Quote:
Originally Posted by rob love
The DND has special purpose built sleds for behind snow machines. When up North, however, the Inuit's qamutiik are much longer so have a greater cargo capacity over the DND ones.
There is mention that the nose of the diesel machines are quite heavy. As such, they are more likely to get stuck in softer snow. My limited arctic experience was that the snow in the arctic is not the same snow we have in the South. The ground ranges from very thin cover of snow with rocks peeking out, and where there are drifts, they are generally quite hard packed.
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The Inuit have something like 30 different names for snow depending on its characteristics.
I found that warm snow crunches, cold snow squeaks, but in the arctic really really cold snow chirps. The oddest snow I saw was the layered variety. There would be a blizzard, followed by wind which picked up exposed dirt, blizzard, dirt, blizzard dirt...the end result being snow with the consistency of dense styrofoam but really cool (sorry for the pun) layers of white and chocolate milk brown. Then there was the June snowstorms accompanied with 80 km/hr winds yet the 3/4" long mosquitos could still land on exposed skin, bite and blow away.