Some of these adventures will break the bank. Others will break your back. But if you’re gutsy, flush or both, the North doesn’t get more epic than this.

Yukon
1- Tombstone Range
View Finder
Train your lens on the Yukon’s stunning landscapes

If you’re an aspiring Ansel Adams, you’re going to love the Yukon’s mountains – and the best time to photograph them is early autumn, when the alpine tundra turns crimson and gold. Cabin Fever Adventures’ Arctic Light and Colour tour has this all figured out. Guided by Robert Postma, one of the Yukon’s finest shooters, their nine-day shutterbug trip begins with a drive from Whitehorse to Dawson. Then, you’ll be helicoptered into the spiky Tombstone Range – arguably the most arresting array of peaks on the continent – where you’ll get six hours on the ground to fill up your memory card. The rest of the tour is spent road-tripping up the Dempster Highway and crossing the Richardson Range to the Mackenzie River, shooting like crazy all the way. By the end, you’ll be an expert at toggling between wide angles (for the big-sky landscapes) and long lenses (for the grizzlies and moose). And we’re just guessing you’ll snap a postcard pretty photograph or two.

DREAMSCAPE: Duration: 9 days ■ Season: Late summer ■ Cost: $3,750 (plus $1,200 or so for the helicopter) ■ Difficulty: Easy
■ Departs: Whitehorse ■ More info: Cabinfeveradventures.com

2- Fishing Branch River
Bear Patrol
Join a convention of grizzlies in the back-of-beyond

The Yukon’s Fishing Branch River is an inland polynya. Here, in October, just shy of the Arctic Circle, its thermal-spring-warmed waters flow free through an otherwise ice-locked landscape. Thanks to that, the river throngs with late-season chum, giving it its Gwich’in name, Ni’iinlii njik: where salmon spawn. Of course, one things leads to another. Where salmon spawn, grizzlies gather – lots of them, fattening for hibernation. And in recent years the bears have lured a handful of lucky bear-watchers. Bear Cave Mountain Eco-Adventures, partly owned by the First Nation in nearby Old Crow, brings visitors in by helicopter from Dawson, housing them in a rustic, riverside lodge. From there, led by a guide, they explore the surrounding mountains, learn about the unique ecology of the area, and most of all, get up close and personal with a remarkable collection of bears feeding in a remarkable river.

DREAMSCAPE: Duration: Variable ■ Season: Autumn ■ Cost: $1,500 per day ■ Difficulty: Easy ■ Departs: Dawson City ■ More info: Bearcavemountain.com

3-Mount Logan
Uphill Climb
Tag Canada’s loftiest summit – and get back down again

After the great alpinist Edmund Hillary descended from the peak of Mount Everest, he bragged he’d “knocked the bastard off.” That attitude toward Mother Nature is no longer cool – but let’s get real: Mother Nature will knock you off right back. That’s especially so on Canada’s most imposing massif, Mount Logan, which lords over the Yukon Territory from its throne in Kluane National Park. The nation’s tallest peak is an especially formidable mountaineering challenge – a real butt-kicker – not just because of its brain-shrinking altitude of 5,959 metres, but because, thanks to its Northern location and proximity to the North Pacific, it gets weather that’ll frostbite your eyeballs and shred your Goretex. So go with a good guiding operation: Canada West Mountain School. Their May Logan climb starts on the Quintino Sella Glacier and ascends, via ice-axe and crampon, up the mountain’s easiest corridor, the King’s Trench route. After four weeks, three vertical kilometres and lots of sweat and tears, you’ll find yourself on the tippy-top of Canada.

DREAMSCAPE: Duration: 28 days ■ Season: Spring ■ Cost: $5,600 ■ Difficulty: Extreme ■ Departs: Whitehorse ■ More info: Themountainschool.com

4-Pelly Mountains
Long Walk
Become Survivorman while tramping the backcountry

The U.S.-based National Outdoor Leadership School is legendary not just for guiding wilderness trips, but for breeding wilderness guides. They offer expeditions all over the world, including in the Yukon, where their month-long summer backpacking course is one of their flagship trips. With 14 other students (NOLS offers university credits in “wilderness ethics” and “leadership techniques,” and many of its participants are college-age), you’ll lace up your waffle-stompers and tromp 150 kilometres through the Pelly Mountains, all the while learning how to schlep a load, ford swollen creeks, stand down grizzlies, patch blistered toes and cook multi-course dinners on micro-sized backpacking stoves. A month later, when you stride back into civilization, you’ll be a better woodsman, and more importantly, a better human being.

DREAMSCAPE: Duration: 27 days ■ Season: Summer ■ Cost: $3,800 Difficulty: Extreme ■ Departs: Whitehorse ■ More info: Nols.edu

5- Yukon River
River Cruise
Navigate the North’s epic river without lifting a paddle

In some ways, the Yukon River is ho-hum. The North has plenty of waterways with better scenery and bigger rapids – but no river has a larger legend. Spilling out of the Coast Mountains and washing north-by-northwest across the territory that adopted its name, this mother of rivers was for eons a liquid highway – originally for First Nations bands, which peopled its banks, then for gold-crazed stampeders, who ran it in a mad dash to the Klondike, and then for plush paddlewheelers, which plied its channels between the boomtowns of Dawson and Whitehorse. Now, 50 years since the river’s heyday, a luxury riverboat is back on the water: the Shakat, owned by a consortium of Yukon First Nations bands, which takes passengers on a trip called
The Great River Journey. When not aboard the boat, passengers hike the banks to view wildlife, explore historic sites, take in aboriginal performances, and bunk down in rustic log lodges and opulent tent camps. The stampeders will be rolling in their graves.

DREAMSCAPE: Duration: 7 days ■ Season: Summer ■ Cost: $6,495 ■ Difficulty: Easy ■ Departs: Whitehorse ■ More info: Greatriverjourney.com

Northwest Territories
6- Great Bear Lake
Reel Deal
Hook blockbuster trout in the North’s king of lakes

Where do you go to catch the world’s largest lake trout? To the North’s largest lake, of course. Straddling the Arctic Circle, Great Bear Lake is bigger than the nation of Belgium and nearly half a kilometre deep, but with only one tiny First Nations village on its shores and just 400 sportsfishermen visiting it annually, its fish have never learned to fear humans. The average Great Bear salvelinus tips the scales at 10 pounds; the world rod-and-reel record, a 72-pound laker, was landed here in 1991; last summer, an 83-pound goliath was caught in a local man’s net. Almost certainly, there’s an even bigger lunker swimming around out there. If anyone can help you find it, it’s the Plummers – the first family of Arctic fishing, whose 46-person Plummer’s Great Bear Lake Lodge, on the lake’s Dease Arm, is widely considered to be the North’s must-visit fishing retreat. When you’re not pulling in trout, there are stellar views beneath the midnight sun, plus a fully stocked bar. What’s more, nearby is the Plummer’s camp on the beautiful Tree River – the best Arctic char river on Earth, where the world record, a 32-pounder, was caught back in 1981.

DREAMSCAPE: Duration: 7 days ■ Season: Summer ■ Cost: $4,995 ■ Difficulty: Easy ■ Departs: Yellowknife ■ More info: Canadianarcticfishing.com

7- Beaufort Sea
Dog Walk
Mush a team of huskies to historic Herschel Island

Dog-sledding and Northern travel: They go together like a horse and carriage. For thousands of years, Inuit and Dene used huskies as hunting-help and beasts of burden; even now, dog-team racing is the North’s signature sport. So it makes sense that, when in Canada’s territories, you travel by canine. Husky day-trips can be enjoyed in lots of Northern communities, but when it comes to epic tours, nothing beats Uncommon Journeys’ Herschel Island Arctic Dogsled Expedition, a 13-day mushing adventure from Aklavik, NWT, to Herschel Island on the Yukon’s Arctic coast. This early-April trip starts below the treeline, twists down the Mackenzie Delta, and emerges onto the Arctic sea-ice, where – through blizzards or blinding sun – you’ll hug the shore westward to Herschel Island, a.k.a Qikiqtaruk Territorial Park. Two days are spent exploring the abandoned buildings and graves of this century-old whaling station before you – and the huskies – return to civilization. It’ll be a howl.

DREAMSCAPE: Duration: 13 days ■ Season: Spring ■ Cost: $11,450 ■ Difficulty: Difficult ■ Departs: Whitehorse
■ More info: Uncommonyukon.com

8- Barrenlands
Icy Ride
Become an ice-road trucker on the NWT’s slickest highway

The North’s most telegenic road exists for just three months a year – but during that time, what a drive. Each winter, a consortium of the NWTs’ diamond mines ploughs a track across 568 kilometres of frozen lakes, linking the continental highway system with the Barrenlands – a vast Empty Quarter beyond the treeline. Between late January and early April, this icy track becomes a superhighway for 700 big rigs to ferry up to 11,000 loads of supplies to mines and exploration camps. It’s perfectly legal for you to join this caravan in your own car, but it’s cold, there’s no gas, and – dude! – you’re driving on ice. Best to go with the experts and join True North Safaris’ Ice Road Tour. They offer a package that includes three days of van-touring to Diavik Mine (with nights at Mackay Lake Lodge, at Kilometre 250 or so) and a day driving dog-teams and gawking at the aurora in Yellowknife. Chance of breaking through the ice? Basically zero.

DREAMSCAPE: Duration: 5 days ■ Season: Winter ■ Cost: $2450 Difficulty: Easy ■ Departs: Yellowknife
■ More info: Truenorthsafaris.com

9- Canol Trail
Country Stroll
Trek through history on the North’s longest hiking trail

Normally, progress is a one-way street: They pave paradise and put up a parking lot. Not so with the NWT’s Canol Trail, a Second World War-era road and pipeline-route that’s been reclaimed by nature and become the North’s ultimate hike. The trail, running through the Mackenzie Mountains from Norman Wells to the Yukon border, was intended as a path for NWT oil to flow to Alaska, which was menaced by Japan during the war. But due to its fantastic costs and shoddy quality, the project went belly up only months after completion. That’s OK, though: Now, the corridor is used by a handful of independent backpackers, plus one package tour – Canoe North Adventure’s Canol Trail Hike. On this 11-day trek, 80 kilometres of the Canol are covered, from the border to Godlin Lakes. Not only is it the trail’s most scenic stretch, but it’s all downhill. High-def views of caribou and mountainscapes are certain; history, in the form of mouldering U.S. military equipment, still lines the trailsides.

DREAMSCAPE: Duration: 11 days ■ Season: Summer ■ Cost: $3,450 ■ Difficulty: Difficult ■ Departs: Norman Wells ■ More info: Canoenorthadventures.com

10-Nahanni River
River Run
Canoe Canada’s ultimate river in its uttermost National Park

It’s one thing to canoe a bit of a river; it’s quite another to run it tip-to-tail. And if you’re going to do a river in its entirety, you might as well do the holy grail: the Nahanni. Even among those who’ve not paddled it, the names of the Nahanni’s features are legendary: Sunblood Mountain, Rabbitkettle Hot Springs, Virginia Falls, Hell’s Gate. Recently, Nahanni National Park Reserve was expanded to encompass almost all of its namesake river. To experience it – plus grizzlies, thermal pools, midnight sun, historic cabins and epic day-hikes – Nahanni River Adventures’ Moose Ponds Expedition provides a 20-day paddling extravaganza, descending from the Yukon border 530 kilometres to the Nahanni’s mouth. To make this trip double-epic, at the beginning or end you can add on a five day heli-hiking trip in the Cirque of the Unclimbables. Downside: After this, all of life will be dull.

DREAMSCAPE: Duration: 20 days ■ Season: Summer ■ Cost: $6,525 (plus $7,525 for Cirque of the Unclimbables heli-hiking) ■ Difficulty: Difficult■Departs: Fort Simpson ■ More info: Nahanni.com

Nunavut
11- Somerset Island
Arctic Escape
Step out of the world at the northernmost lodge

Sometimes it’s nice to get away, and you can’t get much farther away than the top of Nunavut’s Somerset Island. Here, on the flank of the Northwest Passage, you’re 800 kilometres above the Arctic Circle and 80 kilometres from the nearest “town” – the tiny Inuit settlement of Resolute Bay. Weird, then, that in the middle of polar nowhere is one of the finest retreats North of Sixty. Arctic Watch Wilderness Lodge, operated by famed North Pole trekking guides Richard Weber and Josée Auclair, is the highest-latitude – and arguably the highest-quality – naturalist haven in Canada’s territories. Throughout the brief summer they offer rustic accommodations, fine cuisine and astounding wildlife-watching: the area is famous for its beluga congregations, and creatures like muskox, fox, polar bears and peregrine falcons are regularly sighted. Even better, go during their beginning-of-season Discovery Week, when a Twin Otter aircraft is available to wing guests to area attractions like Beechey Island, site of the famous Franklin expedition graves.

DREAMSCAPE: Duration: 9 days ■ Season: Summer ■ Cost: $7,900 (or $10,900 for Discovery Week) ■ Difficulty: Easy ■ Departs: Yellowknife ■ More info: Canadianarcticholidays.ca

12-North Pole
Far Flight
Wing your way to the world’s crown, deplaning at the Pole

Of all the Earth’s ends, none is so steeped in fable – and so stark in fact – as the North Pole. The ancient Greeks called the top of the world Hyperborea, an Eden of round-the-clock sun. The early explorers theorized that the pole must be an island girdled by an ice-free sea. And Robert Peary’s Inuit companions supposedly called it tigi-su, “the big nail.” But when Peary actually got there – or darn close – 101 years ago, the truth became obvious: “Ninety north” is a grim, white, vacant waste – a monotonous jostle of ice-floes around which the world happens to spin. Yet a visit to Earth’s apex is worth it – for the bragging rights, for the brush with history, and, when you go with Seattle-based Arctic Odysseys’ North Pole and Greenland Odyssey, for the things you’ll see along the way. The company’s weeklong Twin Otter trip takes you not just to the North Pole but to the Nunavut villages of Resolute and Grise Fiord, the Eureka research station on Ellesmere Island, and the Greenlandic polar hub of Qaanaaq. The price is flabbergasting, but no package tour takes you higher.

DREAMSCAPE: Duration: 8 days ■ Season: Spring ■ Cost: $26,650 ■ Difficulty: Easy ■ Departs: Resolute, Nunavut ■ More info:
Arcticodysseys.com

13- Eclipse Sound
Deep Dive
Go beneath the floes at Nunavut’s wildlife-rich ice-edge

The Arctic Ocean can seem like a bitter, barren, boring place, but each spring when the sea-ice breaks up and the land-fast ice stays put, the intersection between the two becomes a riot of life. Called the floe edge, this chilly oasis draws everything from seabirds to whales to Inuit hunters – and now, with Arctic Kingdom’s Narwhal and Polar Bear Floe Edge Adventure, it’s drawing scuba divers, too. From Pond Inlet, in Nunavut’s High Arctic, you, your Inuit guides and a PADI-certified divemaster will travel 90 kilometres by snowmobile to the floe edge. There, from a camp of insulated wall-tents, you’ll spend your days diving amid frolicking narwhal, trekking to bird-nesting cliffs, kayaking near icebergs, watching bowheads spout and polar bears prowl, and learning about Inuit lore and lifeways – you know, bitter, barren, boring stuff.

DREAMSCAPE: Duration: 9 days ■ Season: Spring ■ Cost: $8,570 ■ Difficulty: Moderate ■ Departs: Pond Inlet, Nunavut
■ More info: Arctickingdom.com

14- Northwest Passage
Epic Sail
Find the hand of Franklin reaching for the Beaufort Sea

For centuries, locating an Arctic sea-route to the Orient was both an epic quest and a fool’s errand. The Far North’s icy tangle of islands killed hundreds of heroes, including the 128 men of the starry-eyed Franklin expedition, which came to grief in the 1840s near King William Island, Nunavut. Nowadays, even with ice-strengthened ships, satellite ice-monitoring and 24-hour search-and-rescue, threading this most fabled of passages remains an adventure. Cruise North’s Northwest Passage Cruise, operated by the Inuit of Arctic Quebec, took up the challenge this past summer, and aims to tackle the passage again next year. Their little ship, the Russian-made Lyubov Orlova, isn’t opulent, but it’s maneuverable, capable of squeaking through bear-flanked channels and sidling up to islands riddled with seabirds. It also gets nose-to-nose with history: possible stops include the ghostly Fort Ross trading post in Bellot Strait, Victory Point, where the Franklin crew left the only clues as to their fate, and Gjoa Haven, where Roald Amundsen overwintered en route to finally conquering the passage in 1906.

DREAMSCAPE: Duration: 8 days ■ Season: Summer ■ Cost: $4,895-8,695 (depending on cabin) ■ Difficulty: Easy ■ Departs: Montreal ■ More info: Cruisenorthexpeditions.com

15- Kane Basin
Polar Paddle
Kayak back in time in an untouched Arctic sea

The extreme High Arctic has been called Inuit Nunangata Ungata – the land beyond the Inuit land. Here, past the margins of the human world, is a sort of early Earth, where the ice age still holds sway and the animals are strangely tame. A century and a half ago, the dashing American Elisha Kent Kane was one of the first adventurers to enter this curious netherworld, and he left his name on Kane Basin, a sublime sea between Greenland and Ellesmere Island. Since then, only a few thousand humans have visited it, and only one package tour takes you here: Whitney & Smith’s Kayaking the Fjords of Ellesmere Island journey. Over the course of two nightless weeks in July and early August, paddlers will cover 130 kilometres of berg-strewn, fjord-flanked waters, coming ashore to ogle muskox, Arctic hares, grumpy walruses, flower-flecked tundra and ancient Thule sites. Outside of your group, it’s unlikely you’ll encounter another soul. Our guess is that you won’t miss them.

DREAMSCAPE: Duration: 15 Days ■ Season: Summer ■ Cost: $9,250 ■ Difficulty: Moderate ■ Departs: Resolute ■ More info: Legendaryex.com

Northern Manitoba
16-Cape Churchill
Bear Den
Snuggle up to big white bruins at the Arctic’s wildest lodge

In the polar world, there’s no spectacle like it: the annual gathering of polar bears at Cape Churchill in northern Manitoba. Here, where the quick-freezing outflow of the Churchill River promises an early corridor onto the feeding-grounds of Hudson Bay, hundreds of normally solitary bears gang together, browsing, frolicking, fighting and biding their time for the ice. Because of this, squadrons of big-wheeled buses, each packed with long-lens-toting tourists, have turned the place into a sort of chilly Serengeti. For many visitors, the bear-safari is enough. But for those who want the very best pictures or the most intense bear-immersion experience, nothing beats bedding down the big bruins in Frontiers North’s Tundra Buggy Lodge. This one-of-a-kind inn basically consists of several conjoined buggies that have been parked amidst scores of bears. The lodge has bunks and dining facilities, and out each window you can pretty much always spy nanuq. But beware: At night, while you sleep, the bears may be spying on you.

DREAMSCAPE: Duration: 7 days ■ Season: Autumn ■ Cost: $8,249 ■ Difficulty: Easy ■ Departs: Winnipeg ■ More info: Tundrabuggy.com

17- Hudson Bay Coast
Study Group
Study global warming in the Arctic’s climate change hotspot

The melting Arctic is one of the globe’s hottest topics, and the area around Churchill, Manitoba is ground zero. Scientists know the region is warming fast, imperiling the area’s legendary polar bear population (it’s down by 22 percent since 1987, and the bear-viewing season now starts a week later). But researchers still aren’t sure how fast the warming is taking place, or why, or how to stop it. You can help them seek answers by joining Earthwatch’s Climate Change at the Arctic Edge project. Participants will be teamed up with the University of Alberta’s Dr. Peter Kershaw, and will travel across the tundra by snowmobile to measure snow-pack thickness, classify ice crystals and take temperature readings. At night you’ll return to your dorm bunk at the Churchill Northern Studies Centre – not a plush lodge, exactly, but hey, it’s got a low carbon footprint.

DREAMSCAPE: Duration: 11 days ■ Season: Winter ■ Cost: $2,950 ■ Difficulty: Moderate ■ Departs: Churchill ■ More info: Earthwatch.org

Northern B.C.
18- Coast Mountains
Downhill Slide
Catch a ride in a whirlybird to wicked off-piste skiing

Whistler is so last week. The future of skiing is, as the powderhounds say, out of bounds: in the big-mountain, backcountry terrain that you can’t get to via the chairlift. And it’s no surprise that some of the best free-range downhilling in the world is around the northern British Columbia town of Atlin – also known as the Switzerland of Canada. Just south of the Yukon border, Atlin is a living ghost town: In 1898 it bustled with some 5,000 gold miners, but now it’s down to around 400 year-round residents. Those folks stayed for a reason: Atlin is the North’s finest wilderness playground, flanked by a giant lake and girdled by mountains 2,800 metres high. Up among those peaks, the ski-runs are steep, the drifts are deep and just about the only way to reach it all is by chopper. Klondike Heliskiing is the only game in town. They’ll pick you up in Whitehorse, ferry you down the highway to Atlin, load you in a helicopter and turn you loose in their exclusive ski area, boasting 5,000 square kilometres of terrain and more than 300 runs with names like “White Magic,” “Yeti Woman” and “Tango Tango.” Some of the runs drop 1,800 vertical metres, insuring that by the time you get to the bottom, your quads will be quaking – and your jaw will ache from grinning.

DREAMSCAPE: Duration: 1 week ■ Season: Winter & Spring ■ Cost: $7,230-$7,720 ■ Difficulty: Extreme ■ Departs: Whitehorse
■ More info: Atlinheliski.com

Nunavik
19- Ungava Peninsula
Best Shot
Stalk a stately caribou in Quebec’s Arctic tundra

Across Canada’s territories, the once-vast Barrenground caribou herds are in crisis. The NWT’s Bathurst animals, for instance, once numbered half a million and sustained the territory’s sport-hunting industry; now it’s at just 32,000 and caribou trophy hunts are no more. But in one area of the North, both caribou and commercial hunting remain vibrant. Together, Nunavik’s Leaf River and George River herds boast more than a million deer – and they’re growing. It’s no wonder, then, that each autumn, the northbound flights into Nunavik’s hub community, Kuujjuaq, are packed with camo-clad hunters, while the southbound ones are jammed with antlers. Ungava Adventures gets raves as the being the best hunting outfit in the region, leading harvests with low guide-to-hunter ratios based out of rustic but comfortable cabins.

DREAMSCAPE: Duration: 6 days ■ Season: Autumn ■ Cost: $6,245 ■ Difficulty: Moderate ■ Departs: Montreal ■ More info: Ungava-adventures.com