Here are some of CBC North's most-read stories of 2024

Every year, CBC North publishes thousands of stories online — breaking news, investigative reporting, political coverage, community features, longform storytelling, and much more.

Some of those stories reach a huge audience, with hundreds of thousands more readers than actually live in the North.

Here are some of CBC North's most-read stories of 2024.

In June, Vanessa Leegstra of Haines Junction, Yukon, had the sort of wildlife encounter that many Yukoners dread, when she was charged and attacked by an aggressive male grizzly bear.

"He grabbed my head and wrapped his paws around me. And I just remember the claws digging into my back... I could feel him biting my arm, my head," she later recounted to CBC News, from the hospital where she was recovering from her injuries.

Leegstra credits a large plastic hair clip she happened to be wearing that day, for saving her life. She said it shattered when the bear bit down on her head, forcing him to let go and allowing Leegstra to scramble away.

Read about Leegstra's terrifying encounter here. 

It was a story that generated a lot anger and anguish, in Nunavut and beyond. 

Karima Manji pleaded guilty early this year, for falsely claiming her twin daughters had Inuit status in order to defraud the Kakivak Association and Qikiqtani Inuit Association of grant and scholarship money that was only available to Inuit beneficiaries. Charges against her two daughters were dropped.

Manji took "full responsibility for the matters at hand," a Toronto courtroom heard, and was sentenced to three years in prison. She was also ordered to repay the $158,000 her daughters received from the Inuit organizations.

Read more about the case here.

A research paper published last spring in the journal Conservation Genetics Resources shed more light on an unusual northern family tree.  

The researchers used a new tool to look at samples from hundreds of grizzly and polar bears across Canada, Alaska and Greenland, collected between 1975 and 2015. They expected to find more polar and grizzly bear hybrids, or grolars, in the data — but only found eight, all of them descended from the same "strange" mother, a polar bear that apparently had a thing for mating with grizzlies.

Read more about this story here.