Mireille Samson stashes a rifle under her helicopter seat before sliding behind the controls and lifting off from the Canadian Coast Guard icebreaker Des Groseilliers.

“In case we encounter polar bears,” she explains over the headset. Samson is searching for a pair of Inuit fishermen, trapped in their boats amid that shifting seascape, who were reported missing the previous day by Royal Canadian Mounted Police from Resolute Bay. Flying low, we scan a jigsaw of broken ice sheets, dotted with robin’s-egg-blue ponds, stretching to the horizon.

Before long, the radio crackles to inform us the fishermen have been found safe ashore by Inuit searchers. Samson turns the helicopter back, then points out five walruses sunning themselves on a small iceberg.

“Flying in this part of the world does not feel like a job to me,” claims the Quebec native. “It’s a privilege.”

I couldn’t agree more. That’s why I leapt at the opportunity to spend two weeks on an icebreaker in the High Arctic, flying from Montreal in sweltering mid-August to join the 98m Des Groseilliers in chilly Resolute Bay. It is my 14th trip in as many years to Canada’s north.

My passion for the Far North goes back to my first trip here, on assignment for Reader’s Digest in 1992. Flying in to Iqaluit, I was stunned by the beauty of the frozen turquoise ponds below. When I joined a walrus hunt, the floe our dogsled was travelling on began to break up so rapidly, we had to outrun the gigantic blue slabs as they rode up on one another. The power of that ice was frightening but awe-inspiring, and it made me want to experience more of this alien landscape. Now I was eager to taste life aboard an icebreaker.

The search flight has been a detour from our mission to pick up fuel, food, building materials and a new ute at Nanisivik, on Baffin Island’s northern tip, and deliver these to Environment Canada’s Eureka weather station on Ellesmere Island, 1100km north.

Then we will continue up the globe to Tanquary Fjord and the southern entrance to Quttinirpaaq National Park, just over 1000km from the North Pole.

I quickly learn this top-of-the-world voyage is as much a thrill for the crew as it is for me, because it comes only once every four years. The Des Groseilliers cuts shipping lanes through frozen sections of the St Lawrence and Saguenay rivers, the Gulf of St Lawrence and the Atlantic Ocean from the beginning of January to the end of March.