Auyuittuq National Park

Listen. Above the sound of your own breathing there is wind, moving down off the ice. There is meltwater, running fast and grey over stones. And underneath it all there is a silence so large it almost has weight. The light here is hard and clean. In summer it barely fades at night, and the granite walls around you stay pale gold long after you expect darkness. You are standing in Auyuittuq National Park, on the Cumberland Peninsula of Baffin Island, in Canada's far northeastern Arctic.

The name comes from Inuktitut, the language of the Inuit who have lived on this coast for generations. Auyuittuq is usually translated as "the land that never melts." That name points straight at the park's centre: the Penny Ice Cap. It is a broad dome of ancient ice that covers the high ground of the peninsula. From its edges, glaciers pour down into the valleys like frozen rivers. Many of the sounds you hear today, the rushing streams and the occasional crack of ice, begin up there.

This landscape was not empty before it became a park. For a very long time, Inuit families travelled through these valleys between the fiords on either side of the peninsula. They moved by dog team in winter and on foot in summer. The main corridor through the mountains was a natural highway, linking hunting grounds and camps. Today that corridor is called Akshayuk Pass. For many years maps called it Pangnirtung Pass, after the community at its southern end. The newer name honours Inuit history in this place.

Auyuittuq was first protected as a national park reserve in the 1970s. It became a full national park in 2001, after land claim agreements with Inuit in Nunavut. Those agreements matter on the ground. Parks Canada manages the park together with local Inuit, and the knowledge of people from nearby communities shapes how it is cared for. So when you meet a guide or an outfitter here, you may be meeting someone whose family has known these valleys far longer than any map.

Two communities stand at the gates. Pangnirtung sits on a fiord to the south, a small town of brightly painted houses facing tidal waters and steep mountains. Qikiqtarjuaq lies to the north, on an island off the coast, a place where icebergs often drift close to shore. Most visitors begin in one of these towns. From there, they travel by boat in summer or by snowmobile in spring to reach the edges of the park. There are no roads into Auyuittuq at all.

Now, here is a detail that surprises many people. The Arctic Circle runs right through Akshayuk Pass. Walkers heading north from Pangnirtung cross that invisible line somewhere along the valley floor, and a simple marker shows the spot. Beyond the Arctic Circle, the sun stays above the horizon for at least one full day around midsummer. Here, that line is not an abstract idea from a geography lesson. You can stand on it, with glacier ice on one side and granite on the other.

Look up at the walls of the pass. The rock here is very old granite and gneiss, part of the ancient core of the continent. Glaciers carved these valleys into deep U shapes, with flat floors and sheer sides. The best known of these walls belongs to Mount Thor. Its western face drops more than a kilometre in one smooth sweep. It is often described as the greatest purely vertical drop on Earth. Climbers come from around the world to try it, and few succeed.

A little further north stands Mount Asgard, and it may look strangely familiar. It has two flat-topped towers, like giant stone cylinders, separated by a narrow gap. In 1977, the opening scene of the James Bond film The Spy Who Loved Me was filmed here. A stuntman skied straight off the edge of the mountain and opened a parachute printed with the British flag. Many people who watched that scene had no idea it was shot above an Arctic valley on Baffin Island.

The ground under your boots tells its own story. Much of the valley floor is gravel, boulder fields, and braided streams spreading across wide outwash plains. Moraines, long ridges of rock left by retreating glaciers, cross the valley like old walls. Between the stones, life holds on close to the ground. In early summer, look for purple saxifrage, the territorial flower of Nunavut. Arctic willow grows here too, but it spreads sideways along the earth, rarely taller than your ankle.

Wildlife is sparse, and that makes each sighting feel important. You may see Arctic hares, lemmings, foxes, or ravens riding the wind along the cliffs. Snow buntings flit between rocks in summer. Near the coasts, polar bears are a real presence, especially near the fiords. This is not a place to treat lightly. Parks Canada requires visitors to register and attend an orientation before entering, and much of that briefing covers bears, weather, and river crossings.

Those river crossings are part of the rhythm of a trip here. Glacial streams are fed by melting ice, so they grow as the sun warms the glaciers through the day. A stream you could step across at dawn may be waist-deep and roaring by late afternoon. Experienced hikers often plan crossings for the early hours, when the water is lowest and coldest. Along the pass, small emergency shelters stand at intervals. They are reminders that weather can change quickly, and help is always far away.

Even if you never walk the full length of the pass, the edges of the park reward you. Near the southern end, the fiord fills and empties with the tide, and the light shifts across the mountains every hour. Near the north, icebergs sit in the sea like pale buildings. Summit Lake, near the high point of the pass, holds still, cold water under walls of rock. Wherever you stand, the scale is hard to judge. Distances that look like an hour's walk can take a full day.

So take a moment where you are. Notice the colour of the water, that milky grey that comes from rock ground to powder under the ice. Notice how quiet it is between gusts of wind. Look at the nearest glacier, and remember that the name of this place describes it exactly: a land that never melts, though it is always melting a little. When you turn to leave, listen once more. The water will still be running, carrying the ice cap, drop by drop, down to the sea.