An expedition cruise through the once-impassable waters of Canada’s Northwest Passage provides a front-row seat to climate change.

Photographs by Todd Mintz

A shore excursion on the Nunavut mainland in Coronation Gulf.

Winter is still my favorite season,” an Inuk lady told me at the community center in Kugluktuk, a remote coastal village in the northern Canadian territory of Nunavut. During a lunch that brought together locals and passengers from the cruise ship I was about to board, I had asked her how she copes with six months of darkness each year. “I don’t mind the dark as long as there’s snow on the ground. With snow you can see where you’re going even without a light,” she said. “But the changing climate means less snow than before. Now at night it’s pitch-dark outside—black, black, black.”

Kugluktuk was the starting point of a voyage through Canada’s Northwest Passage on the Ocean Endeavour, an old Black Sea ferry refitted as a 198-passenger ship and chartered by expedition cruise company Adventure Canada. My conversation with the Inuk lady suggested this would be no ordinary cruise but a real-life glimpse of how climate change is impacting the planet as a whole—and the polar regions in particular.

This trip wasn’t even possible until a few decades ago, when rising air and water temperatures began to break up the sea ice that once clogged the fabled passage through the Canadian Arctic year-round. Before climate change, the ice had thwarted many attempts to navigate the route—a fact that hit home every night as I watched The Terror on my in-cabin television. Based on the real-life Franklin Expedition, the fictionalized series tells the story of two British navy ships that became icebound in the Northwest Passage for several years during the 1840s, with the eventual loss of all hands.

As we made our way along Coronation Gulf on the first day of the voyage, the sea was as clear and blue as the sky above, with not an iceberg in sight. The conditions were perfect for a shore landing at the mouth of the Tree River, where we hiked across tundra blazing with fall colors to look at fossilized structures known as stromatolites. Laid down by colonies of ancient microorganisms some two billion years ago, they’re among the oldest relics of life on the planet.

Walruses on the shores of Devon Island in Baffin Bay.

Our next stop was Cambridge Bay, an Inuit community on Victoria Island that sprang to life during the Cold War as a Distant Early Warning (DEW) Line base guarding against Soviet attacks. Today it stands on the front line of interpreting climate change, with a world-class Arctic research station staffed by dozens of scientists.

“They’re doing all sorts of studies,” explained Jeannie Ehaloak, the communications director for the agency that runs the station. “Current research includes food health and safety, alternative energy sources, and climate change. For example, the musk ox population here suffered a huge decline. We were asked to find out why. Turns out, they were dying from lungworm carried by birds that are now migrating this far north due to Arctic warming.”

Speaking with some Cambridge Bay locals, I learned that climate change is impacting Inuit culture in more ways than I could have imagined. “More cracks in the ice make it more dangerous,” one told me. “People are afraid to take their children on the ice. So the younger generations are not getting that knowledge or experience, or even the language that’s tied to ice-based cultural traditions.”

Later that day we passed over the spot where the Franklin Expedition ships became icebound in September of 1846—almost the same date we were sailing ice-free through those waters. “It became an obsession in England,” onboard historian Jerry Kobalenko explained during his lecture that evening. “Trying to find a much shorter route to Asia so that you could easily bring back silk, tea, and other treasures around the top of Canada.”

An Inuk elder prepping Arctic char aboard the Ocean Endeavour. — An Inuk elder prepping Arctic char aboard the *Ocean Endeavour*.

The next morning we went ashore at Beechey Island, where the expedition had hunkered down the winter before their disappearance. On a rocky beach stood the wooden tombstones of three sailors who died that season, as well as the remains of a supply depot used by the many rescue missions that tried to find the lost mariners.

Our best wildlife sightings came during a shore landing on Prince of Wales Island, an uninhabited, tundra-clad landmass at the head of Queen Maud Gulf. Through fog and mist we watched a herd of several dozen shaggy musk ox grazing on grasses and sedges. An Arctic fox appeared briefly, and then a young male polar bear drew uncomfortably close, approaching to within about 70 meters before two flares drove it back into the fog.

After nearly a week without any sign of human civilization, another community came into view: Grise Fiord, on the southern reaches of Ellesmere Island. The tiny village has a strange and troubling history. During the Cold War, the Canadian government, anxious that the Russians—or even the Americans—might claim their uninhabited Arctic islands, forcibly relocated several Inuit families here to reinforce Canada’s sovereignty.

During our visit, elder Larry Audlaluk recalled how he and his family were among 90 people moved to this desolate spot from their ancestral village in northwestern Quebec. “The government was looking for what they called ‘volunteers’ for this ‘experiment’ of living in the high Arctic. They wanted us to be happy, smiling Eskimos beside our igloos.”

The towering cliffs of Prince Leopold Island serve as the summer home for tens of thousands of nesting seabirds.

For their first two years, they lived in tents with no heat and minimal supplies. When some died from the harsh conditions, the survivors pleaded to return to Quebec. “But the government said no every time,” Audlaluk told me. “Their attitude was: they are Eskimos and they have always survived in the Arctic.”

Even with the cruise ships that ply the Northwest Passage during its short ice-free season, Grise Fiord doesn’t get a lot of visitors. So the residents were clearly pleased with our arrival. They organized a feast of Inuit foods—bannock, Arctic char, musk ox—and a “fashion show” in which village teens donned traditional outfits made from caribou and seal skin. At the end of our visit, they lined up along the rocky waterfront to bid farewell.

Rounding the southeastern corner of Ellesmere the next day, we cruised into Baffin Bay, an arm of the Atlantic Ocean that separates northern Canada from Greenland. “Ellesmere and Greenland are intimately connected,” Kobalenko explained during another of his lectures. “Back in the days when the bay was frozen over almost the entire year, Inuit from Greenland would cross the 50 kilometers of ice with their sled dogs to hunt musk ox on Ellesmere. Their name for the island was Umingmak Nuna—‘Land of the Musk Ox.’”

The Ocean Endeavour headed up the east coast of Ellesmere, aiming to get as close as possible to the North Pole. The route took us into the Nares Strait, a narrow passage believed to be where the first Inuit crossed over to Greenland around 4,500 years ago. Eventually the ship encountered scattered icebergs and patchy sea ice, and by day 10 of the voyage the ice was too thick to continue. Still, we had reached 78 degrees north—just 728 nautical miles from the top of the world.

For now, it’s impossible to venture farther north without icebreaking capabilities. But as I stared into the autumn twilight over Nares Strait, the aurora borealis beginning its green shimmer above the horizon, I found myself wondering if that might soon be the next frontier of Arctic tourism.

Adventure Canada operates two Northwest Passage cruises each summer during the brief ice-free window. The 17-day voyages include several stops along Greenland’s wild west coast (from US$34,000 per person).

The glow of an Arctic dawn reflecting off the ice-strengthened hull of the Ocean Endeavour. — The glow of an Arctic dawn reflecting off the ice-strengthened hull of the *Ocean Endeavour*.

This article originally appeared in the October/November 2025 print issue of DestinAsian magazine (“Northern Exposure”). Buy a single issue or subscribe here.

Crossing Arctic Canada aboard the Ocean Endeavour

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