Paddling in Nunavut

Nunavut is the largest and most remote paddling territory in Canada — a place where the water itself is the infrastructure, the highway, and the wilderness all at once.

It covers the central and eastern Arctic, from the Barrenlands of the interior to the fjords and floe edges of Baffin Island, and the rivers here were being paddled long before the word "expedition" existed.

The Inuit built the qajaq specifically for these waters, and that lineage is present in every stroke. The interior rivers are the backbone of canoe tripping in Nunavut.

The Thelon, the Kazan, and the Coppermine are the names that come up first — long, demanding routes through the Barrenlands where caribou herds still move in numbers that stop you mid-stroke.

The Hood River runs 250 miles from its headwaters to Arctic Sound, starting as a chain of lakes before building into rapids and massive waterfalls. These are multi-week commitments, fly-in and fly-out, with no road access and no margin for under-preparation.

The Soper Heritage River on Baffin Island is a different character — a lush, glacially carved valley that feels improbably green against the surrounding tundra, with Veil Falls and the Katannilik park landscape framing the route.

Sea kayaking opens up an entirely different scale.

The Arctic coastline runs to 45,000 miles, and around Pond Inlet on Baffin Island's northern tip you're paddling past icebergs, watching narwhal pods work the floe edge, and reading the same water the Thule people read centuries ago.

The tides around Kimmirut on Baffin's southern peninsula are among the most dramatic on the continent. July and August are the window for sea kayaking; river travel can start in late spring as ice releases. Logistics here are not a footnote — they're the trip.

Hard-shell canoes have become difficult to fly into many remote put-ins, and packrafts or inflatables have taken over where weight and aircraft dimensions are the constraint.

Charter bush planes are the standard entry point for interior routes, and finding a pilot willing to take kayaks requires advance work. Three weeks of Arctic gear, food, and safety equipment needs to fit in the boat. Bear spray is not optional.

The Soper is a designated Canadian Heritage River, and the Thelon flows through the Thelon Wildlife Sanctuary — both carry protections that shape how and where you travel.

Check with Parks Canada and the relevant Nunavut land authorities before any trip, because access and land-use conditions vary by route and territory. What stays with people who paddle here isn't any single rapid or campsite.

It's the 24-hour daylight, the silence between waterfalls, and the particular weight of moving through a landscape that has been read by paddlers for four thousand years.