11 Most Isolated Towns in the Canadian Shield

Added: 2026-06-02

[00:00:00]There are places in Canada where the road simply ends, where the last cell tower fades 200 km behind you, and the only thing ahead is granite, black water, and forests so dense that planes have vanished into it without leaving a single witness. The Canadian Shield covers nearly half the country. It is older than anything you have ever touched, 2 and 1/2 billion years of bedrock scraped raw by glaciers, hiding lakes that have never been mapped, mining towns that were abandoned in a single afternoon, and communities where the elders still talk about things that walk on the ice at night. Some of these [music] towns can only be reached by a winter road that exists for 8 weeks a year.

[00:00:38]Others sit on the edge of impact craters, ghost rails, and uranium tailings that the government has quietly fenced off.

[00:00:45]A few of them are inhabited. A few of them used to be. These are the 11 most isolated towns in the Canadian Shield, and what's hiding in them. Before we get into it, if stories about forgotten places and the mysteries buried inside them are your thing, hit subscribe.

[00:01:02]>> [music] >> New videos like this drop every week, and you don't want the algorithm burying the next one. Now, let's start the descent. Number 11, Pickle Lake, Ontario. The end of Highway 599. Pickle Lake sits at the literal end of the road. Highway 599 runs north out of Ignace for 530 km, narrowing as it goes, the asphalt crumbling into gravel, >> [music] >> the trees pressing closer to the shoulders, until it just stops.

[00:01:31]There is nothing past Pickle Lake but a winter ice road that opens for a few weeks every February to supply the First Nations communities further north. After that, the only way in or out is by float plane.

[00:01:43]The town has fewer than 400 permanent residents. It started in the 1930s as a gold rush settlement when prospectors pulled the first ore out of the surrounding bush.

[00:01:53]Three mines opened. Three mines closed.

[00:01:56]The remaining buildings sit against the cold. The kind of cold >> [music] >> that hits -50 in February and turns diesel into jelly inside the fuel tanks.

[00:02:05]What unsettles people about Pickle Lake isn't the isolation. It's the silence.

[00:02:11]Hunters and float plane pilots who have flown the bush north of town describe a particular stillness on the lakes up there, especially around the old Central Patricia mine site.

[00:02:20]Compasses act strange.

[00:02:22]>> [music] >> Radios pick up voices that shouldn't be there. Broken Cree, fragments of conversations in languages the pilots don't recognize. In 1968, a Beaver float plane out of Pickle Lake disappeared on a routine 40-minute flight to a fly-in fishing camp. Search parties combed the area for 2 weeks.

[00:02:39]They found nothing. Not the wreckage, not the pilot, not the two passengers.

[00:02:45]The forest just absorbed them. The Anishinaabe communities in the region have a name for what lives in the muskeg north of Pickle Lake.

[00:02:52]They don't say it out loud. The word translates roughly to the one that grows hungry in the cold, and even the most secular bush pilots in town will tell you that you do not, under any circumstances, leave food unattended at an outpost cabin in winter.

[00:03:07]Not because of bears. Bears are predictable.

[00:03:11]This is something else.

[00:03:12]There is a particular cabin on Mojikit Lake, about 90 km northeast of Pickle Lake, that has not been used since 1991.

[00:03:21]The previous owner, a trapper named Roy Henderson, walked out of the bush on snowshoes in March of that year, abandoned his trap line, sold his Beaver float plane at a loss, and moved to British Columbia.

[00:03:33]He gave one interview to the Thunder Bay Chronicle Journal before he left. In that interview, he said only that something had been mimicking his wife's voice outside the cabin window for three nights in a row.

[00:03:44]His wife had died of cancer 4 years earlier in Sudbury.

[00:03:48]The cabin still stands. The roof has caved in. Hunters who pass by it on snowmobile will not stop, even to take photos. The Trapline Registry for that area was officially retired in 1993 after two more trappers refused to renew their licenses, citing only personal reasons on the paperwork.

[00:04:08]The Ministry of Natural Resources has the file. They do not respond to questions about it.

[00:04:14]Number 10, Lynn Lake, Manitoba. The town that was moved. Lynn Lake doesn't just sit on the Canadian Shield. It was built, dismantled, and rebuilt on it. In 1951, the entire town of Sheridan, Manitoba was loaded onto sled trains and dragged 300 km across the frozen muskeg to a new nickel and copper deposit at Lynn Lake.

[00:04:37]250 buildings made the journey.

[00:04:39]>> [music] >> Houses, the school, the church, the hospital, all of it pulled across the ice by caterpillar tractors during the worst Manitoba winters on record.

[00:04:49]Workers froze to death on the road. One sled train broke through the ice and sank with the family inside still asleep in their beds.

[00:04:56]The new town opened, the mine produced for 40 years, and then in 1976, the nickel ran out.

[00:05:03]Sherritt Mines closed, the population collapsed from 3,500 to fewer than 500.

[00:05:11]Today, Lynn Lake sits at the end of Highway 391, an 11-hour drive from Winnipeg if the road isn't washed out, which it often is.

[00:05:20]Cell service exists only in patches. The grocery store closes for parts of the year. There is no hospital anymore.

[00:05:27]>> [music] >> There is one road in and the same road out.

[00:05:30]The strange part is what was left behind. The original mine shafts run deep under the town. They were never properly sealed. In 2004, a teenage boy on a snowmobile vanished on the outskirts of Lynn Lake. His machine was found running, >> [music] >> headlights still on, parked at the edge of an open shaft that locals had assumed was capped. The RCMP brought in mine rescue specialists. They lowered cameras down the shaft for 3 days.

[00:05:57]They never reached the bottom. The boy was never recovered. The shaft was filled with concrete that summer. Locals will tell you, if you press them, that you can sometimes hear something tapping under the streets near the old head frame.

[00:06:10]They will also tell you not to listen for it. The boy's mother still lives in Lynn Lake.

[00:06:15]She has refused to leave in 20 years, despite multiple offers from family in southern Manitoba to come stay with them.

[00:06:23]She keeps a window open in her son's bedroom, even in February.

[00:06:27]She will not say why, but neighbors have heard her talking to someone in that bedroom on winter nights when the temperature is 40 below and the streets are empty and the only sound for kilometers is the wind [music] moving through the abandoned mine works behind the town.

[00:06:42]There is a section of Lynn Lake on the south side of the highway, a row of bungalows built in the original Sheridan migration, where five of the seven houses are now permanently abandoned.

[00:06:53]The owners did not die. They did not move for work. They simply left in three separate incidents over a span of 18 months between 2000 and 12 and 2014.

[00:07:05]None of them have publicly said why.

[00:07:07]One of the houses still has Christmas lights on the porch.

[00:07:10]They were turned on in December of 2013 and have never been turned off.

[00:07:16]Because the family that owned the house left the power on when they walked away and the Manitoba Hydro account is still being paid every month by a numbered company registered in Winnipeg.

[00:07:27]No one in Lynn Lake knows who is paying.

[00:07:29]>> [music] >> No one wants to ask.

[00:07:31]Number nine, Schefferville, Quebec, >> [music] >> the iron city that died. Schefferville is technically still inhabited. There There 200 people there, most of them members of the Innu Nation of Matimekush John and the Naskapi Nation of Kawawachikamach.

[00:07:48]But the town itself, the original iron ore company town built in the 1950s, is functionally a ruin. When the iron ore market collapsed in 1982, the company gave residents 30 days to leave. 30 days. Houses were abandoned with dishes still in the sinks, photo albums on the shelves, half-finished letters on kitchen tables.

[00:08:09]You cannot drive to Schefferville. There is no road. The only way in is the Tshiuetin Rail Transport, a passenger train that runs once or twice a week from Sept-Îles, 600 km south.

[00:08:20]The train ride takes 12 hours. Outside the window for those 12 hours, there is nothing. No towns, no farms, [music] no power lines. Just spruce, granite, and lakes that have no English or French names because no European has ever bothered to name them.

[00:08:37]Schefferville sits at the edge of the Labrador trough, one of the oldest and most magnetically anomalous regions on Earth.

[00:08:44]GPS units glitch here. Compasses spin.

[00:08:48]The aurora borealis is so intense in the winter that the sky turns green at noon.

[00:08:53]And in the abandoned company houses, the ones the Innu and Naskapi residents will not enter even today, hunters have reported finding things.

[00:09:02]Furniture rearranged inside locked rooms.

[00:09:05]Footprints in dust on second floors that have not been opened in 40 years. A particular house at the end of what used to be Avenue Cartier was used by a hunter in 2015 as a temporary shelter during a blizzard.

[00:09:17]He spent one night. He has never spoken publicly about what happened. He has also never returned to Schefferville, and he was born there.

[00:09:25]The iron ore company demolition crews who returned in 1985 to remove fixtures from the abandoned houses worked only in pairs, never alone, and were pulled out 2 weeks ahead of schedule.

[00:09:37]The crew foreman filed a single sentence in his final report. It read, "The houses are not empty."

[00:09:44]That report is on file with the Quebec Ministry of Natural Resources.

[00:09:48]>> [music] >> It has never been declassified, and it has never been formally explained.

[00:09:53]The mine itself is the strangest part.

[00:09:56]The open pit at the old iron ore company site is 2 km across and over 200 m deep.

[00:10:03]It has been filled with ground water for 40 years. The water is the color of dark tea, stained by iron oxide, and it does not freeze in the same patterns as the natural lakes around it.

[00:10:15]In the winter of 2009, a Quebec Ministry of Natural Resources survey crew flew over the pit and reported what they described as movement under the ice.

[00:10:25]Not fish, not currents, something larger moving in a deliberate spiral pattern at a depth their equipment could not measure. The report was filed and quietly archived.

[00:10:37]The Innu, who have always lived here, did not need a survey to tell them. They have known about the pit for a long time. They do not go near it.

[00:10:46]They tell their children not to go near it. They will not say why.

[00:10:50]Number eight, Tadoule Lake, Manitoba.

[00:10:54]The relocation.

[00:10:56]In 1956, the Canadian government forcibly relocated the Sayisi Dene people from their traditional lands at Little Duck Lake to a beach near Churchill, Manitoba.

[00:11:06]The relocation was a disaster. [music] Within a decade, a third of the community was dead from disease, exposure, and despair.

[00:11:16]In 1973, the survivors made the decision to walk back. They settled at Tadoule Lake, >> [music] >> 400 km north of Thompson, a place reachable only by air or by a winter road that [music] exists for 6 weeks of the year.

[00:11:30]There are about 250 people living at Ts'eku Lake now.

[00:11:33]>> [music] >> The community has rebuilt. Children speak Dene again, but the land itself remembers. The Sahtu Dene have stories about a place not far from the current settlement. A low ridge above the lake where you can hear the old village.

[00:11:48]Voices speaking Dene, the sound of a fiddle, children laughing. [music] Elders say it is the memory of the village before the relocation, an echo trapped in the rocks replaying itself in weather conditions no one has been able to predict. A CBC documentary crew visited Ts'eku Lake in 2011.

[00:12:06]They brought professional audio equipment. They left the recorders running on the ridge for 48 hours. The audio they recovered has never been released. The director, in a private interview years later, said only that the recording confirmed the elders' account and that he believed the equipment should be destroyed. The tapes are reportedly still locked in a CBC archive in Toronto.

[00:12:28]Number seven, Wollaston Lake, Saskatchewan.

[00:12:32]The uranium town.

[00:12:33]Wollaston Lake is the largest lake in the world that drains into two oceans.

[00:12:38]The eastern outflow goes to Hudson Bay, the western to the Arctic.

[00:12:43]>> [music] >> The community of Wollaston Lake, also called Hatchet Lake, sits on the northeastern shore.

[00:12:48]Population, about 1,300, almost entirely Dene.

[00:12:53]There is no road. There has never been a road. There is a winter ice crossing of the lake that opens in late January, and there is a barge in summer.

[00:13:03]That's it. The reason this matters >> [music] >> is uranium.

[00:13:06]Wollaston Lake sits in the middle of the richest uranium deposits on Earth.

[00:13:11]>> [music] >> The Rabbit Lake mine operated from 1975 until 2016, less than 50 km from the community.

[00:13:19]Cigar Lake, McArthur River, Key Lake.

[00:13:23]The names mean nothing to most Canadians, but they produced the uranium that powers reactors in 28 countries.

[00:13:30]The community has lived next to this for 50 years.

[00:13:34]What people don't talk about is the fish.

[00:13:37]The trout in certain bays of Wollaston Lake have measurable radioactivity.

[00:13:42]Not enough to ban consumption. Just enough that the Saskatchewan Ministry of Environment quietly recommends limiting intake for pregnant women and children.

[00:13:50]The trout, locals will tell you, sometimes come up wrong. Two heads. No eyes.

[00:13:56]Fins fused into the shape of a small malformed hand.

[00:14:00]They are thrown back. Nothing is documented. Nothing is studied. The mining companies have moved on. The community has not.

[00:14:09]In 2003, three teenagers from Hatchet Lake went out on the ice for an afternoon of fishing. They never came home. The ice was solid. The weather was clear. The snowmobiles were found three days later parked neatly side by side on a small island in the middle of the lake.

[00:14:25]The keys were in the ignition. There were no tracks leading away from the machines in any direction. No bodies were ever recovered. The case is still officially open with the RCMP. It is also officially not being investigated.

[00:14:39]Number six.

[00:14:40]Asbestos Hill, Quebec.

[00:14:43]The town that was bulldozed.

[00:14:45]You will not find Asbestos Hill on a modern map.

[00:14:48]>> [music] >> It was a company town, population around 300, built in 1972 on the Ungava Peninsula, 1,400 km north of Montreal. There was no road. Workers and supplies arrived by air. The town existed for one purpose, to mine the largest deposit of high-grade chrysotile asbestos in the Western Hemisphere.

[00:15:09]The mine closed in 1983.

[00:15:12]The company, on its way out, did something almost unprecedented.

[00:15:16]They demolished the town. Every house, every building, every road.

[00:15:21]They wanted no liability, no future lawsuits from squatters who might develop mesothelioma. They bulldozed it flat, capped the mine, and walked away.

[00:15:31]But you cannot truly demolish a town in the Canadian Shield. The foundations are still there, sunk into the bedrock. The mine pit is still there, slowly filling with water that glows a particular shade of pale green. And the asbestos fibers are still there, in the soil, in the lichen, blowing on the wind across an Arctic landscape where nothing breaks them down.

[00:15:54]Caribou hunters who pass through the asbestos hillside in winter report the same thing. Their dogs refuse to go near the foundations. The animals will lie down on the snow and whine until the hunters move on.

[00:16:07]In 2007, a Quebec government environmental assessment team flew in to take soil samples. Their helicopter pilot reported that as they descended, every instrument in the cockpit dropped to zero simultaneously, and remained at zero for the 11 seconds it took to land.

[00:16:23]He has refused to fly to the site since.

[00:16:26]The site itself is now considered a class one contaminated zone. Access is theoretically restricted. In practice, no one wants to go anyway.

[00:16:35]Number five, Gillam, Manitoba.

[00:16:39]The town the river built. Gillam is a Manitoba Hydro company town. It exists because of the Nelson River and the seven hydroelectric dams that have been built or are being built along its course. The current population is around 1,200, but it fluctuates wildly with construction crews. To drive there from Winnipeg, you take Highway 6 north for 12 hours, then Highway 280 east for another four.

[00:17:04]The pavement gives out. The forest closes in. You arrive at a town surrounded by the largest hydroelectric infrastructure in Canada.

[00:17:13]Gillam became briefly famous in 2019 when two teenage murder suspects from British Columbia, Kam McLeod and Bryer Schmegelsky, drove 4,000 km across the country and disappeared into the bush north of town. Their bodies were eventually found by RCMP after the largest manhunt in Manitoba history.

[00:17:33]What was less reported was the testimony of the searchers. RCMP officers, military trackers, and Manitoba Hydro security personnel who combed the muskeg north of Gillam for 3 weeks reported the same thing in their internal debriefs.

[00:17:48]There is something in the bush up there, not the suspects. Something else.

[00:17:52]Several officers asked to be reassigned.

[00:17:55]Two resigned from the force within a year.

[00:17:57]The Cree communities in the area, Fox Lake and War Lake, have warned for generations about the land between Gillam and Stevens Lake. The flooding from the dams disturbed something. The reservoirs cover what used to be burial grounds, hunting camps, and a particular stretch of river the Cree called by a name that translates to the place where the water is heavy. The water is now 30 m deep in places.

[00:18:21]What was on the river bottom before the flood has not been on dry land for 40 years.

[00:18:26]Locals who fish the reservoir tell stories of nets coming up with things in them. Carved bone, pieces of birch bark canoe.

[00:18:33]Once in 1998, a hand. Not a recent hand.

[00:18:38]A hand that had been preserved by the cold dark water for a very long time.

[00:18:42]The RCMP took possession of it. There has been no public follow-up.

[00:18:47]Number four, Kashechewan, Ontario. The town that floods.

[00:18:52]Kashechewan sits on the north bank of the Albany River, 8 km from where it empties into James Bay.

[00:18:58]Population, about 1,800, almost entirely Cree.

[00:19:02]The community has been declared a state of emergency more than 15 times in the last 20 years. It floods every spring.

[00:19:09]>> [music] >> The drinking water has been under boil water advisories continuously since 2005.

[00:19:15]The houses are visibly rotting. There is one road in, an ice road that opens for 6 weeks a year, and one airstrip. The federal government has promised to relocate Kashechewan four separate times. None of the relocations have happened. The community wants to move to higher ground. The land they want is 40 km inland. The government keeps refusing. The reasons given are always financial.

[00:19:37]>> [music] >> The reasons not given involve what is in the ground at the proposed relocation site. In 1996, geological surveys of the high ground west of Kashechewan revealed what appeared to be an impact structure, a circular formation roughly 4 km across, covered by muskeg, registering anomalous magnetic readings consistent with a meteorite strike sometime in the last 50,000 years.

[00:20:02]The Cree elders, when shown the survey maps, identified the location immediately. They have a name for it.

[00:20:08]The name is not pronounced. The location is considered, in their terms, broken.

[00:20:12][music] Something fell from the sky there. The land around it does not behave correctly. Animals avoid it. The lichen [music] does not grow back. A federal field team in 2001 set up camp near the rim.

[00:20:25]They abandoned the camp on day three.

[00:20:27]The official reason given was equipment failure.

[00:20:30]The unofficial reason, given by one of the geologists in a private email later obtained by a journalist, was that the team began experiencing identical recurring nightmares from the first night, >> [music] >> and that two members became unable to speak.

[00:20:44]They recovered after leaving the site.

[00:20:46]None of them have returned.

[00:20:49]Number three, Black Tickle, Labrador.

[00:20:52]The fishing village at the edge.

[00:20:54]>> [music] >> Black Tickle is technically in Labrador, which technically is [music] on the eastern edge of the Canadian Shield.

[00:21:02]The community sits on a small island off the southern Labrador coast. Population, less than 100.

[00:21:08]There is no road. There is no airport runway long enough for anything bigger than a Twin Otter.

[00:21:14]There is a coastal ferry that runs in summer and a snowmobile route across sea ice in winter when the ice is solid, which is increasingly not.

[00:21:22]Black Tickle has the highest food insecurity rate of any community in Canada.

[00:21:27]In some winters, residents have gone weeks without resupply.

[00:21:31]The cod fishery collapsed in 1992.

[00:21:34]The community has not recovered. What remains is a handful of families, some of whom can trace their ancestry on the island back to the 1860s, living in collaborative houses on a granite outcrop in the North Atlantic.

[00:21:47]What the residents will tell you, if you ask carefully, is about the [music] lights.

[00:21:51]There are lights that come up from under the water around Black Tickle.

[00:21:55]Not the aurora, not phosphorescence, lights that move with apparent intent, that follow the small fishing boats home in the late summer evenings, that hover at the edges of the harbor on calm nights.

[00:22:07]The Inuit and Inuit-descended residents have a name for the phenomenon.

[00:22:10]>> [music] >> The name has been written down exactly once in a Memorial University Folklore Archive in 1978 in a transcribed interview with an elder who has since passed. The transcript is sealed at the request of her family.

[00:22:24]Researchers who have been allowed to see it report that the elder, in describing the lights, said the same sentence three times in three different ways, and that the sentence translates roughly to they are checking on us. She did not specify who they were.

[00:22:39]She did not specify what they were checking for.

[00:22:42]In 2012, a Coast Guard vessel responding to a distress call near Black Tickle, reported being followed for 19 nautical miles by a series of submerged lights that maintained a constant distance of approximately 50 m off the starboard side.

[00:22:58]The lights matched the vessel's speed exactly. When the vessel changed course, the lights changed course. The incident is logged in Coast Guard records as anomalous bioluminescence and was never investigated further. The captain, a 30-year veteran, requested transfer to a Pacific posting and got it.

[00:23:17]There is one more detail from the Memorial University file that has been confirmed by a second independent source.

[00:23:24]A Coast Guard officer stationed at the Cartwright base, about 100 km south of Black Tickle, recorded in his personal logbook in 1994 [music] that during a routine summer patrol, his vessel's depth sounder picked up a solid object [music] roughly 40 m below the surface moving at the same speed and bearing as his ship. The object stayed below them for 46 minutes. It was not a whale. Whales surface. It was not a submarine.

[00:23:50]>> [music] >> The Royal Canadian Navy confirmed there were no submarines in the area. The officer made one more note in his log.

[00:23:57]He wrote that the object eventually broke off and headed directly toward Black Tickle and that he had not slept properly since.

[00:24:05]Number two.

[00:24:06]Pikangikum, Ontario. The community at the edge. Pikangikum is a fly-in Anishinaabe community in Northwestern Ontario, about 300 km north of Kenora.

[00:24:18]There are no roads. The community sits on the western shore of Pikangikum Lake.

[00:24:23]The population is around 3,200, making it one of the largest fly-in First Nations in Canada. It is also, by some measures, the youth suicide capital of the world. The crisis has lasted for decades. Multiple federal investigations have failed to address it.

[00:24:39]What is not in the federal investigations is what the elders of Pikangikum say about the land.

[00:24:45]They say the cluster of suicides is not just trauma, not just addiction, not just the failures of the Canadian state, although all of those things are true.

[00:24:54]They They the land itself has been sick for a very long time. They say something is feeding. In 2006, a small team of academic researchers from Lakehead University began a long-term project on traditional Anishinaabe land relationships in the Pikangikum region.

[00:25:11]The project ran for 4 years. The principal investigator's notes from the final year, which became part of an unpublished doctoral thesis, describe an evening at a fishing camp on a small lake >> [music] >> an hour's flight south of Pikangikum proper. The investigator, two graduate students, and four Anishinaabe elders were present. According to the notes, around 2:00 in the morning, every person at the camp simultaneously woke up. They sat in the cabin in silence for approximately 90 minutes.

[00:25:43]They did not speak. They did not look at each other. The elders, when finally asked the next morning what had happened, said only that something had walked past the cabin in the night, and that it had been polite enough not to come in, and that this politeness should not be mistaken for kindness.

[00:25:59]The investigator left academia within the year. He now works in unrelated industry. His thesis was never completed. Number one, Resolute Bay, Nunavut, the town the government created. Resolute Bay is technically not on the Canadian Shield proper, but it sits at the geological seam where the Shield meets the Arctic.

[00:26:20]We are including it because nothing else captures the meaning of isolation in this country >> [music] >> quite like Resolute.

[00:26:27]The community is on Cornwallis Island, 2,500 km north of any city you have heard of.

[00:26:33]There are about 190 people.

[00:26:36]The sun does not rise for 3 months of the year.

[00:26:39]The sun does not set for 3 months of the year.

[00:26:42]Polar bears walk through town.

[00:26:44]There is one store. There is one school.

[00:26:47]There is one airstrip, and the planes that use it are the only connection to the outside world.

[00:26:53]Resolute Bay was created by the Canadian government in 1953.

[00:26:58]Inuit families from northern Quebec were forcibly relocated to Resolute and Grise Fiord as part of what is now acknowledged as a sovereignty exercise.

[00:27:07]The government wanted Canadians, any Canadians, on the high Arctic islands to bolster Canada's claim against Cold War rivals.

[00:27:14]>> [music] >> The Inuit families were promised game, support, and the option to return home.

[00:27:19]They were given none of those things.

[00:27:21]They were dropped on the gravel beach with summer tents and left to figure out a winter that drops to -52 and lasts until June. People died. Children died.

[00:27:31]The relocation has since been formally apologized for and compensated, but the community remains.

[00:27:38]The descendants of those original families still live there. They have made a life. They have built a culture.

[00:27:44]And they are, by any measurement that exists, more isolated than anyone else in this country.

[00:27:50]What they will tell you, >> [music] >> if you visit Resolute and you sit quietly in someone's kitchen and you listen, is that the land remembers everything.

[00:27:59]The first winter was so brutal that several of the relocated elders died on a particular stretch of beach about a kilometer from the current settlement.

[00:28:07]That stretch of beach is avoided now.

[00:28:09]Not by rule, by instinct. Hunters who pass it report a feeling of being watched even though there is nothing there.

[00:28:16]Tourists who walk it without knowing report that their cameras refuse to take pictures, that the digital frames come out blank, [music] that battery levels drop from full to zero in minutes.

[00:28:27]Inuit hunters in Resolute have a word for what is on that beach.

[00:28:30]>> [music] >> It is an Inuktitut word. The word translates loosely to the ones who waited too long. It refers to the dead from that first winter.

[00:28:40]The elders say they are still there. The elders also say that the land in the high Arctic does not let people go. That it holds on to them in a way that the South does not, and that this is neither good >> [music] >> nor evil.

[00:28:53]It simply is. It is the price you pay for being on the Shield. The Canadian Shield is the oldest piece of exposed Earth on the planet.

[00:29:01]>> [music] >> It has been here longer than oxygen, longer than complex life, longer than oceans as we understand them. It does not care about us. It does not need us.

[00:29:10]The towns we have built on it are temporary by every measurement that matters.

[00:29:15]The granite will outlast our governments, our languages, and our memories. The lakes will be here when there is no one left to name them. The 11 towns in this video are not unusual.

[00:29:26]They are simply the ones where the silence is loudest, where the isolation is most measurable, where the things that walk on the ice at night have been seen often enough that the people who live there have stopped pretending otherwise.

[00:29:39]There are hundreds more like them. Some are smaller. Some have already been forgotten. If you found this video worth your time, consider subscribing. There are more places like these and more stories like these, and the next [music] one is already in production. Until then, stay warm, stay close to the road, and if you ever find yourself driving north and the [music] pavement turns to gravel and the trees start pressing closer to the shoulders of the highway, remember that there is a reason the road ends where it does. The Shield is patient.

[00:30:11]>> [music] >> It has been waiting 2 and 1/2 billion years. It can wait a little longer.

[00:30:16][music]