Only a few years later, the last survivor of a 1906–1908 expedition, sponsored by the Danish government and known formally as the Denmark Expedition to Greenland's Northeast Coast, died after failing to light his kerosene (?) stove in a freezing cave.
His body and his diary were found in 1908, but the stove itself was recovered only in 1973.
The Canadian Rangers are military reservists who establish a government presence in the Far North ("sovereignty patrols"), perform search and rescue, and so on. Why the bolt-action rifles? Mainly for hunting and for aggressive bears. As reported by the National Post, the Lee-Enfield worked well for decades:
Canadian Rangers with Lee-Enfield rifles
at a shooting match in Ottawa (National Post).
Since 1947 the Lee-Enfield has remained the main service
weapon of the Canadian Rangers, a part-time force mainly devoted to
Arctic patrols. [In August 2018] the Canadian Rangers began replacement of
their Lee-Enfields with the specially commissioned Colt Canada C19.
Unlike
many other antique items in the Canadian military, the Lee-Enfield
didn’t hang on for so long out of apathy or tight budgets. Rather, it’s
because it’s still one of the best guns to carry above the tree line. . . . .
The Lee-Enfield is on
the Rangers' insignia.
Its wood stock makes it uniquely resistant to cracking
or splitting in extreme cold. The rifle is also bolt-action, meaning
that every shot must be manually pushed into place by the shooter. This
makes for slower firing, but it also leaves the Lee-Enfield with as few
moving parts as possible.
“The more complicated a rifle gets … the
more prone you are to problems with parts breaking or jamming in a
harsh environment,” said Eric Fernberg, an arms collection specialist at
the Canadian War Museum.
“It might seem old-fashioned … (but) the
retention of the Lee-Enfield by the Canadian Rangers was a wise choice
for their role and environment.”
Canadian Rangers march with their Lee-Enfield rifles.
As the photos show, the Rangers are mostly Indians and Inuit people.
The Canadian Rangers provide a limited military presence in Canada's
remote areas and receive 12 days or so per year of formal training
(often more days of training are offered but attendance is not
mandatory), albeit they are considered to be somewhat always on duty,
observing and reporting as part of their daily lives. Canadian Rangers
are paid when formally on duty according to the rank they hold within
their patrol and when present on operations or during training events.
They are paid in accordance with the standard rates of pay for Class-A
(part-time) or Class-B (full-time) Reserve forces, except when they are
called out for search and rescue missions or domestic operations (such
as fighting floods and wildfires), when they are paid as Class-C
Reserves and receive the full Regular Force pay and benefits ("Canadian Rangers," Wikipedia.)
When I was introduced to mountaineering as a teenager, I received two conflicting pieces of advice about colored outerwear.
One was to wear bright colors because they cheered you up, particularly if the sky was grey and the wind was blowing. I took that counsel to heart during my five years in western Oregon, where my burnt-orange cotton anorak was my go-to jacket. I had a bright red down-filled jacket too, but it was better back in Colorado, out of the Northwestern drizzle.
The opposite advice came from famed mountaineer Paul Pedzoldt, founder of the National Outdoor Leadership School. I never met him, but I read somewhere that he told his students to wear subdued colors above timberline as a courtesy to other mountaineers. Let other climbers sit on a summit and enjoy the view without having to look at dots of orange, bright blue, or red on the next ridge over — that was the gist of it.
