Embarking on an Arctic Adventure

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Holding my breath, I slide into an unsteady kayak from the Zodiac—a small inflatable boat bouncing in the Arctic waves. I’m an experienced kayaker but this unconventional transfer tactic above the icy waters of Croker Bay is not for the faint of heart—falling in won’t be fun, even in my dry suit. The slight drizzle that’s making everything slippery isn’t helping either. Yet, it’s the only way to see the magnificent Devon Island glaciers up close, so I hold my breath, put my feet into the bobbing kayak and plop in.

“You’re a pro,” says my kayak expedition leader Chris Scerri, as he hands me my paddle. “Remember, in the unlikely event of a glacier calving, you must quickly put your kayak to face the mini-tsunami it causes to avoid capsizing.” These “parting words” aren’t exactly helping either—now I both fear the calving and desperately want to see one.

Kayaking in Croker Bay

As we paddle along, I relax—or perhaps more fittingly, chillax—as freezing raindrops cover me in a thin layer of ice and crystallize on my eyelashes. The sheer beauty of Mother Nature makes me forget my worries. Whether because of absolute silence or low temperature, even the sound of rain is different here—you can hear every drop hitting the water. Soon, the journey becomes even more exciting as several seals start following us, as we glide between ice floes and along the shimmering glacier.

“There are four different species of seals here and they’re very curious,” Scerri says, “so they always come to check us out.”

Read More: Glacier Kayaking in Switzerland

A Rare Spectacle

An hour later, as we turn our backs towards the glacier and head towards the ship, a roaring noise—a cross between thunder and an avalanche—shudders the silence. “The iceberg is calving!” shouts Scerri. In a frenzy, I scramble to turn my kayak around to face the wave—and only catch the last seconds of the spectacle when the white mass already hits the water. I brace myself, preparing for anything including capsizing, but we’re far enough now, so by the time the wave reaches us, it mostly peters out.

“Thank the rain, because all that water broke off the ice,” explains Scerri. “And congrats—that’s a rare spectacle to see,” he adds—except I barely saw anything. With an Arctic trip being a once-in-a-lifetime adventure, will I ever get another chance?

Exploring with Adventure Canada

I’m here with Adventure Canada, a family-owned company that sails up into the high Arctic on the Ocean Endeavor, a midsize ship with all the comforts of a typical cruise but high on the adventure spirit—from kayaking to watching seals to glacier trekking. Along the way, we also dock at an Inuit village, disembark at an uninhabited island turned historic landmark, and traverse a Greenlandic Icefjord. Here are just a few memorable highlights of this high Arctic expedition with Adventure Canada, which you’ll want to add to the list of your future adventures.

Read More: Big Arctic 5: What to See & Do in Greenland

Visiting the Inuit Village of Mittimatilik

In the Inuit language, Mittimatilik means “a place of landing” or a “place where the seagulls land,” which refers to a large rock where the bird used to gather and fish from, explains Karen Nutarak, an educator from Mittimatalik. The largest Inuit village in Canada’s high north, Mittimatilik is home to about 1800 people, located on the northeastern tip of Baffin Island.

To get to land from the Ocean Endeavor, we once again must board the Zodiacs, which requires wearing waterproof clothing and boots high enough that we can step into the freezing water without getting our feet wet. (The boots are provided.) Once on land, we walk to a Community Center to watch a cultural performance and learn about Inuit history.

Before European contact, the Inuit made their living by hunting caribou, hares, seals, polar bears, walruses, and narwhals, eating the meat raw, frozen, aged, and—less often—boiled. They moved around on dogsleds and burned seal or whale oil lamps for light and heat during winter. Although life was harsh and feeding families was a continuous struggle, the Inuit were fully self-sufficient because hunting provided for everything—food, clothes, heat, and light. They also practiced art carvings and throat singing, in which people use their vocal cords, belly, and diaphragm to produce sounds.

When Europeans arrived, things changed. In the early 1920s, Catholic missionaries established a settlement called Pond Inlet here. In the 1960s, the Canadian government built a residential school here so the children were forced to move from their original homes located further up the land into Pond Inlet. In the next decade, many families followed their children down to shore, settling closer to the water. The missionaries also banned throat singing because they decreed it as “satanic.” The ban was finally lifted in the 1980s.

The cultural performance at the Mittimatilik Community Center includes throat singing, which is now experiencing a revival. We also watch several other cultural activities and competitions that revolve around good coordination, speed, and being able to move fast and keep one’s balance—all the qualities important for hunting and survival out “on the land.”

The Historic Beechey Island

A couple of days later, we visit Beechey Island, an uninhabited piece of land that became the last resting place for the ill-fated Franklin expedition. Led by Sir John Franklin in 1845, the expedition set off to find the Northwest Passage through Canada and to record magnetic information for navigational purposes. Unfortunately, their ships became trapped in ice and the crew disembarked on Beechey Island, never to be seen again, despite the British Navy’s wide-ranging search efforts.

Nowadays, Beechey Island serves as a burial site for three of Franklin’s men. “Today we know that they primarily died of tuberculosis and pneumonia,” archeologist Kaylee Baxter tells me as I read the memorial plaques on the simple stone tombs. There’s another theory that purports that lead poisoning from the canned food they relied on may have played a role too. And there’s a fourth grave, in which lies a man from one of the rescue expeditions that ultimately reached the island too late. This graveyard in the middle of the high Arctic serves as a tribute to the brave souls who gave their lives in pursuit of mapping out our planet.

Exploring Ilulissat Icefjord

A few more days down the road, we dock at the Greenlandic village of Ilulissat. Here we disembark to hike to the Ilulissat Glacier, a large ice sheet that produces numerous icebergs as they calve off, sliding into Ilulissat Icefjord. As I hike along the trail, I approach the beach, where a warning sign directs me to stay away from the water because of unexpected tsunamis caused by newly formed icebergs. Needless to say, I heed the warning.

Later that day, we board a small boat and sail into the Ilulissat Icefjord to watch the humongous ice floes up close. Shimmering in the sun, the massive frozen mountains soar over us like Alpine peaks albeit on water. We weave around the medium-sized floes and sometimes cut across the smaller ones. As our boat roams through the maze of this towering whiteness, I can’t take enough photos, even though I know the pictures can’t do it justice.

As we meander along, I suddenly hear the familiar sound—a mix of thunder and an avalanche. Another iceberg is calving! This time I catch the full spectacle: the cracking of the ice, the initial slow descent of the crumbling ivory mass, the precipitous fall, and the huge wave it generates. The wave rocks our boat, luckily big and steady enough to easily withstand it, bounces off the iceberg on the other side of the channel—and rocks us again, finally dissipating. I feel so fortunate to have witnessed this marvel of nature more than once. As our planet is changing, who knows how long this majestic Arctic beauty will remain?

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Author Bio: A culture shock junkie, Lina Zeldovich shimmied with belly dancers in Turkey, cooked zebu in Madagascar, fished for piranhas in the Amazon, sipped a drink made from a venomous snake in Peru—and always lived to write the story. Her work appeared in AAA Magazines, AARP, BBC, Smithsonian, Washington Post, Toronto Star, AFAR, Saturday Evening Post, Sierra Club, NPR, InsideHook, Escape and in-flight magazines. She holds several journalism awards including NATJA’s gold, silver and bronze, and lives in New York so she can fly nonstop to almost anywhere.A culture shock junkie, Lina Zeldovich shimmied with belly dancers in Turkey, cooked zebu in Madagascar, fished for piranhas in the Amazon, sipped a drink made from a venomous snake in Peru—and always lived to write the story. Her work appeared in AAA Magazines, AARP, BBC, Smithsonian, Washington Post, Toronto Star, AFAR, Saturday Evening Post, Sierra Club, NPR, InsideHook, Escape and in-flight magazines. She holds several journalism awards including NATJA’s gold, silver and bronze, and lives in New York so she can fly nonstop to almost anywhere.

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