The Hudson Bay Train to Churchill

From Winnipeg’s Union Station, near the junction of the Assiniboine and Red Rivers, I boarded the Hudson Bay train to Churchill, bound for the world’s largest congregation of polar bears. The two-day rail journey of 1,055 miles would turn first to the northwest into the plains of Saskatchewan—a prairie patchwork of freshly harrowed tracts of chocolate-shaded soil scattered among the tawny stubble of harvested wheat fields. Grain elevators and silos spiraled into the prairie ether, the skyscrapers of the pancake-flat-to-rolling landscape. Fat cylinders of rolled wheat straw studded the plains as winter fodder for the herds of cattle that flashed into view and faded like flyspecks on the horizon. The Hudson Bay would then zigzag back to the northeast and the Manitoba mining town of Thompson. From there—after tracing the Nelson River to Gillam, a district filled with lakes, rivers, and hydroelectric projects—we would creep at a snail’s pace across the undulating tundra, into the winter solitudes of Churchill, the “Polar Bear Capital of the World.”