Hiking the Akshayuk Pass Trail

Wind moves across the ice fields. Gravel shifts underfoot. The occasional groan of a glacier somewhere out of sight breaks a quiet I’ve come to know well after years of guiding in Arctic landscapes.

We’ve arrived in Auyuittuq National Park: myself, my co-guide Monica, and 6 other hearty travellers. Our objective is to hike the full 97-kilometre traverse of the Akshayuk Pass Trail, from Qikiqtarjuaq in the north to Pangnirtung in the south, with 12 days to move through some of the most dramatic granite peaks on the planet.

Before a single boot hits the trail, reaching Auyuittuq National Park is quite the endeavour. Monica and I fly in from Iceland, connecting through Toronto, then Ottawa, before landing in Iqaluit,where we meet our guests who arrive on their own international flights from all over the world.

The night before we leave civilization behind, we gather at Nunavut Brewing Company (NuBrew), a local brewery in Iqaluit. Pints in hand, maps spread across the table, this is where nerves start to settle into something closer to excitement. These trip briefings are a small ritual Monica and I have upheld for years, and have come to believe they really matter. Most of the group has read (and re-read) the brochures or watched our Instagram reels, but this is different: face to face, we walk through how each day will actually unfold, adjusted for the weather we’re watching right now.

I look around at the group and I know that by tomorrow night, none of us will be sleeping under a roof again for eight nights.
The next morning, we chartered a twin otter north to Qikiqtarjuaq. On landing, we headed straight to the Parks Canada office for mandatory safety training with the wardens. Anyone planning a Baffin Island hike should expect this step and budget time for it. The rangers know this terrain better than any guidebook, and their read on river levels and bear activity shapes how the trip unfolds. 

In the morning, a local Qikiqtarjuaq resident named Billy meets us for the boat ride to North Pang Emergency Cabin, the true entrance to Auyuittuq National Park. Two and a half hours on open water, and I watch the coastline thin out behind us. Every kilometre narrows the world a little more: fewer people, fewer buildings, more ice, more mountains.

We land under full sun, rare for this stretch of the Arctic, and go straight into hiking mode. The terrain doesn’t ease us in. Tussock grass covers most of the ground here, uneven hummocks that force a slow, deliberate pace no matter how fresh anyone’s legs are. We cross two rivers, one very wide, one big enough to slow the whole group down just before the shelter. We camp on the hill above the descent, about 2km short of the shelter, next to a good river for filling up water before tomorrow’s push to the beach.

The ground never really dries around here. Permafrost sits just beneath the surface, so the summer thaw has nowhere to drain, and the tundra stays saturated for the length of the season. We woke to a mix of sun and cloud, packed our camp and set off shortly after breakfast to endure 5 to 8 kilometres of super soggy, boggy hiking terrain. With each step, the ground gave way, thick and reluctant, testing our patience more than our heavy pack or our tired legs. Then, without warning, the trail firmed up and ran clean alongside the river. For a stretch we could move at a decent clip, but the glorious firm footing didn’t last. The bog returned in patches, so we always had to stay on guard. It was familiar by now, so less punishing the second time around.

By the afternoon, we reached the last river crossing of the day, wading through fast-moving water, but shallow enough to cross without much thought. We made our camp next to the June Valley emergency shelter. A stunning, unnamed peak took over the horizon. Half the group had their cameras out snapping pics before our tents were staked, but you couldn’t blame them. The photos speak for themselves.

We began day five wrapped in a thick blanket of fog with visibility at an all-time low, enough to erase the mountains. Back to the old familiar routine – breakfast, pack-up, suit-up, set out. About an hour into the day’s hike, the fog slowly lifted, and what emerged was spectacular… Mount Asgard, one of the most dramatic mountains on the planet.

Mount Asgard pierces the sky with an elevation of 6,611 feet. But more impressive than its height is its shape. Mount Asgard consists of two distinct flat-topped cylindrical rock towers connected by a saddle, a granite formation unlike any other on Earth. We stood there longer than we needed to. Nobody said much, just soaking it in. There’s a specific kind of humility that comes from standing at the gates of a place named after the gods themselves, especially when there really is no other mountain quite like it.

Day six tested our mettle. We woke up at 3 a.m. to frigid Arctic temps to cross the Owl River while the water levels were at their lowest.  We spent an hour and a half in those wee hours of the morning moving in and out of the current, testing different footings, backtracking, trying again. One team member lost a water shoe mid-crossing, never to be seen again.

Side note: For anyone planning their own hiking trip to Baffin Island: bring proper water shoes with real ankle support and grip, not kayak socks… (IYKYK). Neoprene socks are fine in addition to a waterproof shoe, but they aren’t built for standing in a moving glacial river at 3 a.m. searching for solid footing on their own. 

After the arduous river crossing, we climbed the glacial moraine onto the real trail again, and enjoyed having solid ground underfoot for the first time in hours. Mount Asgard still loomed behind us; views started opening up toward the coast.
We hiked down to the beach, crossed the Norman Glacier outflow, and worked our way slowly along the moraine wall left behind by the glacier’s retreat. We found camp for the night in a sandy pocket near a small lake, sheltered enough to escape the wind that had been building all afternoon.

We crossed the Turner Glacier outflow early in the morning, as Loki Peak rose ahead of us in the low morning light. Baffin Island’s striking landscape is like fuel — each view creates anticipation for the next, physically motivating us through the cold, tired, most grinding part of the day.

Then the unthinkable happened. Partway through the day, the group caught a partial solar eclipse. It was ominous and strikingly beautiful at the same time. The light dimmed and shifted in a way that instantly stopped all trail conversations.

The ground didn’t make the rest of the day easy. We hit a stretch of soft sand that swallowed our boots with every step, forcing us to scout two or three different crossing points before finding anything solid enough to trust. By afternoon, some unfavourable weather was building fast on the horizon behind Caribou Glacier, dark and moving in our direction. We decided to set up camp early instead of pushing on, just a few kilometres short of Summit Lake emergency shelter to avoid getting caught in the storm. Safe to say, we made the right call.

We crossed the Caribou Glacier outflow river early in the morning to reach Summit Lake emergency shelter. A small team of biologists were there too, on their own expedition to study the microbes living in the ice on Turner Glacier. It’s easy to forget, deep into a physically demanding trek, that this landscape is also a very active site for scientific research. The Penny Ice Cap’s glaciers, Turner and Caribou among them, are retreating fast enough that researchers return year after year to track the change, and what lives in that ice may not be there much longer. We traded notes for a few minutes and kept moving.

Past the shelter, the terrain turned rocky, then boggy again, then rocky. We climbed into the moraine and reached Half Hour Creek, a crossing with a reputation for being brutal late in the day. But today, that wasn’t the case. The water was low and easy, and we were through in minutes, grateful for the one break the terrain decided to give us. We exited the boulder field onto familiar ground, rock and bog in equal measure, before a stretch of river crossings that turned into rock-hopping more than wading. The trail firmed up again after that, well marked, until we hit a section beneath a steady stream of falling rock. We moved through quickly and climbed the last small hill, 1.5 kilometres left before camp.

We arrived to find Thor Peak waiting for us, and it was absolutely worth every one of those arduous kilometres. Its west face holds the greatest vertical drop on Earth, 1,250 metres of nearly overhanging granite, steeper than straight down. Photos don’t do it justice. Standing at its base does something to our sense of scale that’s hard to shake. We set up camp and let the grandeur of it all sink in.

The trail was kind to us this morning, a welcome change of pace. We crossed a few boulder sections early, and the trail firmed up again on the other side. By the time we reached Windy Lake, the day had settled into, dare I say, something almost easy. We skirted the moraine closest to the glacier, up and over a short rise, and found a sheltered spot inside the moraine’s bowl to eat lunch in full sun.

The river crossings that followed were the easiest we’d had all trip: low water, no wind fighting us, no route to scout or second-guess. Yesterday, we fought the terrain for every kilometre. Today, the Arctic just let us through. After years leading treks through these kinds of remote landscapes, I’ve learned to never take a freebie for granted. You say thank you, and keep walking.

From there, a clean trail carried us to Schwartzenbach Falls, where we crossed downstream and kept moving. The path beyond wound through a stretch of blueberry bushes and boulders, easy enough that for the first time all week, nobody was talking about the terrain. We made camp on grassy ground just before Crater Lake, a river running beside it. Nobody rushed to set up. We just sat there for a while, taking it in.

You can always feel a trek coming to an end. There’s a new energy that settles over the group as we near the finish line, physically exhausted, yet charged in a different kind of way. We were total strangers ten days ago. In that time, we’ve covered more ground and had more real conversation than most people manage with a neighbour of five years or more. We know those deep bonds are nearing an end. Never to be forgotten, just paused, until the next adventure brings us back together.

We broke camp at Crater Lake after breakfast and dropped down to the beach for our final river crossing of the expedition. From there, the trail climbed straight up the crater’s edge, and within minutes the whole basin opened up below us: water sitting still and blue against the dark rock, a view worth every step of the climb. We walked along the ridge for a while before descending the other side into sand, more sand than we’d seen anywhere else on the trail, stretching out flat in every direction.

The terrain eased from there. A long, flat push carried us toward Ulu, broken only by minor rises and dips that barely registered after ten days of tougher ground. We made our last camp of the trip in Ulu that evening and radioed Peter to confirm the pick-up point for the following morning. It didn’t feel like the last night in the wild until we were actually lying in our tents, taking in the sounds of the Arctic we knew we wouldn’t hear again for a long time.

The next morning was easy, calm weather with a few clouds gathering on the horizon. We packed up and covered the last four kilometres to the pick-up point without much urgency. By the time we reached the beach, the weather had started to turn, and we ate our final freeze-dried meal of the trip waiting for Peter’s speedboat to arrive, watching the wind pick up over the water.

Peter’s boat driving was flawless, battling growing winds as he carefully threaded the coastline to avoid getting stuck in the sand at low tide. It was a fitting way to close a trip that had asked us, time and time again, to respect the conditions rather than fight them.
Back in Pangnirtung, we deregistered with the park rangers and sat down to one last dinner together as a group, the kind where everyone is soaking up every last minute of each other’s time together. The next morning, we boarded our charter flight back to Iqaluit, where we made one final stop at the brewery and a few local shops before flying home that evening.

Monica and I headed back to Iceland, our guests scattering to their own corners of the world, twelve days and another 97-kilometre thru-hike through Baffin Island now ingrained in our memories long after the gear’s been put away.

Thinking about joining this expedition next year? Learn more and join the interest list here.

This trek isn’t for everyone. But for those ready to embrace the true remoteness of the Canadian Arctic, Baffin Island offers an adventure as wild as it is humbling.