Ecologist Aldo Leopold defined wilderness as “an area that possesses no possibility of conveyance by mechanical means.”  Welcome to Mansel Island in Canada’s eastern Hudson Bay, where there are no cars, tundra buggies, ATVs, SUVs, motorcycles, or airplanes, all of which are mechanical conveyances. As my Inuit guide Jake and I explored this large, uninhabited chunk of limestone, I was …

Atlin is a former gold mining town located near the Yukon border in the extreme northern part of British Columbia.  From the moment I arrived there, I found myself staring at Teresa Island, which, crowned by Birch Mountain, rises 4,567 feet above Atlin Lake, making it one of the highest inland islands in the world.  The longer I stared at …

Situated in the southern part of Haida Gwaii (formerly the Queen Charlotte Islands), Anthony Island dangles on the very edge of the continent, seemingly poised to be swallowed by the Pacific. Shortly after I set foot on this 395-acre tract of rock and Sitka spruce, I found myself being stared at by a bestiary of faces—eagles, black bears, killer whales, …

With the great out-of-doors, as with cuisine, there’s no disputing matters of taste. One person’s caviar is another’s soggy dumpling. For myself, I’ve always preferred a good healthy slog through an ancient forest to the more easeful charms of a beach. So it was that, shortly after I arrived on Orcas Island, I began hiking along the Cold Spring Trail. …

This past spring I visited Whitehorse and a friend drove me to the Son of War Eagle Landfill a few miles outside of town. For local birders, this might as well have been Point Pelee, or even Brazil’s Pantanal. “Last year I saw two uncommon species for the Yukon here—a Brewer’s blackbird and an American pipit,” my friend told me. …

The town of Moose Factory in northern Ontario has few obvious attractions for the visitor. You can drop in on the Cree Interpretation Centre and look at old artifacts; you can visit the Hudson’s Bay Company Museum, assuming it’s open; or you can experience the local horsefly, otherwise known as a bulldog. In the words of an early northern explorer, …