Canadian Arctic: Kayaking Baffin Island

• Explore an arresting High Arctic realm of peaks, cliffs, fjords, ice and abundant wildlife
• Intermediate kayaking with some intermediate day hikes
• 12 nights wilderness tent camping, 2 nights hotel (hotel cost on your own)

This magnificent trip to the top of Baffin Island offers an immersion in high Arctic sea kayaking near Sirmilik National Park, Canada’s newest, whose name means 'Land of Many Glaciers.' This is a wilderness realm where silence is broken only by the hollow, resonating blows of narwhal breaking the water’s surface, by flocks of eiders and oldsquaw as they pass through in a fury of whistling wing beats, and by caribou hooves as they strut silhouetted against a craggy skyline.

We paddle in the same waters as the narwhal migrating to Koluctoo Bay, in view of the dramatic cliffs and icefields of Bylot Island. The region abounds in wildlife, including 21 species of marine and land mammals and 52 species of birds, many of which nest in cliffside colonies. The sheltered inlets we explore are where much of the most important narwhal research has taken place. Present estimates for the population of narwhal that enters the Lancaster Sound/Eclipse Sound region each year is 15,000 – 20,000. Beluga whales and orcas, as well as harp, bearded, and ringed seals, also share these waters.

The drama in this potent Arctic landscape leaves any visitor awestruck. Our time here will be filled with magical discoveries as we join the ranks of a select few who have experienced this special corner of the planet. The window for kayak travel on Baffin Island is small, and in our experience, August is the month of choice for open sea-ice conditions. The late evening and early morning sun accents the photographic potential, and at times the light pours in like glowing butterscotch. Delicate woolly flowers are backlit, as are the outlying islands and the spray plume from the blows of narwhal swimming up the fjords.

The area is also rich in the history and culture of its traditional people, the Inuit, whose roots extend back millennia: their ancestors had adapted to life in the Arctic environment at about the time the pyramids were being built, some 3,000 years before the first Europeans arrived in the New World. By 1616, when Robert Bylot and William Baffin sailed from northwest Greenland into Lancaster Sound, the neo-Eskimo Thule culture was thriving on Baffin Island, a marine hunting society well adapted to life among the Arctic seas and tundra regions by means of dogs, sleds, umiaks, and kayaks.