The call of the north: Exhilarating adventures in the freezing cold

Britain in winter is an exceptionally dull place. Too mild for snow, too wet for frost. Just mud and rain and grey: empty vistas for as far as your bleary, apathetic gaze could care to look. Is there any wonder that the overwhelming urge is to shun travel entirely? To simply curl up by the fire, swaddled in blankets like a gift-wrapped newborn, reading books and dozing? 

For those who care to listen, the boundless winter calls, promising exhilarating adventures to stave off hibernation.

And yet, the outdoors remains, regardless of our interest. For those who care to listen, the boundless winter calls, promising exhilarating adventures to stave off hibernation, at the most far-flung corners of the world. Activities at this time of year go far beyond Christmas markets, skiing, or watching the Northern Lights: in fact, there is a wellspring of unusual travel activities for deep midwinter. 

Take, for instance, ice canoeing on the St Lawrence River, in Quebec, Canada. This is a pastime with deep roots in the local history, when those hoping to cross the river had to do so when the water was filled with ice but not enough to create an ice bridge. Instead, the crews of canoes would simply get out of their boats whenever they encountered an ice floe, and skid the vessel along the surface of the ice sheet, sort of like a bobsled. The advent of steam-powered vessels capable of smashing through the ice ended the need for such a novel way of travel, but the pastime now lives on as a uniquely Canadian sport – and nowhere more so than in Quebec.

Norway has developed a huge tourist industry taking adventurers to live out their fantasies.

Annually, there are major ice canoeing tournaments, in which professional teams of five athletes brave the freezing rivers to scramble over jagged ice floes in brightly coloured canoes. Clearly, unless you’ve had a frankly odd amount of prior experience for a student, you won’t be able to compete in these, but opportunities for recreational ice canoeing are abundant in any Canadian city near a body of water: Ottawa, Montreal, and Quebec City stand out, and are all brilliant tourist destinations in their own right. 

If sub-zero water sports don’t exactly sound like your thing, perhaps you would prefer something more to do with animals. The obvious suggestion, then, is dogsledding, and where better to try this than Norway, home to some of the world’s largest sledding competitions? Again, it probably isn’t realistic to suggest entering into these competitions (where are you supposed to find the team of dogs…?), but Norway has developed a huge tourist industry taking adventurers to live out their Snow Buddies fantasies. 

Beyond that the slopes are your oyster.

The most famous dogsledding destinations in the world are Finnmark and Svalbard, located deep into the Arctic Circle. Naturally, those are extremely remote destinations, so much closer and easier-to-reach sledding hotspots include Tromsø (similarly northern, but much more populated), the Hallingdal valley, and Telemark. Anyone who fancies the idea of being pulled at breathtaking speed through the Scandinavian mountains, but isn’t good with dogs, need not fear: whilst piloting your own sled is quite accessible (and by all accounts extremely fun), many dogsled operators also offer passenger experiences. As a bonus to all this, you can pet the dogs as well! 

Having spent 500 words chastising the idea of any holiday as bourgeoise as skiing, it would be odd to turn around now and recommend exactly that as a final destination idea. But this kind of skiing is anything but ordinary: unless you consider strapping yourself to a 30-meter rope attached to a giant sail to be mundane. Snowkiting, either on skis or a snowboard, is to regular skiing what motor racing must be to a pedal-kart user. There are several European hotspots for this terrifyingly fun pastime, notably Switzerland the south of France. As with everything on this list, it’s not something you can just pick up as you go along: most sites recommend at least a couple days of training, but beyond that the slopes are your oyster. 

The call of the north: can you hear it yet?

That concept is a lot more truthful than you might think: uniquely, snowkiting allows adventurers to travel uphill, propelled by massive kites that function in the same way as for kitesurfers. Increasingly, snowkiters have begun to embrace the air as its own domain, too, with the kites potentially allowing a huge amount of time suspended in the air between jumps. And if Switzerland is far too bougie a travel destination for you, that doesn’t have to be the end of your wind-propelled dreams: in recent years, a fledgling snowkiting industry has actually developed in the English Pennines. 

Clearly, there is no excuse to remain sedentary this winter. Across the globe, from the frozen rivers of Canada to the mountains of Norway and Switzerland, dizzying adventures are calling. The call of the north: can you hear it yet?