In Canada’s distant north, a lonely camp offers a taste of the high Arctic

On the high plains of Somerset Island, not far from the Northwest Passage, lie the remains of a whale. Grass threads through bones that are 8,000 years old, a small Eden in the desolate tundra. 

Any nutrients from the bowhead are millennia gone. Now the ground is fertilised by other creatures: lemmings that burrow beneath, wolves that shelter within, snow owls that use the bones to perch. As a cold wind presses, I stare at this small world, moved.

The high Arctic requires hard looking. In most landscapes there’s too much going on, but here I’m captivated by the small things: the lichen; the ice; the small bones in an owl pellet.

Around about is a vast landscape of stone and mud, smoothed by glaciers. A lake lies in a hollow, and in a patch of snow an ageing muskox — a prehistoric shagpile of a creature — cools itself from the 24-hour sun’s balmy 4C.

I know I am going to love the camp, known as Arctic Watch, the moment our plane lands, three hours out of Yellowknife, the already remote capital of Canada’s Northwest Territory. The city had to be evacuated in August because of wildfires, the 20,000 residents only allowed to return earlier this month.

But we are well beyond the tree line now, 800km north of the Arctic Circle. Our motley collection of guests walk over the stony delta of the Cunningham river to white tents on a bluff. “Welcome to the gravel pit,” says owner Josée Auclair. I’d describe it differently: a shifting world of greys, blues and white. Ian Penn, a fellow guest, agrees, pulling out watercolours. 

Josée is one of the Webers, the family who claim this as the world’s “most northerly fly-in lodge”. Arctic Watch lies at 74 degrees north on a big bay that opens on to the infamous Northwest Passage.

It was set up by a man called Pete Jess in 1992 because during summer — all seven weeks of it — beluga whales turn the bay into their kindergarten. In 1999 Jess sold it to Josée and her husband Richard Weber, who arrived with their two young boys, Tessum and Nansen.

They are quite the family. Only 200 people have skied from land to the North Pole, only 25 of them have gone with no outside help, and only two have made the journey there and back. Richard is one of them.

In the 1990s, while Richard was on expedition, Josée took the boys to Baffin Island to spend the summers with an Inuit family, eating seals and living on berries. But she knew they needed a plan for the future.

So they bought Arctic Watch. The camp sleeps 25 in beds thick with fleece and blanket, in sprung tents of aluminium and canvas, in the middle of this lethal land.

My fellow guests are wonderfully varied. Ian, for example, is a surgeon who pioneered stent technology. Hara Hidenori is a Tokyo-based dealer in Ukiyo-e Japanese art. Leah Duffin is a retired murder detective with London’s Metropolitan Police.

You must be good at reading people’s characters, I say to Leah at the first of our huge and hearty dinners. “I clocked you at once,” she replies. Oh, what did you see? “Knob,” she says. We become friends.

The following morning, after a quick driving lesson, we head off in a Mad Max convoy of all-terrain vehicles. With the bay still frozen, the belugas have yet to arrive, so we’re off to walk on the Northwest Passage.

This storied route across the north of the Americas has killed a lot of people, the most notorious being the 129 men of the 1845 Franklin expedition.

The passage seems to breathe frozen air. We look out over the pressure ridges and cracks, past the black dots of seals, searching in the distance for patches of yellow, like pee stains on the ice. One is spotted in the distance, where a haze wobbles the floe.

Moving further, we pass the circular stones of a Thule house, once occupied by the predecessors of the Inuit. “Each time I see how they lived, I feel such a wimp,” says Josée. The Webers often discover remnants of their existence, such as a fish carved from narwhal tusk that once was a fishing lure.

The yellow dot turns into a polar bear and its cub. We climb the scree slope and settle to watch. The bear stalks a nervy seal, dropping into cracks in the ice before popping up closer. Then mother and cub walk towards us, sometimes swimming in open water. They turn, fur brilliant in the sun, clear to the naked eye.

Tessum talks me through the history of the Arctic, which he says unravels in layers. We are sitting in Arctic Watch’s “great room”, a vast tent full of sofas, decorated with narwhal tusks and display cases full of bones, with a bar full of Okanagan Valley wine. 

“The Thule arrived around 700AD with kayak technology and became the masters of the Arctic,” he says. “They lived in houses that have whalebone ribs with a stretched animal hide over the top. Then came a cold snap in the 1300s and they had to change how they hunted, turning from whales to muskoxen and caribou. They became the Inuit. 

“Then you had waves of Europeans, first the Vikings — who I think just had a look and decided there is nothing here — then the whalers, then the British looking for the Northwest Passage. Most failed, and they left stuff everywhere. And because it’s such a fragile environment, everything stayed. 

“HMS Fury is wrecked on the south end of this island, there are abandoned Hudson’s Bay Company stores, and many, many 1,200-year-old Thule sites. They’re still finding ships. Franklin’s ships, the Erebus and the Terror, were only found in the last 10 years.”

He had suggested to Parks Canada, the government agency, that the Webers help study them. “I called them and was like, ‘Hey, guys, I’ve got a client who will bring a sub; we’ll raise money’.” Parks Canada said no.

I get up at 7am to have a hot shower in a comfortable block off the great room. Eleanor Dickinson is sitting at a table looking into a microscope. A young research scientist from the University of Calgary, she is studying the local herd of muskoxen. She calls me over to look at a parasite in their poo. The parasite squirms. 

On my way back from my shower I see Leah arrive, take a look at the slide, and then ask Eleanor if she wants her to provide a sample too. At 8am when we gather, pre-breakfast, to be offered a choice of excursions for the day, I’m still laughing at Eleanor’s appalled expression. Having taken an interest in their gut, I feel obliged to sign up for muskoxen.

Tessum leads our small party on what turns into a 19km hike through a forest of Arctic willow, some hundreds of years old. Fortunately, walking remains easy given these willows are ground-hugging shrubs, rising only a few centimetres off the ground. It’s not a forest you will get lost in.

Black dots appear on a distant slope and we circle downwind. “Their scientific name is Ovibos which means sheep-cow,” Eleanor tells me. “But they’re not closely related to either. Their closest relatives are two ungulates in the Himalayas, the takin and the goral.”

We stop for soup and sandwiches — bread freshly baked on site and cheeses brought in from Quebec — before making our final approach.

There are 24 muskoxen, ranging from big old bulls to four babies corralled in the centre of the herd. We get within 100 metres, picking up shed qiviut, wool so warm that it seems to heat the hand. In other places these strange creatures are hunted and will flee. Here, though, the dominant male lumbers to his feet to take a long hard look at us before turning his back and lying down again.

We cross the gravel runway on our way back. It was made using a bulldozer a friend of the Webers drove over the frozen Northwest Passage from Resolute Bay — after losing a bet. They removed the cab and gave him a life vest in case the ice split. 

They’re that sort of family. Tessum describes being hunted by a polar bear when he was 10. “My brother and I were down the coast, sitting down for lunch. We see this polar bear coming from the ocean, using a creek to hide itself. We’re good with firearms but, still, it was intense.” (He fired a shotgun in the air to chase it away.)

Now in their thirties, the boys are using the experience, knowledge and contacts they have gained at Arctic Watch to build their own businesses, as private guides, heli-skiing in the mountains of Baffin, say, or guiding film crews from the big wildlife shows. They keep a helicopter in camp, and every morning four of the guests head off, most to see the belugas, hundreds of which are down the coast in Elwin Bay waiting for the ice of the passage to open. 

It was the belugas being shown on the BBC television documentary series Frozen Planet that put Arctic Watch on the map. One beluga mother will look after a group of the others’ babies. “I’ve seen a mother diving down and coming up with seaweed as a wig and then being chased by the little ones,” one of the guides tells me.

I had turned down the chopper on environmental grounds, but now I itch to go to Creswell Bay, an hour’s flight south, to see icebergs, narwhals, the remains of an old Hudson Bay Company trading post, to fly-fish for sea-run Arctic char and to meet an Inuit man who hunts there in summer (and whose daughter works at Arctic Watch). It’s fair to say I fast regret my piety.

Arctic Watch is unique, and precarious. The family had another spot, Arctic Haven, far to the south where trees actually grow high. There it was possible to watch vast caribou migrations, but the herds have disappeared. There was a pack of wolves, but one winter hunters arrived on skidoos and shot them all.

For Nansen, looking after Arctic Watch is a duty as well as a pleasure. “Our goal is that the muskox and the whales remain intact,” he says. “Especially the whales. It really is something — the last place on earth there is a beluga nursery like this.”

I am hoping for a fairytale ending, the ice cracking and the whales entering the bay to wave me goodbye. But it’s not to be. Instead we head upriver for lunch, passing the ancient bowhead bones. Afterwards we climb into kayaks and dinghies to float back downstream.

We start in a gorge, the never-setting sun making green glass of the water. But after several hours, a fog rolls off the passage and I become separated from the others. I thread my own way in my kayak, happy. 

I know that somewhere ahead is the camp with its warm shower, vast dinner and hot-water bottle. But for now, I am immersed in endless shades of silver — glistening fog, sparkling rock, mercurial water. As I pick my channels, I look and look again.

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