The Canadian Arctic can be a truly brutal place, bitterly cold, remorselessly unforgiving to the uninitiated. It has but two real seasons and one of them is a winter’s night that stretches for six long, gloomy months. During this time the Arctic is a polar desert, with an average temperature hovering at a numbing -29F/-34 C. It can freeze a face to hard stone in milliseconds. The Arctic summer that follows brings the phenomenon of floating ice which expands to an average of 6.2 million square miles- more than 1 ½ times the area of the United States. The tundra- or treeless plain- which carpets this land in summer covers fully 1/10th of the earth’s surface.