Northern Canada Summary

This trip was always going to be very exciting. It included just about everything I had wanted to see in Northern Canada, or had missed in the past. When I went through the edge of the Yukon in 2016, I couldn’t see the Top of the World Highway  or the Dempster Highway (the ferries weren’t open because there was still ice in the waterways). As a result, I couldn’t see much of the Yukon in that trip. Most Canadian parks had been shut. The Icefields Parkway (Lake Louise to Jasper) was a whiteout. I’d never been to the North West Territories or Nunavut, Hudson Bay or Baffin Island, the Arctic Ocean... The major fossil sites in Alberta (the Burgess Shale and the dinosaur sites).

We decided to get a travel agent involved when we couldn’t find a way to get to Nahanni and Victoria Falls, and she found the tour we did there, and booked our stay in Nunavut as well. We went kayaking with icebergs and with beluga whales because she had booked these tours. Perhaps we would have done these things on our own, but possibly not. She also organised our flights. We organised almost everything else ourselves.

It was great staying with friends, meeting indigenous people and going on tours of closed sections of world Heritage areas with park rangers. It was fun doing a variety of things, using different forms of transport, and seeing what we did. It gave us a feel for just how big northern Canada is. We had a wonderful time together, and it was great having a travel companion (especially an excellent one).

While there were highlights that we have pointed out to many people, the whole trip was a highlight. There wasn’t anything that stood out as being better than everything else. Yes, we probably did a lot of things that are on people’s bucket lists, but that isn’t the purpose of a trip. We just had a thoroughly wonderful time.