COAST BETWEEN MACKENZIE DELTA AND BATHURST INLET 
CAPE BATHURST 
The Cape Bathurst peninsula has on its east side slaty and mostly steep cliffs, 
the famous ‘‘smoking mountains.” It is, however, that part of the peninsula 
which faces the two Baillie islands which principally interests us. Both Baillie 
islands and the mainland coast present tundra bluffs underlaid in places by 
ground ice, and large blocks of the latter may be seen standing like immense 
boulders at the beach, washed out by the sea and covered with a layer of mud. 
I did not visit Baillie islands myself, but they are known to be below 40 feet 
high and have the character of typical tundra islands with sandspits and lagoons. 
A long spit of gravel and sand juts out towards the northwest from the 
mainland peninsula, and the village and harbour of cape Bathurst are situated 
atitsend. At the latter place is a grassy spot with a lagoon pond, but the stones 
which make up the shingle composing the spit have no growth of lichens on 
them, proving that in stormy weather and at very high tide the sea reaches all 
over the spit. This is further emphasized by the appearance of the place where 
the sandspit joins the tundra behind; a belt of tumbled-down tundra sods and 
barren muck washed out by the sea is found there while the bluffs themselves 
are steeply cut and intersected by gullies, perhaps mainly made by drainage 
water in the spring. The gullies gradually merge into swampy depressions 
between the higher parts of the tundra. Still farther up, these gully swamps 
contain more water and branch out where brook tributaries come down; back 
of it all is finally the typical, higher tundra with its swamps, ponds, lakes, gravel 
hummocks, ete., stretching far inland. 
My own observations from this place are limited to an afternoon, July 
26th, 1916, but in the following description of the vegetation I have included 
what I have gathered together from other sources.! 
The gravelly sandspit is barren of vegetation apart from a few, typical 
beach plants near the village. These comprise three grasses, viz.: Alopecurus 
alpinus, Glyceria vaginata, G. vilfotdea, the last two growing in the swampy 
place at the above mentioned lagoon; also Halianthus peploides, Cochlearia 
groenlandica, and Aertensia maritima, The absence of some of the most typical 
beach plants, e.g. Elymus mollis, is interesting, the reason probably being that 
the sandspit got its vegetation in fairly recent times. Unfortunately, however, 
those who have collected plants at cape Bathurst from the time it was discovered 
by Richardson and Kendall in 1826 have not distinguished between the vegeta- 
tion on the sandspit and that of the tundra behind, or the collections were 
perhaps only made on the latter. 
The water holes in the swampy part of the gullies at the time of my visit 
were almost filled with algae, mosses (Drepanocladus Wilsoni), and the equally 
submerged Ranunculus Purshii, while Carex stans, Eriophorum angustifolium, 
E. Scheuchzeri, Caltha palustris forma radicans, Cardamine pratensis, C. digitata, 
Chrysosplenium alternifolium var. tetrandrum, and other typical swamp plants 
were growing in or around them. On the little drier parts of the swamps a few 
of the more typical tundra plants had entered in addition, viz.: Saxifraga cernua, 
S. Hirculus, Pedicularis sudetica, ete. At the places where the swamps merged 
into the higher tundra behind were found the plants common on the latter 
though only a few of them were in bloom, viz.: mosses, lichens, fungi, grasses, 
Lychnis apetala, Dryas integrifolia, Potentilla Vahliana, Pedicularis arctica, 
Senecio palustris, etc. 
1P. A. Rydberg, in V. Stefansson, My Life with the Eskimos, New York, 1913, pp. 447-48. Collection made by Dr. R. 
M. Anderson. : 
