Tuktoyaktuk and the Pingo Canadian Landmark

Pingo Canadian Landmark, Co Managed By Parks Canada And The Inuvialuit, Protecting Eight Pingos Including Ibyuk, The Tallest In Canada; Reached By The Inuvik To Tuktoyaktuk Highway, Opened 2017 · Tuktoyaktuk, Northwest Territories

Until November 2017 you could not drive to the Arctic Ocean in Canada. Then the Inuvik to Tuktoyaktuk Highway opened - a hundred and thirty-seven kilometres of gravel laid on top of permafrost, replacing a winter ice road - and the Beaufort Sea became a place you could reach in an ordinary vehicle, which is why people now dip their feet in it and photograph the sign. Tuktoyaktuk is an Inuvialuit hamlet of about nine hundred people, and behind it stands the strangest landform in the Canadian Arctic. A pingo is a hill with a core of ice, pushed up out of the flat tundra over centuries by freezing groundwater, and the Tuktoyaktuk Peninsula holds roughly thirteen hundred and fifty of them, the greatest concentration on earth. Ibyuk, the tallest in Canada, stands about forty-nine metres, is around a thousand years old and is still growing.

Pingo Canadian Landmark, Tuktoyaktuk, Inuvialuit Settlement Region, Tuktoyaktuk, Northwest Territories, Canada

The INUVIK TO TUKTOYAKTUK HIGHWAY is a public road, free and open year round, but it is 137km of gravel with NO SERVICES in between and winter conditions are severe. The PINGO CANADIAN LANDMARK has no entry fee and no opening hours - and NO ROAD ACCESS: it is reached by boat from Tuktoyaktuk in summer, by snowmobile in winter, or on foot across wet tundra, so in practice you go when a local operator can take you. Ibyuk is climbed on a boardwalk and steps. Midnight sun runs late May to late July; the sun does not rise at all in December and early January.

Tuktoyaktuk and the Pingo Canadian Landmark on Spottos · Explore more places on Spottos