Dropdown navigation for calendar view
I had the same requirement a few time ago.You are right the key is date pager in url to navigate through date/month/year

here is a workaround I did,might be helpfull in your case too.

As in brief I created custom form with field as month and year.Submission of the form navigates passing the selected month and year in url using drupal_goto() and we are calling this form in views header.