This week’s travel dream: Quebec’s northern frontier

Nunavik, Quebec, is a “near and wild frontier,” said Costas Christ in National Geographic Traveler. The northern reaches of the French Canadian province remain a “landscape largely unmarked by man,” where people are outnumbered by natural wonders such as “deep-valley rivers, glacier-sculpted lakes, boreal forests, and tundra plains.” Nunavik, an Arctic area roughly the size of France, is home to fewer than 12,000 people, most native Inuit. It can be a “glorious yet challenging place to live—and visit.” Every year only a few “willing-to-rough-it” travelers find their way to this remote wonderland. I was determined to be one of them.

I started my two-week excursion in Kuujjuaq, the most populous of Nunavik’s 14 off-the-grid villages and a gateway to the vast north. Massive inuksuks—man-made rock formations said to guide Inuit travelers to fruitful hunting and fishing grounds—tower over the edge of the tiny town. I joined an indigenous guide in kayaking to Akpatok Island in the nearby Ungava Bay. Thousands of seabirds soared along the steep limestone cliffs as we paddled around the island’s “white-gravel” shores, which are the best place for sighting polar bears. The next day, a light aircraft dropped me at Puvirnituq in west Nunavik. My guide, armed with a rifle, pointed out some wolf tracks and telltale signs of black bears as we weaved through black spruce and “patches of lowbush blueberries.” Suddenly, we happened upon a camp of tepees where Cree Indians were busy catching wild trout; it was like stepping onto the set of Dances With Wolves.

From Puvirnituq, we moved inland for my first encounter with the “Crystal Eye,” a two-mile-wide crater that cradles some of the deepest water in North America. “Blasted into existence” eons ago by a meteor strike, the Pingualuit Crater Lake is “one of the purest bodies of water on Earth.” Trekking around the rim of the perfectly circular lake proved “transformative, connecting me deeply with the powerful natural world.” My adventures in Canada’s great frontier—whether spotting beluga whales in the Richmond Gulf or sitting in on traditional Inuit ceremonies—changed me forever.

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Contact: Nunavik-tourism.com