The Northwest Passage: a journey across the roof of the world

Entering Conningham Bay, in Arctic Canada’s Northwest Passage, the tide needed to be judged to perfection. It was a bitingly cold morning when Ian, the pilot of our zodiac inflatable, paused in choppy swell at the shallow entrance of this horseshoe-shaped bay. He revved the engine with the next tidal surge and we crested through. Inside, glacial shattered rocks harboured pockets of diminishing snow. It was the foreshore however – where the whitened skeletons of dozens of beluga whales lay – that piqued our interest. 

We weren’t here for an anatomy class, though. Conningham Bay presents the best opportunity in Arctic Canada’s Northwest Passage to see polar bears. Hungry ones, too. For the beluga that swims into this bay it can be a death trap because when the tide ebbs they may become stranded in the shallows and the bears pounce for a fatty, easy meal. "There’s something on the shoreline at one o’clock," said Ian, our zodiac driver. He didn't rev hard but pootled towards a large male bear whose nuzzle was stained red from a recent meal. He watched us impassively around 100 metres away as we photographed him and whispered our excitement. Eventually, he turned inland and vanished. Ian suggested he’d be back to look for another meal when the tide had drained, long after we were ensconced on our warm expedition ship. 

It wasn’t long ago that traversing the Northwest Passage was the quest of gnarled explorers, some of whom would never leave this perishingly harsh environment. The inimitable Norwegian explorer Roald Amundsen was credited with the first traverse in 1905. He had completed a holy grail that has been ongoing for several hundred years: forging a high northern hemisphere passage between the Atlantic and Pacific oceans. 

It seems remarkable, given the deprivations the explorers endured, that it is now possible to transit the passage in style and comfort. It’s a short season, between late July and early September, to make the transit, even despite research showing Arctic sea ice is decreasing fast. A NASA report found a 45cm thinning of ice between 2019-21, a loss in volume of 16%. Yet even now, a successful transit is no certainty, and since 2018, there have been a couple of summer seasons when the sea ice has been impenetrable. The Northwest Passage does not yield easily for either person or vessel.