ARCTIC HIGH: Bears, whales and awesome scenery on top of the world

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CROKER BAY, Nunavut — Adventure Canada’s helpful hints to avoid being eaten by a polar bear go something like this:

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1. Do not chat, take selfies or flirt with the bear guards, thus distracting them. They are armed for a reason.

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2. If a bear appears, slowly back away. If he persists, shout at him. Maybe he’s the sensitive type and will storm off in a huff.

3. Look big, quite a challenge since a polar bear is the world’s largest land predator, weighs as much as a Smart car and has paws the size of your Christmas turkey. Try huddling with fellow travellers, especially if any are football linemen.

4. If all else fails, and the bear simply must eat you, FIGHT FOR YOUR LIFE!

Luckily, Adventure Canada has never had a paying customer get to step 4 — and the Arctic’s noblest icon remains the prime sighting of any voyage.

We got lucky. Two bears in one morning, which happened to be my birthday.

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Bravely, braced to fight for my life if need be, I stared down the first bear … through a zoom lens, from the top deck of our ship, Ocean Endeavour, with a mob of other Adventure Canada voyagers. Before we all went for scrambled eggs and oatmeal.

Soon after, bear guards in orange vests, with expedition leader John Blyth, scouted our planned landing beach near the spectacular Croker Bay glacier.

In his Zodiac, Blyth suddenly tensed. “Whoa,” he said. “Where’d you come from, big fella?”

It was my birthday bear number two, scruffier than the first one, but as fearsome. Blyth’s team retreated, and our landing was off. That included our small fleet of kayakers. Not even an Olympic paddler can outpace a swimming polar bear, and I’m no Olympic paddler.

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Instead, we floated offshore in Zodiacs for half an hour, watching the second bear.

That worthy beast lolled about, brunched on seaweed, stretched, scratched himself and stared back at us. A few dozen servings of raw meat on handy little floating plates. I imagined he licked his massive chops.

“Mmmmm, sushi,” I think I heard him say. Then, he ambled off into the barren depths of Devon Island and we went to admire the glacier.

Every Canadian should experience that vast glacier, or touch this country’s far north in some way.

You’d never know it from the flight monitors at Pearson, but our national identity is up here, not in Florida or Mexico.

Adventure Canada has small-ship “expedition cruises” to many off-road places, but the high Arctic is this family-owned company’s signature destination.

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We travelled on its flagship, Ocean Endeavour, a converted Polish ferry with a reinforced hull and beds for 200 passengers, plus crew.

Our 12-day route: By charter jet from Ottawa to the gravel runway at Resolute Bay, on the eastern Northwest Passage, where our ship awaited, then east along mighty Lancaster Sound to the Inuit hamlet of Pond Inlet, then across Baffin Bay to the west coast of Greenland.

While Toronto steamed in the dog days of summer, we wore coats and tuques. Kayakers squeezed into survival suits. But the snow is mostly gone by August and it was never bone-chilling, usually single digits on the plus side. (The daily high in Resolute in February averages minus 30.)

Ocean Endeavour is warm and cozy, especially after a kayak or Zodiac outing. She is no Pacific Princess or Disney Wish. If you seek cabaret shows, casinos and little umbrellas in your drinks, this is not your ride. But the ship is stout, stable and easy to get around. The crew is top-drawer. And the views …

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Brochures or schoolbooks hardly do justice to the high Arctic. There is not a single tree up here, yet the scenery will drop your jaw. Frankly, it is a bit overpowering — an unending roll of soaring cliffs, fjords, ice caps, bergs and frigid, silvery seas.

Devon Island, on our port side for what seemed like forever, is the largest uninhabited isle in the world. The size of Nova Scotia, yet not one human calls Devon home.

Wildlife, on the other hand, is an Arctic trek’s big draw. Aside from the two polar bears, themselves worth the price of admission, we saw walrus swimming in Lancaster Sound, Arctic hares, polar bees, countless birds, and a variety of seals. Some of the latter glared accusingly, perhaps because we lunched on raw seal meat one day.

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We might have seen a beluga — at least, something big and white splish-splashed against guide Barb Parsons-Sooley’s kayak in Cuming Inlet. Unless it was a harp seal or a freakishly large Siberian white hamster, it was a beluga, which are famous for their playfulness. The incident became known among us kayakers as the Attack of the Killer Beluga.

There was no doubt about the two humpback whales who joined our kayaks among misty icebergs in the seas off Ilulissat, Greenland. Kayaking does not get better than that.

Bird-watcher? Prince Leopold Island’s vast cliffs swarm with nesting thick-billed murres, northern fulmars, black-legged kittiwakes, black guillemots and other seabirds.

Plant lover? True, there are no trees, but the north holds many surprises, such as bright orange lichen centuries old, and dashes of colour in the bleak landscape, including yellow Arctic poppies, brilliant white cotton grass and purple dwarf fireweed.

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I know their names because Adventure Canada staffs each expedition with a small army of advisers — from ornithologists to historians, to geologists to biologists and botanists, to archeologists, to Inuit cultural leaders, to art experts.

We even had a workshop on how to knit with muskox wool.

(I do not know how they get the muskox to stand still for shearing.)

So, this is nothing like your boozy, buffet-style Caribbean cruise, though there is a bar and the food is resort-worthy, raw seal meat and smoked whale skin notwithstanding.

You’re expected to be in reasonable shape, for jumping in and out of Zodiacs, clambering over rocky hills and, if you’re up for it, swimming in the Arctic Ocean.

Of course, you need only be fitter than your group’s slowest runner — if a polar bear gives chase.

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A LONELY PLACE TO DIE

Beechey Island is a speck on the map, a kilometre across, but there are few places in Canada more sacred or historic — or desolate.

It is treeless, of course. A few Arctic poppies blow in the relentless wind that scours the gravel beach.

Three members of Sir John Franklin’s doomed expedition, seeking the Northwest Passage, are buried on Beechey’s shore. Franklin’s ships, Terror and Erebus, wintered nearby in 1845-46. The island camp included a forge and carpentry shop.

The three bodies were exhumed in the 1980s. I was at the Calgary Sun. The photographs were extraordinary, the men eerily preserved by permafrost.

My own family tree, on my mother’s side, is said to include one Alexander Paterson, corporal of a Royal Marines contingent on Erebus. It is not known where or how Paterson died — none of Franklin and his 128 men survived. But the marine, barely 30, surely walked this island, perhaps hunting for food or helping to bury those three men.

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We came ashore in Zodiacs from our comfortable ship. Today, the Beechey site is littered with rusty remnants of Franklin rescue missions and the ruins of Northumberland House, built to shelter any expedition survivors who showed up. None did. Two more graves were dug for searchers. Franklin’s widow commissioned a memorial marker.

I can’t imagine a bleaker burial site.

IF YOU GO

Adventure Canada, based in Mississauga, offers six different “expedition cruises” to the Canadian Arctic.

The trips are once-in-a-lifetime, but they’re not cheap. The lowest priced berth of any 12-day tour is around six grand per person. Top fare is around $30,000.

If you’re a late-riser, try a Disney cruise. We were dispatched from Ocean Endeavour in Zodiacs or kayaks as early as 6 a.m., though it is hard to tell, when the sun doesn’t set.

Be flexible. The trip may not be exactly as advertised, depending on ice, weather and the whims of wildlife. The expedition leader adapts to what the Arctic gives him.

Other Adventure Canada destinations include Greenland, Iceland, Newfoundland and Labrador, Sable Island, the B.C. coast, and Antarctica. See adventurecanada.com.

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