As Franklin’s lure brings people north, Gjoa Haven seeks its share of the booty
GJOA HAVEN , Nunavut — It’s cool and cloudy as Don Sessions, wearing a toque and a good, solid jacket, hops off an inflatable boat that has ferried him from his cruise ship to shore.
The welcoming facilities in Gjoa Haven, Nunavut, are primitive — a stretch of pebbly beach marked off with yellow police tape. Sessions and his fellow tourists will walk up a dusty dirt trail into town to stroll its dusty dirt roads.
He’s having a ball.
“I’m loving the trip,” says Sessions, a self-described Franklin Expedition nut who has travelled from St. Louis to visit the Arctic hamlet near the site of Sir John Franklin’s shipwrecks. “When you were a kid, this is what you dreamed about, if you dreamed about the North.”