I'll be traveling for the first time over northern Canada and the Arctic on DL173 JFK-NRT and back on DL172. I'd like to learn as much as I can about the route and anything of interest for this flight and this region of the world with respect to aviation. I'll likely be able to obtain the flight plan beforehand from flightaware.com and could probably get the lat/long of the fixes in US airspace from airnav.com, though I don't know how I'd do so for Russian and Japanese airspace. Then I could input those coordinates into Motion GPS for iPad and I'll have a personal flight map. The outbound flight has personal screens, presumably that means it's the updated B744 with AVOD and a moving map, though the latter flight is showing up as not having been updated yet, so just an overhead screen so no map there.

So, some technical questions here:

How to look up fixes and routes (similar to skyvector.com and airnav.com) in the Arctic, and Canadian, Russian, and Japanese airspace
Wind projections for this region
Anything interesting about Arctic flights and the underwhelming DL B744s I'll be on
Reasons for taking routes that may go north/south/through Alaska (I noticed it can vary greatly every flight)
Any links to a related topic regarding prior trips on the trip report forum