All photographs by David Kenny
David Kenny is more digital than you and I, as much as we may think we are (and probably are) too digitally enslaved. He was the CEO of data and TV audience measurement company Nielsen until a couple of years ago (and remains their Chairman of the Board) and before that worked at IBM where he led their AI initiatives. And before that, he was CEO and Chairman of The Weather Company, parent of the ubiquitous (and glorious!) Weather Channel. So, to paraphrase/mangle Mark Twain’s quote that everyone talks about the weather but does nothing about it, David actually did do something about it.
In June of 2022, post-pandemic and when travel returned to as near to normal as was possible then, David decided to take his family on a trip that was, cliche surpassing, life altering. The Kennys went to the Magnetic North Pole.
“My daughter studied earth and ocean studies at Boden, with a focus on glaciers, and this got her interested in glaciers, and Narwhals,” he says.
“There are expeditions to the Arctic, usually through Norway, but you really have to go pretty far north to see Narwhals. So I started investigating. That led me to this company called Arctic Kingdom.”
Arctic Kingdom is a specialist tour operator – duh – who will get you into the Arctic, and make you happy you went. For David they put together an exclusive trip for just the Kennys — David, his wife and their two daughters, and support personnel: guides to show them the splendid lands of the frozen top of the world, and set up their camps, but also to protect them if necessary, and a cook and a helicopter pilot.
“June is the best time to go,” David explains. “That’s when it’s warmest and you go into the Solstice. It’s light 24 hours a day, and you can manage.
“You fly to Iqaluit, capital of Nunavut, a state in Canada. This used to be known as the Northern Territories and then when Canada was coming to grips with its handling of indigenous people there, they gave them back this territory. That’s as far as you can fly on a commercial plane. From there you get on a little plane to go up to the most northern airport, which is Arctic Bay, where there are very few people. Then we got a helicopter to take us up to the camp. It was a helicopter that they use to put out forest fires, but it was the only one they could rent for us to use for a couple of weeks.
“The camp was at Baffin Bay. It’s desolate, there’s nothing there. They’d set up yurts, which were actually quite nice.”
He adds, quite reasonably, “If you’re going to bother getting there, you really should take two weeks.”
What do you do there for two weeks?
You really lose track of time there, because it’s always light. You put a mask on when you’re tired and you go to sleep, and you wake up and it’s a new day, and you get a lot of energy.
You go to a different place and you see different glaciers, and different rock formations. The helicopter was very important, it stayed with us and every day we went on a different adventure, different islands, to see wildlife, because you don’t know where they’re going to be. So you scope out places and touch down, and spend the day.
We went for the Narwhals, and they really are amazing, because they’re unicorns, right?
Were you landing on ice everywhere, or was there clear ground?
Just ice. We had a couple of local people who would get out to make sure the ice was solid, and brought weapons in case polar bears got too close.
Seems from the photographs that you got pretty close.
We saw several of them. We came upon one sleeping, a mother and her two cubs. The guides were quick to have us stop. She certainly sensed the danger, of us, and stood up. But you just have to follow the rules — not get too close, not alarm them in any way, stand still, and let the guides be in front!
What did it feel like to be there?
It was kind of like being in a sensory deprivation tank for a long period of time.
When you get off that helicopter, and you get to your yurt, you just have to let go. There are no cell towers, no Starlink, and there’s no electricity! You put your devices away. You’re in all 24 time zones at once. And there’s no day and night! The sun moves a few inches in the sky, so you’re in permanent noon, daylight. You have no connection with the outside world, no sense of the news, no email, text messages, social media. There’s just you and your guides you have to trust, and you have to reset everything.
You realize you’re letting go of everything, and you’re just in a thrilling mode for the next couple of weeks.
The glaciers are spectacular. They freeze in place so they look like mountains. And when they melt a little, the water you can drink is just spectacular, it’s ice cold and completely clean fresh water. The glaciers are fresh water ice on top of salt water ocean.
Did you see the geographical North Pole, which is not on land but in the Arctic Ocean at exactly 90 degrees north latitude?
To get to the North Pole would have been a couple more days of flying, so it wasn’t really worth it. It’s 600 miles from where we were. But the magnetic North Pole is where all the compasses point to.
We talked about going, but I don’t think you really notice it. It’s just ice.
In reality, there’s nothing to see. There’s no Santa Claus, there’s no flag.
What was the most revelatory moment for you?
There are places where the ice has melted, where you could see the earth. There are very small fossils that are at least 2 million years old and so you get the sense the earth was here a long time before the humans, and it will probably be here a long time after the humans. That the Earth is not here to serve humans.
You get this real respect for the planet when you realize it’s hosted other forms of life for millions of years. Literally dinosaurs would have been there. We were at places that probably no other human being had been. There really are some places in the world that humans haven’t touched.
We had a couple of great days with Narwhals. The advantage of going in June, as you’re moving from spring to summer, is you get ice floes so there’s some cracks in the ice, and this is great for narwhals, because they need to get their horns into the air, and when the crack opens for the first time, they will go down that floe because there’s new food that they haven’t had access to. So it was literally like a Narwhal parade. Hundreds of Narwhals, one after the other. We thought, if we see one or two Narwhals, we’d had a really great trip.
What was really thrilling was there was one Narwhal with two horns, which is really rare. It was really quite something.
What restrictions were there?
Alcohol is forbidden. They’re very worried for the local tribes about alcoholism and substance abuse, so they’re very strict about it. If you have a prescription you can bring it, everything else is against the law.
You’re allowed to catch the Narwhal if you’re going to eat it, but only the locals are allowed to catch one. We had it, prepared like sushi. It wasn’t that tasty. They’re related to whales, so very thick.
It wasn’t just narwhals we saw. Walruses are very interesting. The beluga whales were very interesting,
This is the other thing about time. One day we couldn’t go on our adventure because there was a blizzard, so we walked around the camp, and then it cleared at, like 10 p.m. But at 10 p.m. it’s still perfectly light out.
It was just this beautiful thing, because there were all these Belugas and Narwhals swimming together and singing to each other. It was just a beautiful sound, part of these experiences, and I think the moral of the story, is that sometimes to have a great experience, you have to take things away.
Because you would never have heard this if you’d been in a place with other noises. It was completely silent, there were no other people around.
It was operatic. It sounded like a high pitched, but a good operatic soprano. Hitting different notes. And it moved, as different whales were singing to each other as they moved around, you could get this sense of a conversation almost.
Musk oxs are interesting too. They’re quite rare,and are the remaining descendants of the wooly mammoth. They’re very afraid of people, you have to see them from far away.
How did you eat for two weeks?
We ate very well. They made do with what they could get there. We brought provisions up with us and they would go back to Arctic Bay a couple of times to get more.
Our family really liked getting to know the guides, so we would have breakfast with them. We had a dining tent where we ate dinner, but we chose to have breakfast and lunch with everyone, to learn from them, their history and their ancestors, and their hopes and dreams for their kids. They could speak some English, enough that we could follow them. And Graham Dickson [founder of Arctic Kingdom] and his team could interpret.
It was so interesting to understand their life. Don’t forget they have a whole winter where they have no light. It’s a really tough time. There isn’t much of an economy there [Arctic Bay]. It’s a small town. It isn’t a big tourist place. It’s a lonely life to live there.
We all found the value of just having time that was unscheduled. To just be together, to not have anything to distract us. We read books, we enjoyed the sun, spending time together. We loved seeing things we couldn’t have seen anywhere else.
What was your overriding feeling from the trip?
When you take everything away and you just have the beauty of the earth and these animals and you lose time and connection to the world, then when you re-enter you say, well, what did I give up that I don’t want back? So I would say that the lessons I learned are, number one, don’t spend time with people who sap your energy.
You think you have to do it. But you don’t have to. You can choose… I made some career choices, about what I wanted to do next, how important my family was to me. Life was going to be better to spend moments with people who give me energy. I didn’t meet anyone who sapped energy the whole trip and I came back so energized.
Number two, it’s important to know what’s going on in the world, but you don’t need to read the news every hour, because it can also sap energy.
When you give up things that sap energy, you can get energy from so many beautiful things in the world.