 19th, and within hours it will be the Spring Equinox (I’ve scheduled this post to go out on the precise minute of that, just for kicks.) Hall of Fame status, because the weather record shows that on every single morning of the month thus far we have noted the wind as “calm” or “very light.”

Did somebody out there miss the memo on Equinoctial Winds? Are we in for 10 straight days of gale, starting tomorrow? Doesn’t seem so. And even if the rest of the month was just one long blow, it has still been calm and cold and sunny and stable for so long that I can honestly say we’ve never seen a March like this, in our (admittedly brief) time here.

I was out across McLeod Bay by skidoo the other day, putting in a track for our dogs to follow. Young and tentative lead dogs are carrying the teams forward now, as several old “power steering” leaders age and falter. The bay is smooth, and fluffy on top of a foot or more of snow. A ski-plane could be landed safely anywhere out there, even in flat light, without busting anything or even rattling anyone’s dentures. Had I been on a snowmobile with any sort of contemporary shock absorbers and springs, instead of our trusty old Bravo, I could have opened it right up, I’m sure, and covered the 13 miles down to my turnaround southeast of Reliance in under twenty minutes. There have been a few times over the past thirty-some years when the frozen surface of the bay has been as smooth and soft as it is right now, but never have we seen it like this in the month of March.

It is not calm right across the North. This morning the weather maps showed a big nasty cyclone centered 400 miles to the east of us, over Southampton Island, with tight isobars and wind flags marked “G45” for “gusts to 45 knots.” Visibility at the Baker Lake airport at 9 a.m. was 1/8 of a mile.

But here, this morning, it is calm, yet again. Smoke from the workshop chimney rising straight up. Sunrise minutes earlier than yesterday, and the bright light first cleared the horizon a few degrees of arc north of where it popped up yesterday. I was watching. (It’s part of my job.) And by now we have not had any significant new snowfall for nearly seven weeks. The deep snow cover around the entire area for many miles inland is absolutely covered with ptarmigan ptracks. The white birds are everywhere, and we are happy for the life they give to the landscape. They must be in some sort of cyclical high, for the past three winters. We have proclaimed a “no hunt zone” within sight of all buildings here, and several of them seem to have realized this. One in particular almost got himself booted in the tail feathers today, just in the spirit of neighbourly fun.

Happy Equinox! It is comforting to me to think that at this moment, the daylight and darkness ration right around the entire planet is the same from pole to equator to pole. Nobody can take that away. The sliding of our star through the celestial equator strikes me as an older and more interesting story than any of the other stories vying for my attention right now.