The Icy Final Frontier.

In 35 years of skiing, Halsted Morris had never seen anything like the slopes of Baffin Island. Located in the Arctic Ocean, off the coast of Nunavut in northern Canada, the island is made up of ice-cream-cone- shaped summits, 100-foot glaciers and walls of sheer rock. "Here you are, out in the wilderness, hundreds of miles from anyone else," he says. "You're putting your signature down on the snow. You're signing a painting with your tracks."

Morris might have journeyed to Baffin Island with explorers on dog sleds, the way he goes on about the place. Truth is, he flew there on a DeHavilland Twin Otter airplane as part of Arctic Odysseys' six-day Baffin Ski Odyssey package (arcticodysseys.com; $6,595). The pilot picks up passengers in Pangnirtung, a village on the Cumberland Peninsula of the island, and takes them to pristine peaks just south of the Arctic Circle. Morris stayed in a dormitory-style lodge with a restaurant that served marinated caribou.

For those who have already sampled most of the globe's exotic destinations, icy wildernesses in Greenland, the North Pole, Baffin Island and Antarctica may be the planet's final frontiers. A spate of travel documentaries and films about explorer Ernest Shackleton have fueled interest in these locations, say travel agents, and tourists rank the polar regions very low on the risk scale for terrorism.

Although both poles have become more accessible to travelers in recent years, Antarctica is the most rapidly growing attraction. Only 6,700 tourists visited in the 1993 season, but by 2001 that number had nearly doubled. Because more outdoor activities are offered, more and more young people worldwide are ...