Canada
Île d'Anticosti
An island bigger than PEI with 200 white-tailed deer per resident and zero stoplights.
Île d'Anticosti is larger than Prince Edward Island, but it has roughly 200 permanent residents, approximately 160,000 white-tailed deer, and zero traffic lights. The French chocolate magnate Henri Menier bought the entire island in 1895 as his private hunting estate. The deer have been multiplying ever since.
Anticosti sits in the Gulf of St Lawrence, Québec, accessible by air from Sept-Îles or Havre-Saint-Pierre. Vauréal Falls drops 76 metres into a canyon of Ordovician limestone layered with 450-million-year-old marine fossils. The deer-to-human ratio is staggering — roughly 800 deer per resident — a consequence of Menier's introduction of a breeding population over a century ago. No cellphone signal covers most of the island. The disconnection is absolute: no traffic lights, no fast food, no schedule beyond the weather and the deer.
Solo
Anticosti's total disconnection — no signal, no crowds, no schedule — combined with the absurd deer population and the fossil canyons, makes it one of the most unusual solo wilderness experiences in eastern Canada.
Friends
A group trip to Anticosti — hunting, fishing, canyon hiking, and the absurdity of 160,000 deer on one island — is a story-generating adventure that friends retell for decades.
- The island is larger than Prince Edward Island but has only about 200 permanent residents — and roughly 160,000 white-tailed deer.
- Vauréal Falls drops 76 metres into a canyon of Ordovician limestone layered with 450-million-year-old marine fossils.
- Henri Menier, a French chocolate magnate, bought the entire island in 1895 as a private hunting estate.
- No traffic lights, no fast food, no cellphone signal across most of the island — the disconnection is absolute.
Wild venison is the local staple — grilled, stewed, or smoked by the islanders.
Fresh Atlantic salmon from the Jupiter River, one of the continent's finest salmon rivers.
Fossil Rock (Jebel Maleihah)
United Arab Emirates
Marine fossils embedded in a desert plateau — ancient ocean floor lifted into dry air.
Þórsmörk
Iceland
A hidden valley of birch forest and braided rivers walled by three colossal glaciers.
Zagora
Morocco
The sign reads 'Timbuktu: 52 days' — the last outpost before emptiness.
Rum
Scotland
A volcanic island where a millionaire's Edwardian castle still houses a hydraulic orchestrion playing to nobody.
Churchill River
Canada
Cree pictographs and abandoned fur-trade posts along a canoe route through trackless boreal forest.
Clearwater River
Canada
A river so clear the gravel glows twenty feet down through boreal wilderness no road reaches.
Tombstone Territorial Park
Canada
Granite towers named for gravestones pierce a tundra turned crimson in the briefest Arctic autumn.
Kluane National Park
Canada
Canada's highest peak guards the largest non-polar ice field on Earth, and almost no one comes.