Former FOX-C DEW Line Radar Site

 closed / former military, early warning radar

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Built in the mid-1950's as an Intermediate or "I" site in the FOX Sector of the Distant Early Warning (DEW) Line, the FOX-C or Ekalugad site was a short-range "gap filler" radar site built to cover low-altitude gaps in the radar coverage of the Long Range Radar Sites of FOX-4 at Cape Hooper to the East and FOX-3 at Dewar Lakes to the West. Staffed year-round by a crew of only four personnel, the site was equipped with an AN/FPS-23 radar system mounted atop a 200ft tower fixed to the top of the 2,300ft mountain the station was perched upon.

Due to the rugged and mountainous terrain surrounding the station, FOX-C was built with a very small airstrip located between two freshwater lakes to the Southwest of the station for resupply of stores and personnel, although the airfield was often rendered unusable during the Summer months by flooding and heavy snow drifts in the Winter. Unlike similarly-equipped I sites in the FOX Sector which were close enough to the DYE-MAIN site at Cape Dyer to permit resupply by helicopter, FOX-C's isolated location meant that during the long Winter the majority of provisions and freight delivered to the station was by means of parachute drop onto the frozen surface of Kangok Fjord.

As advances in radar coverage technology at the Long Range sites led to the service provided by FOX-C's radar system to become redundant, and as a result FOX-C joined the rest of the Intermediate "gap filler" filler system sites in shutting down its operations at the end of the 1963 Summer season. Left abandoned for the next thirty years, the site was eventually razed and environmentally remediated in the mid-1990's as part of a territory-wide cleanup program at former DEW Line sites.

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