With more than 1.4 billion people traveling internationally each year, it’s getting harder and harder to find a place to vacation that’s scenic, provocative, not too crowded and maybe a little quirky.

Canada’s Arctic checks all four of those boxes.

Around 40 percent of Canada lies above the Arctic Circle (66° 34′ north latitude), a vast expanse of wetlands and tundra, glaciers and snowcapped peaks shared by the Yukon, Nunavut and Northwest Territories and populated by both indigenous people and an incredible array of wildlife

The region is now easier to explore than ever before thanks to a new highway, more cruise options, and fly-in hiking and skiing adventures.

Here are three great ways to explore Arctic Canada this summer:

One If By Land

Until 2017, it was impossible to reach the Canadian Arctic by road until the rivers froze over and you could do your own Ice Road Trucker thing through the middle of the frozen wilderness.

But that year saw the opening of the Inuvik–Tuktoyaktuk Highway (ITH), the first all-weather, year-round link between the Arctic coast and the rest of Canada.

If you think the Alaska Highway makes a radical road trip, try the ITH. You start by driving the paved Alaska Highway to Whitehorse and Klondike Highway to Dawson City. The next leg is along the Dempster Highway, an epic journey through boreal forest and tundra that crosses the Arctic Circle.

The town of Inuvik in the Mackenzie River Delta marks the start of the ITH and an 86-mile (138-km) stretch to Tuktoyaktuk village on the Arctic Ocean coast.

There are just four small towns between Dawson City and Tuktoyaktuk and not all of them have grocery stores, gas stations or overnight accommodation. So anyone who makes the journey needs to carry food and fuel and be prepared to camp.

Why bother?

How about a chance to see vast herds of grazing caribou, grizzly bears fishing for salmon in a roadside stream, summer wildflowers as far as you can see, an explosion of fall colors on the tundra, chance encounters with First Nation and Inuit residents, and the realization that for much of the drive you’re the only human (or manmade thing) in sight.

Two If By Sea

The Terror — both the bestselling book and TV series — showed how difficult it was to cruise the Canadian Arctic in the 1840s when the “lost” Franklin Expedition got stuck in the ice and all hands of both ships perished.

They would have sailed right through today. That’s because climate change has drastically reduced the icepack along Canada’s northern shore. For a period of four to six weeks in late summer and early fall, the ice disappears long enough to allow cruise ship passage through the fabled Northwest Passage.

Voyages are infused with an overwhelming sense of history, the fact that you’re doing something that explorers like Captain James Cook, John Cabot, Vitus Bering and others tried and failed to accomplish.

The cruises are also a window into modern life in the Arctic, the people who live in its handful of settlements, how they came to live in such remote places, and how they manage to survive such harsh conditions.

Traveling from west to east, passengers normally fly commercial to Yellowknife and then hop a charter flight to Kugluktuk, an Inuit settlement on the Coronation Gulf. That first day on the Northwest Passage is far and away the most colorful, the tundra dappled with the autumn colors and shore excursions to view the two-billion-year-old stromatolites at Port Epworth, an area nominated for UNESCO World Heritage status.

Cambridge Bay on Victoria Island is another intriguing shore excursion. Tours and talks are available at the Canadian High Arctic Research Station (CHAR) while the waterfront Red Fish Studio offers innovative scrap metal sculptures fashioned by young local artists. There might also be a chance to sample some local delicacies like bannock, Arctic char or caribou.

Most Northwest Passage cruises pass directly over the watery spot near King William Island where the Franklin ships were captured by the sea ice. Farther along is Beechey Island, where the expedition wintered in 1845-46. Now a national historic site, the island safeguards the graves of three expedition members and ruined Northumberland House, a basecamp for efforts to rescue the lost expedition.

The world’s 10^th largest island, Ellesmere demarcates the upper extent of the Northwest Passage. Huge cliffs and mountains rise from a shoreline of rocky beaches and tundra flats traversed by polar bear, muskox, caribou, Arctic fox and other cold-climate creatures.

Adventure Canadaoffers two Northwest Passage cruises between mid-August and mid-September. Starting from either Kugluktuk or Greenland, one travels west to east through the maze of Arctic channels and islands, while the other voyages east to west.

Three If By Air

The best way to reach the most remote parts of Arctic Canada is flying in and heading overland on guided hiking, cross-country skiing, snowmobile, snowshoe or dogsled trips with veteran outfitters.

The Arctic Circle crosses through the middle of Auyuittuq National Park on Baffin (world’s fifth largest island). The “land that never melts” offers year-round glaciers and icefields strewn between jagged granite peaks as spectacular as anything on planet Earth.

Cooperatively managed with the island’s Inuit residents, the park offers raw, unfettered nature of the type that’s disappearing elsewhere in the world. The bucket list adventure is trekking or skiing Akshayuk Pass, a U-shaped glacial valley that runs around 60 miles (100 km) through the heart of the park.

Inukpak is one of several outfitters that lead guided trips across the park including one- and two-week hiking treks in the summer and two-week ski camping expeditions in the spring.

For those who want to venture where hardly anyone ever goes, Quttinirpaaq National Park is poised at the northern end of Ellesmere Island beside the permanent Arctic icepack. Less than 500 miles (700 km) from the North Pole, the world’s second most northerly national park welcomes less than 40 visitors each year.

Like its more southerly counterpart, the park is dominated by massive glaciers and the highest mountains in the Canadian Arctic, an alien world of rock and ice where hardly anything grows, even during the short summer season. Despite that, Quttinirpaaq supports an amazing array of wildlife, from grazing muskox and caribou to carnivorous Arctic wolves and migratory birds.

Black Feather Wilderness Adventure Company offers two-week guided camping treks across Quttinirpaaq in the summer that include all meals, all equipment and round-trip flights from Resolute Bay.