Behold! Pingualuit!
I genuinely wish I had something interesting to add about this that you couldn't just find on Wikipedia. I've only ever had the opportunity to see it from the air, albeit multiple times, since it was a regular fixture on my flight to and from a remote mine I used to work at.
If you didn't realize it right away, it's a crater lake, a million years old, close to the northernmost tip of Quebec. At this point you're beyond the latitudinal treeline. Between the Canadian Shield and a long history of glaciers, the landscape looks nothing so much as the surface of the moon: flat and silent and featureless. But it's beautiful and alien. I've spent most of my life growing up around mountains, and I find most "flat" geography to be excruciating. Not so in the Arctic.
This picture was taken in March, at 6pm, when I somehow lucked into a beautiful golden hour. You can see the snow blanketing everything, including the surface of the lake, perfectly flat.
It looks small from this aerial photograph, but the lake itself is over two miles across.
One day I'll fly up to Kuujjuaq, and take on the hike to see it in person, at eye level. Supposedly it has some of the clearest water in the world. I don't have a lot of bucket list things to do, but Pingualuit is waiting on it.
