When Laura Trethewey heard that Cambridge Bay had invited Google Street View to photograph it on a bike cam, she took it as an invitation, also, for strangers to visit. She wandered through the streets of Cambridge Bay several times over the next few months from her home in Banff, Alberta, found a few stories, and recorded this virtual tour:

This month, Up Here's Kelsey Eliasson flew to Ulakhaktok on a mission to find a creature that no one has ever documented alive: a half grizzly-half polar bear hybrid - the grolar bear. As far as we know, no one has ever photographed a living grolar bear.

Eliasson will be documenting his trek on his blog, Polar Bear Alley, throughout the spring and the whole quest will be featured in our July/August issue. Here's an excerpt of his first dispatch from the field:

For anyone who thinks of drum dances and ayaya songs when they envision Arctic music, meet the Jerry Cans. With their rip-roaring Celtic rhythms, this band of Iqaluit young folks, most of them white, are bringing Nunavut’s grandmothers and grandfathers to their feet, stomping along to “good ol’- fashioned seal-clubbin’ songs” and sometimes – no joke – crying for joy. Because when the band picks up their guitars and fiddles, they make music in the language everyone here loves: Inuktitut.

In polar bear country, bring a gun – or, better yet, bring a qualified polar bear guard. Each summer across Canada’s Arctic, dozens of Northerners find work fending off prowling bruins. But if you want to get the job, you’ll need training and certification. That’s where Andy McMullen, owner of the Yellowknife firm Bearwise, comes in.

Binky had a taste for zoo-goers’ flesh. But with each tourist he attacked, Alaskans loved him even more.

By ELIZABETH HAMES

Never look a polar bear in the eye. That's the name of Up Here contributor Zac Unger's newly-published book. Incidentally, it's also good advice, given to him by a friend of his six-year-old son. Zac wrote about his experience researching polar bears in Churchill, Manitoba for our April/May polar bear issue. He recently talked with us over the phone about moving his family to a town where there are about as many polar bears as there are people.

On a bright day in March, photo editor Angela Gzowski and an assistant slipped out of Up Here’s Yellowknife office to shoot a polar bear.

That is, they wanted to photograph one for this issue’s cover – but living in Yellowknife means the only polar bears around are stuffed and on display. It took some creative lighting, a ladder and, of course, a willing subject, to get this issue’s cover to look just right:

The co-op runs out of pop. It’s too cold out to do anything fun. Someone else has better looking kamiks than you do. Whatever the complaint, you can always laugh it off – or turn it into a meme.