Arctic pace. That’s what longtime guide Françoise Gervais calls it. It’s the way time passes on a summer expedition in the far, far, far north — interminable, blurry, manic. You spend days waiting for the weather to clear — ratcheting open your dirt-gritty tent zipper to glimpse the pewter sky, sorting through gold-foil bags of dehydrated Quick Cook Vegetable Rice Pilaf, smothering your face with your sleeping bag — because the weather decides your schedule for you, and the sun goes around in circles without ever setting, and days and nights, up here, are really just endless days. But then the light sweetens and you decide it’s the perfect time to ride the perfect line — the one you found on Google Earth a few years ago, the one you scouted from a droning DHC-6 Twin Otter utility aircraft last year, the one you’ve been searching for all your life. It’s on a remote Canadian Arctic island called Axel Heiberg, less than 700 miles from the North Pole and the size of Switzerland. It’s the one with the black- brown clay that your mountain-bike tires carve like soft butter. Freeriders like you don’t go around with measuring sticks, but damn, the line in question starts at 2,700 feet and doesn’t let up until your rims touch the sea, and it looks like some big routes in Utah — only it’s way bigger. In a word: legendary.