The Arctic has two seasons, and they have almost nothing in common. In winter, the sun disappears for weeks or months, and the landscape becomes a world of silence, snow, and a quality of darkness that most travelers have never experienced. In summer, the sun refuses to set, wildlife returns in extraordinary concentrations, and ice retreats far enough to open waters that were impassable six months earlier.
This guide is organized around that division, because a traveler who visits Finnish Lapland in January and Svalbard in July has not visited the same destination twice — they have visited two different worlds that happen to share a latitude.
From the aurora-lit forests of Lapland and the fjord coastlines of Arctic Norway, to the polar bear territories of Svalbard and the ice-calving fjords of Greenland, to the remote passages of the Canadian Arctic, each destination offers a different expression of what the far north can be. Before choosing where to go, the traveler must first decide which Arctic they want to experience.
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