Dorset Island, Nunavut
YOU MAY BE FAMILIAR with Dorset prints — often stark and stunning, linear stylizations of Arctic wildlife — and carvings created in the island hamlet of Cape Dorset, but nothing beats setting foot in what is arguably the most artistic community north of 60 and seeing them with your own eyes. Yes, it takes an extra bit of cash to reach a place so remote, but the return is a rare opportunity to explore the community and the fruits of the West Baffin Co-operative, which many credit with igniting the international obsession with Inuit art. Of course, you don’t have to have the soul of an artist to be bowled over by Cape Dorset. You can boat or hike, at low tide, from Dorset Island into Mallikjuaq Territorial Park on Mallik Island, where you’ll see foundations of the ancestral Thule people’s squat stone-and-whale-rib houses as well as traces of the even more ancient Dorset culture. Time your visit for midsummer and you’ll encounter a landscape spattered with purple saxifrage and other tough, bright wildflowers. It’s enough to bring out the artist in anyone.