besthike.com - the blog

The Adventure Addict posted a great series of annotated photos of their trek south to the Arctic Circle.

Wow! I’ve never hiked that far North. (If only I could afford to fly to Pangnirtung. And on to Qikiqtarjuaq.)

You can’t really see from the pic, but the vertical part of the face is actually overhanging at 105°. This mountain has the longest vertical uninterrupted face on Earth, and is a mecca for climbers and B.A.S.E. jumpers. The vertical part is 1250m tall — yes, that’s 1.25 KILOMETRES tall. …

Thor Peak - flickr

Auyuittuq National Park, Baffin Island, Nunavut, Canada. 6 intrepid/crazy hikers go for a 9 day hike in a remote, mountainous landscape in the Canadian arctic.

Akshayuk Pass hike, Auyuittuq National Park, Canada - a photoset on Flickr

Breadablik and Thor

Interested? Check an even better trip report with photos by Nestor and Lewycky.

More information:

Baffin Island. The Akshayuk Pass, formerly known as Pangnirtung Pass, is an extraordinary 100-km trek through a land recently vacated by glaciers - though they line the edges of the valley and send fingers of ice creeping into the edges of it. Mountains over 2000 metres high line a route through the finest scenery in North America. In 2004 Outside Magazine voted the Auyuittuq Backpacking trip one of the top “Trips Of A Lifetime”.

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Friends are looking at Akshayuk for the summer of 2009. Leave a comment if you have deep pockets and might be interested in joining us. If bears scare you, we’ll need a gun. A bigger concern, actually, is drowning or death by hypothermia after river crossings.

Obviously Akshayuk is included on our list of the best hikes in North America.

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