Northwest Territories, Canada

The Northwest Territories is where the road ends and the ice road begins, and Yellowknife is the aurora capital of the world with a genuinely international population of scientists, pilots, diamond miners and people who simply wanted out. Great Slave Lake is the deepest lake in North America and freezes solid enough for trucks; the ice road to the diamond mines north of the city is one of the great engineering oddities of the country; Nahanni is a UNESCO river valley that whitewater paddlers treat as a pilgrimage; and Inuvik is on the Arctic coast where the sun does not set in July and does not rise in December.

The territory's character is frontier-technical and genuinely mixed — eleven official languages including nine Indigenous ones, a real diamond industry, and a population so small that the whole thing functions on first-name terms. Nobody here is impressed by anything and everybody has a hobby that would be a career elsewhere.

Expect genuine aurora content, real Arctic-season talk, and a territory where the population is smaller than a single city block in Toronto.

Nearby: Yukon Nunavut Alberta Edmonton