Arctic Watch and Arctic Wonder

I first went to Arctic Watch in 2019 and in a small but profound way, it changed my life.

I met people whose personalities and stories shine brightly in my memory even years after the fact. It’s quite something to be in a room with people who have achieved every measure of material success, listen enviously to someone who has seen and done things almost no one else on earth has done and know, with certainty, that the person they are listening to wants nothing that they have. 

I saw things I never imagined I would see: the eternal daylight of the Arctic summer, the Northwest Passage, polar bears, epic expanses of Arctic tundra. I experienced the staggering beauty of Canada’s Far North and it inspired an honest and surprisingly emotional love of country which I find very difficult to reconcile with the more cynical parts of my personality. That such places still exist fills me with what I can only describe as a deep joy that is almost embarrassing to try and express.

A moment from my most recent trip encapsulates the depth of feeling. I spent hours stalking muskox along a wind-blown ridge with my friend Tessum. I had my camera at the ready, and he had his shotgun. We both wore broad grins, squinting into the distance, while the snow and wind howled around us, the only humans this side of the horizon in every direction. That afternoon, there was nowhere else in the world we would rather have been, right there, right then.

After I came back from my first trip I fell into a years long cycle of reading every book I could find on Arctic exploration including Pierre Berton’s The Arctic Grail, along with numerous books about the ill-fated Franklin expedition, tales of early explorers, adventurers, con-men, dreamers, scientists and pirates.

The North is a very difficult place to define; it is unforgiving and hostile in the extreme, yet fragile and utterly spectacular; at times desolate, while being filled with life. I think these contrasts, these boundary conditions, are why it has compelled me and so many others over the years. In a very real sense, the Arctic completely captured my imagination. For long periods of time, it seemed to be all I could think about.

The Arctic lacks the vegetation to sustain the huge number of mammals you’d find in, for example, Africa, yet the native fauna is nonetheless amazing. Beluga, Southern right whales, improbably-tusked narwhal, wolves, walrus, seals, foxes, myriad birds, even lemmings and of course muskox (which are essentially just extremely hairy and well insulated goats). I got my first glimpse of a wild polar bear at Arctic Watch, easily the most formidable predator I have ever seen. Next to them, a fully grown male lion may as well be a large house cat.

A little strangely for a piece in Trufflepig’s Sounder, I am writing about a place you won’t be able to go for much longer. The summer of 2026 will be the final season that Arctic Watch will be operating with the Weber family at the helm (so if you’re keen to visit, get in touch). The nitty gritty of why is not for this piece, suffice it to say that the steady march of climate change means that mining in the High Arctic is getting ever more feasible and profitable, and as the interests of the people who govern the North come into contact with the interests of unrestrained capitalism, it’s places like these that disappear first (There is some hope that it will continue past 2026 in a different evolution so watch this space).

There are of course other ways to visit the Arctic, but my hope is that it remains a hard place to reach. The easier it becomes, the more commodified it will be. Take East Africa this past summer, which saw some truly awful scenes during the wildebeest migration, with traffic jams at river crossings and people on foot disrupting the animals. The simple reason for this is that Africa has become too easy to access, with the result that incredible natural spectacles like the Great Migration, become something that can be packaged and sold, with ‘experiences guaranteed’.

Happily the Arctic remains tough to access. And I hope it stays that way because for those up for the challenge of getting there, the rewards are immense.