You either love the North or you don’t. I love the North and always have. Since I was young I’ve been magnetized by it, compass-like. My inner needle points to where the roads end — and then beyond. I’ve paddled solo from my home, on the Leech Lake Reservation in Minnesota, 250 miles north to Rainy Lake. I’ve taken weeks-long canoe trips with my brother and my friends on the Berens and Bloodvein rivers, which flow from Ontario northwest into Lake Winnipeg. And I once spent an entire winter in northwestern Ontario’s boreal forest trapping beavers and pine marten. So it was with massive excitement that I traveled last July as far north from Minnesota as Guadalajara is south: to Canada’s newest national park, Thaidene Nëné, in the Northwest Territories.

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