We got up the next morning at about 8:00am, breakfast is served at 8:30.  This was pretty basic, we had scrambled eggs and sausage or yogurt and fruit, and lots of coffee.

We signed up and went down to the lake for a little ice fishing.  We had a pretty good crowd for this, almost everyone took part.  The guides cut some 8" holes in the ice, the lake ice is about 3 feet thick at this time of year.  They gave us simple lines on sticks and baited them for us.  We all sat on buckets and dipped our lines in the water.

Walter, a police officer from Edmonton, who was on the ice with us for the fishing, got right down on the ice with his head covering the hole so he could see the bottom.

This excursion was not very successful.  Walter did not see any fish, no one got any bites, and so no dinner (at least nothing from any of the guests).  We did get to sit out on the ice on Canadian Tire buckets and dip a line in the water for a little more than an hour.  Temp was -30C with a feel like which was much colder on the lake, the breeze was not too bad... but still helped drop the feel like temp.

We stopped the fishing because lunch was being served.  

After lunch we decided to go on a longer hike, the sun was out, the temperatures were pretty good considering where on the planet we were.  The hike was a little over 5km, though the woods, some of it on snowmobile groomed trails but a lot of it was on narrow, stomp packed paths through the woods.  Part of the hike was up to Caldrey Lookout, which has great views but you need to climb a hill through the woods in the snow, which was mostly drifted over.  So we missed the trail a few times and when we did we sunk down to our hip in snow.  We kept our eye on the trail.  Something neat about this hike is that we could see all kinds of prints from rabbits, foxes, and lynx.  The tracks told an interesting story where we could tell that something was hunting something else.  It was easy to identify where the lynx was hunting, and we also saw the remains of one of his catches.

This was a good long hike.  We were pretty much exhausted after this one, trudging through the snow is like running on a sandy beach, it takes a lot of effort with all of the gear on.  We spent the rest of the day in the lodge, warming up, playing cards and talking to new friends.

Dinner tonight was excellent, bison meatloaf.  We've never had bison before, and I was really surprised with how light and full of flavor it is.  It was not at all gamy.

We hung out, relaxed a bit, until it was time to go out and see if we could find any Aurora tonight.  

We again were not disappointed, we stayed out for a while, then came back in to warm up until we figured it was ready to go back out.  There is a web site call AuroraMax, which is a camera with a fisheye lens looking straight up at the sky.  The camera is located somewhere in Yellowknife, but we're only 100km away at Blachford so if they see aurora on that camera we should be able to see it as well.  The strategy worked, we got some really good shots of the northern lights.

We were probably up until 1:00am, then called it a night.  Others stayed up until 3:00am and did see some amazing aurora.