7 Days in the Canadian Arctic | Camping, Fishing, and Eating Wild Foods

I'm on Baffin Island here in the Arctic of Canada. This is Nunavut, just outside the capital city of Iqaluit, one of the least densely populated places on the entire planet. Over the next couple days, I'm gonna be exploring the Arctic tundra by snowmobile and by dog sled, camping, eating local foods, fishing for Arctic char, hopefully catching the northern lights and seeing some wildlife, while at the same time avoiding the dangerous polar bears that inhabit this land. Pretty exciting stuff, I'm really stoked to be here. Let's get right into it. So I picked up a number of local foods on this trip. I'll be eating them throughout. But this one, to start, I got candied Arctic char. Arctic char is a beautiful fish. Oh wow, tastes like candied fish. Of the mere 36,000 people that live in the entire territory of Nunavut, 85% are the indigenous Inuit. In Inuit, of the four languages, there's a language called Naktatat. I apologize if I'm mispronouncing. But there is an amazing saying that I really resonate with, and that is kakakliak. Kakakliak means to climb a mountain, sit, ponder, and think about your life. Almost a form of meditation. I absolutely love that. Especially as I sit up here on top of this mountain, looking across the vastness of the Arctic tundra and these rolling hills covered in all the snow. For such a beautiful kakakliak. Lots of snowmobile tracks in the area. Snowmobile is a huge part of the culture here because it's just the best way of getting around. I'm gonna go try to find a place a little bit off the beaten path, though that might be hard. I think we can do it. I think it's getting about time to find camp and set up. Cool, crisp wind picking up from the north, making it a little bit bone-chilling to be up here. I parked my sled on the leeward side of this mountain, out of the wind. Might set up camp there. I got a great view of the northern sky for the potential of seeing some northern lights tonight. Fingers crossed. Beautiful view to see the sunset set in the west. Tundra as far as the eye can see. Oh my god, this is ever pretty. Not a big fan of these types of stoves. In fact, I don't use them very often, but the benefit is they can run on a bunch of different types of fuels, including diesel and petrol. So I actually, I brought this canister empty on the airplane when I flew here and just filled it up with petrol when I filled up the snowmobile. So I ventured a little bit away from camp. I got some tuktu manuk, which is caribou meat. Tuktu meaning caribou. Manuk, I think, is fat or meat in Inuktitut. So we're gonna cook this one up. The other one I'm gonna save for another meal. But yeah, should be good. And then I got some other things on the menu. All right, while we're waiting for that, I just wanna test out this shotgun. I borrowed this from my buddy Mark Asplen. Mark is the facilitator of this trip. He was the one that got me to come out here. He set me up with accommodations and just hooked me up with the whole thing. He made everything a lot easier for me. He's teaching me a lot about the culture and we've just been hanging out for the last couple days. Great guy. Very grateful for all his help setting all this trip up. And also thankful for him lending me the shotgun. Thank you, Mark, because it saves me from having to bring my own. So I just wanna make sure it works. All right, that looks like a relatively cooked caribou. Yo, that's really good. It's kind of raw in the middle, but you can eat caribou raw. Let's cut her up. That was absolutely delicious, but not enough to fill me up. Brought a MRE, U.S. Combat Rations. This one's Chicken Chunks White. Never had one of these before, so let's test her out. Wow, this is like a whole ordeal. Can't believe how much stuff is in here. All right, so you pour water in, you put the MRE in, and then this bag heats it up. We still have lots of traditional food to eat on this trip, but we gotta eat a real big meal tonight because I'm not hungry yet. It's a really chilly breeze coming off around the mountain right now. I'm gonna move back to camp with all my stuff just because it's a little bit numbing. All right, I think this is probably one of baked snack crackers and tortillas. Mayonnaise cheese spread, look at that. What the hell is this thing? It's like cheese spread. What the hell am I eating? Mayonnaise. Look at how unappetizing that looks. It's disgusting. I prefer the caribou. By a large margin. Beautiful. It's really cool to think that just a few weeks ago I was watching the same sunset from a totally different vantage point on the Earth. I was way down in Central America, close to the equator. Now I'm the furthest north that I've ever been. Life's been really good to me lately and I'm just extremely grateful. Carry this, I don't know, a little bit of the ways away from camp just so if Polar Bear comes, well, hopefully he goes for this and I'll hear him. These are slugs for bear defense. So, Iqaluit is obstructed by this mountain here, but there's a few lights down there. Those are houses from the small town of Apex, which is kind of a, I guess a little suburb of Iqaluit, if you want to call it that. Just a little small town. Beautiful evening. Usually I don't love seeing city lights or town lights or any lights on the horizon, but for whatever reason, it's kind of peaceful seeing the twinkle of those homes far off in the distance. I guess there's something about being on the fringe of the world. Seeing a little bit of civilization. Brings a tear to my eye. They're launching fireworks off in Iqaluit. This time of the year is called tunic time. It's the returning of the sun. It's a celebration, it's a festival. They have dog slide races, snowmobile races, a whole bunch of festivities. The winters here are extremely cold and harsh. I hear it can go down to negative 50 at times and on the shortest days of the year, they only get about four hours of sunlight, something like that, which is absolutely insanity. So I understand why they have a celebration in spring for the returning of the sun. Harsh times up here in the north. I can make out just the faintest lines of the northern, like clouds. Woo! This is the first time I've seen the northern lights to my south. Oh my god, it's so pretty. For a bit. Good morning, everyone. Well, it looks like it's kind of late in the morning. It's actually only 5 a.m. We're gonna go back to bed for a few more hours because it's still really early. Good morning, everyone. I got lots of sleep. Lots of oodles and noodles of sleep. It was hard. It looks like an absolutely magnificent day outside. All right, do you wanna come? All right, let's go. Eh, cool. It's pretty important to wear sunscreen because the sun's coming from all angles. It's not just coming from below or across the horizon, but it's also reflecting off all the snow. Apparently, Mark was telling me that people can get burns on the underside of their mouth. Sorry, on the top of their mouth and on the inside of their nostrils because when they're doing activities and they're breathing heavy, sun reflecting off the snow burns the top of their mouth. Plus, it's not just like a few hours of sunlight. It's sunlight for huge portions of the day this time of year. So this morning, I woke up at five and the sun was already up. Sunscreen is important. Dense, densely packed snow. Gasoline water's done. All right, in here, I got some taktu. It's caribou, dehydrated caribou. Taktu manuk, caribou meat. Oh, it tastes like jerky. Unseasoned, but it's nice. All right, all packed up. Gonna head a little deeper into the tundra. I got some interesting food that I'm still gonna eat on this trip and I potentially have a cool idea for a place to sleep tonight. Maybe, we'll stay tuned for that. Well, I flipped the snowmobile. Oh, I got her upright. It wasn't too hard, but it wasn't super easy. GoPro battery died in the process. But yeah, back on our way. About to pull over and look at all this food that I got. All this local things that I'm gonna try. This is pickled mukta, which is, well, this one's bow-headed whale, but I believe mukta, muktaq, muktaq. Muktaq means whale fat, whale blubber, I believe. This is bow-headed whale, pickled bow-headed whale. Wild. Look at that. Okay, all right, I can eat that. So I think the pickling is a bit of a twist on a classic. It's really good. This is freshly smoked Arctic char. Oh, damn, that's really good. That is excellent. It's not so much as a like, it's more of a love. Real nice. Fatty, chewy, it's like a nice light salmon, or like a brookie. So tasty. Wish I could be more descriptive with my words. Yummy, yum, yum in my tongue. So I have two jars of local food. This one's the muktaq, the bow-headed whale, but there's this jar. This one is real interesting. I'll have this one later and I'll let you guys know what this one is in just a little bit. Cool, there's a little cabin here. If you make use of our cabin, please leave door unlocked when you exit. I could camp in here tonight, I'd feel very comfy. Blasphemy or not, I don't. Coming outside to this view. Now we're talking. A great spot for a quick cleanup. This is a great view from up here, but those mountains over there look slightly higher. And this snowmobile is so quick. So I'm gonna try to get over there. Shouldn't take me a little bit of a drop here. By a little bit, that's pretty big, too big for me to handle. Having trouble backing up and turning it around. I think I'll just manually do that. Lesson learned, scout. Yeah, that was as tight of a pickle as I wanted to get into. So here's where I almost went down from the other side. I was looking at this and maybe I could have done it, but then it's like, you go steep into that. I don't know, I'm sure some of you guys out there who snowmobile all the time could have done it. For me, absolute amateur. So I think I made the right call. Backing right out. Made it to the next mountain. Sitting up here having a bit of a cuckuckluck and realizing that when I was talking about the pickled bowheaded whale earlier that I was eating, I might have been calling it a muckaluck. And that is not what it's called. That is a shoe. It's called a muckta. So I can't remember what I, anyways, there's another mountain further to my east that's higher than this one that I'm on. And I feel like each mountain after that will just keep getting higher up to infinity. I'll be continuing, I'm gonna hang up here and then, with all the excitement chasing the caribou, I lost one of my mittens. I feel like it'll be really hard to find out here. All right, I gave it a good 45 minutes of looking. I went all the way back to the top of the mountain where I was earlier. Wasn't there. Pretty sure I had them on my hands. Anyways, it's enough looking for me. I got a spare set. Not as warm in this bag that I'll grab later. Maybe I packed it away in all the excitement, but I doubt it. Gotta move forward. Sun's going down. Back out on the sea ice. This is the same bay that Iqaluit's on, 20 or 30 kilometers down yonder. I wanna set up camp here because there's this ice wall behind us. And what's cool about this is as the tides rise and fall, more or less of this ice wall will reveal itself, at least that's the theory. So I'm gonna set up camp around here somewhere and then just observe the changing of that ice wall. Should be cool. There's no cracks through it, only around it. Figure if this thing moves, it'll move in one chunk. So I have another caribou steak and you can eat these raw and actually apparently frozen it's really good. You cut off little pieces using an ulu and you eat it that way. But mine has de-thawed, I think from the heat of the snowmobile, but I'm gonna eat some raw anyways. Extremely chewy. Let's cook it. I mean, it still tastes pretty good, but can't really beat a cooked steak. It's done. Or done enough. Let's get in to the caribou. Everyone? Oh boy. This is that pickled mukta, which we enjoyed earlier. Mukta, look at that, what an interesting texture. Wild, I can't get over that, look at that. Okay. This is smoked Arctic char, just like the last one we had for lunch. Yeah, really good. All right, so we got the caribou steak. We got the Arctic char. Mukta, which is bow-headed whale. And then we have the mystery jar. And this one was a little bit weird for me at first. I didn't know how I felt about it, but I learned a little bit more and that was absolutely cool. So in the mystery jar is polar bear meat. Around here they thrive and often when people hunt polar bears it's because they're prom bears. These are big, vicious animals and if they're coming into the dump and wandering around town causing havoc, they need to be put down. And not only that, all of the bear is utilized when one of these things is dispatched, one of these things is killed. Except for the liver, because the liver is toxic. So in these communities, they eat absolutely all of the bear because food is actually in scarcity here. Mark was telling me, my buddy Mark, that something like seven out of 10 kids go to school hungry around here, which is really sad to think about. So when food such as polar bear comes in, all of it is utilized. It's a way of life. It's an Inuit way of life to hunt polar bear, hunt and eat polar bear. So I have a little bit polar bear in here and I'm just oh so curious. So let's try her out. Polar bear. The way it was cooked and preserved, it tastes like a beef stew. So it's quite good. Very interesting. Mukta, that pickled mukta is so good. Yeah, so with all this food, it's traditional food of the Inuit and of the people around here. This was probably a problem bear or a bear that had fed a great amount of. Good morning, everyone. I don't think that the ice wall moved one inch last night, but hopefully that time lapse was cool. It's really windy here, so I'm just gonna pack up and I'm not gonna eat breakfast or have a coffee here. I'm gonna rip back to town. It should take an hour, hour and a half, maybe a bit longer, but there's a nice breakfast place in town, so I'm just gonna eat there. And then I'm going dog sledding today, which should be really fun. Yeah, time to just pack up. I think it was a little nippy today. It's hard to read, but it's around negative 20. So while I was hoping for that ice wall to move throughout the night as the tides changed, we didn't exactly get that. Maybe it was two low tides in a row. That doesn't happen. I'm just joking. But I did hear a bunch of the movement of the ice and it was really creepy because I was right on top of it and all you'd hear was, almost like as if something was running at you. Really cool. Cool, but freaky. Good to see you, Mark. Hey, dude, good to see you. Welcome back. Thank you. Great trip? Oh, yeah. All right, made it back to Iqaluit. Just met up with Mark. We're heading out to do some dog sledding in a bit. But first, a little bit of food. All right, grabbing some coffee at our favorite coffee shop. All right, I'm with Sarah McNair Landry. She's gonna be our dog sled team captain for the day. Sarah lives up here in Iqaluit and she's an absolute expert of all things Nunavut. Mostly dogs. Dogs and camping. These guys are looking forward to it. Echo. Huh, Echo? Come here, sweetie. She's a little female. Hello. They might pet a little girl. Probably eat a lot of dead caribou, right? Hello. You are adorable. Yeah, they're all super friendly. This is our crazy one. This is our youngest one. This guy is the boss dog. Boss dog. You hate stuff? Stuff because of his tail. Yeah, he's born without a tail. Oh, we got some slobber on the lens. Oh, it's frozen to it. I'm going around and doing a meet and greet. Nice to meet you. You seem like you pull real well. Hello, nice to meet you. Nice to meet you. Hello, good to meet you. Beautiful, look at you. Hello, bashful one. You are beautiful. You're the fiercest. Oh, you are the most shy. Oh, it's okay. It's okay, it's okay. Okay, we love you. Nice to meet you. If either if I fall off or... Break! Okay. You just grab the break and you throw it on over. Just make sure it clears before you let go of it. Right, okay. And then, and you just let go of it. And what happens when it catches here, especially when somebody's weight, drag and I'll slow the team down. Like jumping off and pull the sled. Oh, I see. Or sometimes you can kind of push with the foot. In fact, we have these little breaks here. You just press down on them. And if you press the left one, they'll slightly move left. If you press the right one, then the sled will kind of veer right. It's a good spot if you're like cold, because you can jump off and run. Loop. I just fold his leg up. They kind of know the drill. Put his leg through. I just pull it back so it doesn't catch on his collar. Sorry, Moose. Curry says he's sorry about knocking your camera over. Oh, it's okay. So there's a difference between the boss dog and the lead dog. The boss dog's the alpha of the pack. The lead dog is the one that Sarah controls. Tells to go left or right. Gives directions too. So Stubbs here is the alpha, but not the lead. Burn Marshmallow M is the lead dog. Hello. Lead dog. Okay. This is Christina. She's in training. Is that right? Okay, Christina. Ready, hike. That was fun. You'd think that they haven't run every single day this week. They're so energetic. I've been saying k-k-kliak, but Christina's going to pronounce it correctly. K-k-kliak. Yeah, k-k-kliak. The beautiful part about language is that there are multiple different words in which can't be translated very easily. In Inuktitut, the local language, the k-k-kliak is a word that we do not have in the English language. And unfortunately, local languages are being lost as new languages come in. So it's important to preserve these things and it's fun to be taught some of the local words. We are stopping to untangle. The mess. This is so fun. Sarah and Christina are looking for the route down because of the great amount of snow melt going on this time of year. But I'm sitting up here on top of this mountain, enjoying the view, really taking it in because I'm in the Nunavut. If this is not a bucket list goal, then I don't know. Whoa, whoa, whoa! That was, that was fun. I fell off. You fell off? I fell off, yeah. Yeah, that was, that was like real fun. This is the most chaotic one I've done. The most chaotic, awesome. All right, made it back to Iqaluit. That was so much fun. That far exceeded my expectations. My God, was that great. Sarah, thank you so much. Yeah, super fun. That was so much fun. Thumbs up. Yeah, Christina. Christina, thank you. That was great. You're welcome. Today is a day off from activities. Feeling pooped. Need a good day to recover, but I'm gonna head out and do a little bit of exploring. Go to check out the museum and just get out of the house for a little bit. Place we're staying at, it's just, the house is that way, but the short walk is from this incredible view. Look at this. You gotta love that. There's the town. Looks further than it is. Welcome to my walking tour of Iqaluit. Woo, poo-poo pals. Hello. This is beautiful. We're in town. Some of these houses are really interesting. Look at this one. Arctic cities. Very interesting. Looks like the fight that I came in on. Seal skin. Driftwood, I guess. It's called an ugu. Northern bottlenose whale. Is this marble local? Yes. Do you think these look good together? Hey, got some souvenirs. These are all handcrafted by local artisans. Yeah, that's the same guy. Johnny Caleb Up, he made both those. Perfect. Awesome, thank you so much. Have a wonderful day. Bye. It was a fun little trip to the museum. Heading back. Hello. Another day, another trip. So we're going out ice fishing for Arctic char with Jimmy and his friends and family. They have these two sleds with Komotiks, which are traditional Inuit sleds. We were using one of those when I was dog sledding the other day. Mark and I are hopping on this rental that we just got. Hey, how's it going? We're heading off an hour and a half to our fishing destination. All right, so the sled that we borrowed from a guy on Facebook Marketplace is overheating within five minutes from Iqaluit. We're going up into the mountains, so that's just a no-go for us. So we have to return this thing and try to get another sled. And we hopefully will go meet up with them in a little bit. Update, update number 10. So the snowmobile is apparently okay. We're going to keep driving a little bit. See you in a minute. We did it! You guys made it, you're pumped up! Yeah. You guys are so fast. The auger is six feet tall. Very excited. Here you go. Just some fresh bannock. Every bannock is different. Oh yeah, look at that. Hey! Cute. You could use that as bait. Beautiful fish, though, eh? I keep it, I keep it. You're gonna keep it? Yeah, great. So apparently the Arctic char, they like the orange peel. Nice. Wow, so many. Yeah, it feels big. Oh! Hey! Look at that. Awesome. That's a good one. Another one. Hey, Mark, how you doing, man? Pretty good, having the time of my life. Who brought you to Nunavut? I found a job here. Came up to work as a videographer and photographer. Ended up being a lot of work, so I ended up opening my own business, and life changed ever since. So I stayed here, been here for about 10 years. Oh, we got a fish. Oh! 10 years. 10 years, yeah. Met a lot of cool people, amazing projects. Yeah, life-changing, for sure. It's a beautiful place. Makes you very grateful for what you have. Beautiful. Just by itself, like raw? Yeah, you could eat it. By itself, by raw? I've eaten them cooked. Pop it out from the inside of the gill, and then eat it raw. You guys playing with me, or? No. Okay. Oh, yep, there it goes. Popped right out. Great. Fishy. Do a little bit of this Greek seasoning, because we're in Nunavut. All right. That one, you guys can have that. Yeah, yeah, go for it. Me and Mark will have this one. Fresh, fresh Arctic char from Nunavut. Doesn't get better than this. Great job. This is great. I'm happy this worked out. Nice, Mark. Not bad, not bad. There you go. It's pretty good. My first fish. I'm usually out here documenting people, but I got the chance to fish today, and I got my first one, my first char. 10 years in. 10 years, it took me 10 years, but yeah, I think it's pretty good. I think Xander's gonna eat it later. You got it. Oh, it's a good one. All right, time to head back. Komotiks, the sleds of the Inuit, are tied together, as opposed to using nails and screws, so they can bend over the terrain, and if any of the pieces break, it's usually the rope, and they're easy to fix. Very ingenious. I would just say goodbye to Jimmy and friends. We're back in Iqaluit. I'm dropping Mark off, and I'm gonna be heading back out. Do a little bit of camping. When these ski-dos overheat, they're more like ski-do-nots. We're almost there. All right, we're gonna camp here. We're gonna see Iqaluit in the background, but that's all right, because we're gonna get an absolutely epic sunset, and it's getting late, so we gotta call it. This is what we got. Iqaluit is just over here. We'll get the sunset over the sea ice, but then we'll see the city. Should be nice. Not super remote, but hey, this is Baffin Island. We're kind of remote as is. This place is pretty remarkable. That's pretty good. We're gonna see if we can cook Mark's fish from earlier. He also caught a nice-looking fish, and hopefully it's not completely frozen. Great, it's not. Only issue is I gotta get this thing. Looks good. This won't burn. Uh-oh. What the hell was that noise? It's been a pretty amazing trip. The last few days before getting my flight up here to Nunavut, I felt some resistance and didn't wanna leave. The weather was getting warm back home, and the thought of coming to the Arctic in the cold, desolate rock that is Baffin Island was a little unappealing to me. I know how these things go, and that maybe my mind will change once I give it a try, and sure enough, as I gave Iqaluit and Nunavut a try, I really have begun to see the absolute beauty in this place. The people, the landscape, the ice, even just the pace of life here. It's truly beautiful. It's slow and simple, it's stressless. Or maybe it's just spring. Yeah, this place will be way different in the middle of winter. This is definitely the time to come. Yeah, I've been having a blast here. So happy I get to experience it. You guys do too. Thanks for coming along. Really does make me happy having you guys with me, by the way, really does. I feel ya, I feel your presence, I really do. It's been a wonderful day, but I'm looking forward to a wonderful sleep and another wonderful day tomorrow. Lots of activities still planned, which I'm stoked for. So I'm gonna wake up bright and early to get into said activities, so we'll see you guys in the morning. Good night. Morning, everyone. Rise and shine. Had a great night's sleep. Got some activities planned for today, so we're gonna get ready and head back to town. Bit of a storm has just rolled in. All activities are called off for the day, but that's okay. I had an absolute blast here in Iqaluit and Nunavut here in the spring. Tudor time was a great time to be out here. The returning of the sun and all the activities that came with it. This is a harsh environment and I really commend the people for being out here. Though it is absolutely beautiful, so I do understand that aspect of it. I had such an amazing time getting out into the tundra, exploring on the snowmobile, seeing some caribou, the northern lights, eating local foods, and getting to experience some of the local activities, hanging out with some of the locals, Sarah, Christina, Jimmy and friends, and all the others that had helped me, and of course, Mark, who was such a help for me on this trip. Huge shout out to Mark. Without him, this trip wouldn't have been possible. Amazing experience up here in Nunavut. I'll be back. No doubt about that. Anyways, my plane's coming in just a little bit, so this video wraps up here. Hope you guys enjoyed that one as much as I did. Thanks for watching. Have a great day. Going home!