Yukon, Canada

The Yukon is the size of Spain and holds about forty thousand people, most of them in Whitehorse. The Klondike gold rush of 1898 built the whole territory in a single year — Dawson City is the preserved gold-rush town where the streets are still dirt and the buildings are still the ones the prospectors put up, and the frozen muck has kept a genuinely astonishing archive intact. The aurora runs from August to April and Whitehorse is one of the best places on earth to see it, the summer gives nineteen hours of daylight and no real darkness at all, and Kluane has the biggest icefields in the world outside the polar regions.

The territory's character is self-sufficient and genuinely independent — people here moved for a reason and most of them can fix their own vehicle at minus thirty, which is a necessary skill. The Indigenous First Nations have settled land claims that are genuinely among the most advanced in the country.

Expect real frontier independence, genuine aurora content, and a territory where the sun not setting is a season rather than a phenomenon.

Nearby: Northwest Territories British Columbia Alberta Nunavut