When asked why anyone would attempt a six-week traverse of Axel Heiberg Island in Canada’s High Arctic, Greg Horne has a simple response.

“Why not?” he asks in turn, laughing. Horne, who has travelled north five times since 2001, finds that the remote nature of the Arctic draws him back time and again.

“The Arctic makes the Canadian Rockies look tiny in my mind. Tiny in terms of scale — the mountains here are steeper and have more vertical height and higher altitude but just the whole scope and size of the landscape,” he says. “We were flying three hours from Resolute to our drop off point and there are absolutely no villages or human habitation. That’s wilderness.” 

Horne, who has lived in Jasper for the past 25 years and works for Parks as a backcountry warden, made his latest journey along with his partner, Louise Jarry, another longtime Jasperite and Parks employee. 

“The first trip she thought it was going to be too cold so she said no thanks, not interested but when I came back and told her that it was warmer than an average Rockies winter trip ... well she’s been hooked, too,” says Horne. While most might anticipate brutal cold, the conditions aren’t that bad, he insists.

“That’s one thing that people always assume, that the cold must be really harsh. Camping in the Canadian Rockies in January for a week in cold weather would be less fun than a month in April and May in the Arctic. You’ve got a 16-hour night here at this time of year,” Horne says.

Starting on their voyage in April, the four-person party faced daytime temperatures around -25 degrees Centigrade. 

“That, with no wind, is not that bad but it doesn’t take much wind for that to become quite bitter in your face,” Horne says. By the end of the trip, however, the temperatures had improved considerably, to the point that it almost rained on their last day.

Horne and Jarry were joined on their adventure by Sarah Boyle and Vicky Lytle, two Australians with extensive polar experience. Boyle had travelled with the Jasper couple on an earlier trip to Baffin Island and brought Lytle into the fold. Finding a group of four people was a challenge, Horne admits.

“It took me four years to get a group of people together because of the classic problem you run into: people who have time and no money, and people who have money and no time. It’s a hard combination,” he says. Having a party of four is essential to ensure safety, according to Horne. 

“It’s a safety factor, particularly travelling on glaciers,” he says. “If you fall in a crevasse roped in with a sled it’s going to be a very ugly situation, but if you’re three or four you’ve got a separate team that independently assess the situation.”

Another advantage to taking four people to the Arctic is being able to divide the costs of travel that much more. For their pick-up and drop-off in a ski plane, the group paid $24,000 and their overall trip budget came to almost $60,000.

“It’s welcome to the High Arctic,” Horne says of the price. “You go into a store and everything is double or triple the price.”

Getting to Axel Heiberg might have been expensive, but from his very first experience in the region, Horne had his eye on a trip there.

“When I was planning my first trip I bought the aeronautical maps and I didn’t know anything about Axel Heiberg and I thought ‘oh, what’s this over here?’ It’s got lots of glaciers and had this appeal,” he says. 

For Horne, a good trip location must feature glaciated mountains and be “off the radar screen” of most travelers.

Axel Heiberg certainly fit the bill. 

“This is not a trip to be taken lightly, you need to have substantial experience under your belt to make a trip like this. The previous trips that I did were good experience-building trips,” says Horne, who consulted alpine journals and the internet as he prepared for the voyage. 

“It’s just like coming to the Canadian Rockies, if you’ve never been to an area and you don’t have any idea how to get to a place, what the snow is like or when the best time of year to travel is. The difference is that there are guidebooks here and there’s not really a guidebook for polar mountain skiing and climbing trips.”

There were surprises in store for the group, as they saw more wildlife than they had anticipated. The party saw arctic fox, Peary caribou, muskox and wolves, but no polar bears. Their route deliberately avoided the coast, where the fearsome predators roam, and in his five trips, Horne has never seen a polar bear in person.

“It’s a little bit of luck and a little bit of trip planning,” he says. For protection, the group carried a shotgun and bearspray and set up a perimeter alarm wire around the campsite while they slept.

The trip was entirely self-supported meaning that the group had no cached food or supplies waiting for them. At the outset, their heaviest sled weighed close to 100 kilograms.

“My philosophy is that with caches you can do any trip in the world,” Horne says in explanation of his approach. “Of course, you make caches and two things can happen: they can be lost, or raided by animals.”

Still, travelling in such a manner made the group entirely reliant upon their equipment, and there was one point at which Horne thought the trip was over.

“That was a heartstopper,” he says, recalling the incident. What happened? Well, to find out, you’ll have to make it to Horne and Jarry’s slideshow where they will tell all about their adventure and even give the audience the chance to see just how hard it was to drag their heavy sleds.

The presentation is scheduled for Wednesday 

(January 18) at 7 p.m. at the Jasper Yellowhead Museum and Archives. There is also a talk set for Hinton on Monday night (January 16) at 7 p. m.