Exploring Greenland’s Artic trails

Two Boulderites experience one of the world’s most remote treks

With just three days of food, we set off to test out the eastern tip of the Arctic Circle Trail, heading west in bright sunshine along a dirt road that parallels the Kangerlussuaq runway. We then turned north — magnetic north, which at this latitude is more than thirty degrees west of true north — to pass through the bustling metropolis of Kellyville. Kellyville has a stated population of seven, and while we were there (we stopped for a picnic lunch on a plank of wood that served as the town bench), the seven residents must have been out of town. Kellyville is a scientific community set up in 1983 to study the ionosphere and upper atmosphere using incoherent scatter radar. Before leaving home, we had checked out the community’s website, skipped over the incoherence of its incoherent scatter radar explanation, and zeroed in on its warning to visitors that “the weather here can change drastically and rapidly; take proper arctic precautions” — a warning that, even in August, we were beginning to think we should have taken more seriously.

A mile further on, we left the dirt road and trudged off across the open tundra, past a large boulder decorated with a red half-circle — the insignia (derived from Greenland’s national flag) that’s sporadically used to mark the Arctic Circle Trail. The hills around us rolled gently to the horizon, covered with dwarf birch, willow and crowberry — low-growing ground cover that was still a soft summer green in places, but a fiery autumnal red elsewhere. Communities of cotton grasses, with their white pom pom heads nodding in the breeze, warned us off especially boggy areas. But for the most part, the trail was dry and springy enough to give our steps an added bounce, as if we were striding across a trampoline.

Our plan was to spend the first night of our hike in a hut on the shores of Lake Hundeso, but when we arrived we found it fully occupied by four Inuit — a man, a woman and two teenage girls. Huts like this one were not set up for the convenience of hikers like us, but were established as fishermen’s and hunters’ shelters, built by and for the locals. This one was an abandoned trailer that must have been hauled in by sled during the winter. It was dilapidated, weathered and streaked with rust, and the four Inuit inside all smoked heavily so we would not have survived a night in their company, even if there had been room to join them. Fortunately, someone had constructed a small tool shed next to the hut, which incorporated a couple of narrow bunks, so we stepped over the stripped bones of a slaughtered reindeer and squeezed in there.

The Inuit man in the trailer was formal but friendly when we later met, shaking hands and introducing himself as Jorn. He was a stocky 30-something, dressed in a baggy shirt over camouflage pants with a couple of rips in them and had been on or around the Trail for a little over a week. He had little in the way of supplies and no food other than a few slices of bread. But he did have a knife, as well as a rifle slung over one shoulder.

As we boiled up a camper’s standby of tasteless noodles, Jorn squinted through his telescopic sight at the hillside opposite until he spotted something moving. He and the woman set off in pursuit, briefly outlined on the horizon before dropping out of sight. The two Inuit girls — both with punk hairstyles and piercings — emerged from the trailer to take a few selfies with their smart phones, then retreated into their smog.

Half an hour later, Jorn and the woman were back with an arctic hare that Jorn thumped onto a make-shift chopping block outside our shed. He lopped off its head with one slice of his knife and tossed it onto the ground near our stove where it sat, upright, on its non-existent neck, with its eyes wide open. Then he chopped off the legs. One of the Inuit girls was handed a paw, perhaps as a souvenir, or maybe a charm. She stood beside us petting the fur while blood from the severed end dripped onto her shoes. Jorn skinned the carcass, ripping it from the flesh, then pulled out the liver, kidneys, heart and lungs with his hands.

He’d once been a professional photographer, he told us, but now he worked as a guide and hunter, mainly employed by foreigners who would fly into Kangerlussuaq to hunt muskox. After preparing the hare for the pot, he unfurled a map in the newly spilled blood that was now congealing and also beginning to freeze, to show us where the muskox were most commonly found. Muskox, he said, are typically found north of the Kangerlussuaq fjord, while reindeer are seen on the tundra to the south. The musk-ox are big lumbering animals, like bison or yaks, and are usually harmless unless you get too close.

“There are a lot of rich people around who want a trophy head to hang on their wall,” Jorn said, “or at least enough of them to give me a living.”

It drummed with rain during the night, but the morning dawned bright and cold. A strong wind blew from the northwest. Around 8 a.m., a Canadian woman — hiking solo — came through from the other end of the trail, starting at Sisimiut. There was snow on the higher ground, she said, and all the huts she’d passed were full. We spread our sleeping bags over our bunks to reserve our tool shed for a second night, then set off along the trail, stopping only to drink some water out of the lake. The lakes in Greenland — like the streams — are as pure and clear as the air. There are no pollutants, no oil, no soap and no giardia, so you can drink the water just as it is, without needing to filter or treat it.

We made good progress, bouncing along on the springy turf, surrounded by a rich palette of reds and greens. The sky was cobalt, with not a single cloud in sight. Lakes were nestled everywhere in folds among the hills and the trail snaked among them. There was no one around — just a vast wild emptiness unlike any we’d experienced on previous hikes. We walked quickly, trying to stay warm. At noon, with the sun at its highest, we were still chilled. Each of us wore a full set of thermal underwear, a fleece pullover, a thicker fleece jacket and a Gortex outer shell. On our bottom halves, we wore fleece pants, hiking trousers and an outer layer of Gortex pants. We also wore woolen hats (under our hoods), two (sometimes three) pairs of gloves, as well an inner and outer pair of socks inside waterproof boots.

The sun continued to shine for a while, before the weather took a sudden turn. The temperature fell and a short squall brought hail and sleet as well as rain. More clouds rolled in from the west, and the afternoon weather settled into an English-style drizzle. With visibility dropping close to zero, we retraced our steps and spent a second chilly night slotted into our bunks in the tool shed.

To reach Sisimiut, at the other (western) end of the Arctic Circle Trail, we hopped a short flight, because Greenland doesn’t have roads outside its towns. Sisimiut is Greenland’s second largest city, with a population of 5,600. In many ways, it is a smaller version of Nuuk, the capital, but it’s a lot more attractive — less urban, more rugged and dramatically set at the end of a long peninsula beneath two striking mountains (Palasip Qaqqaa and Nasaasaaq). It also has a relatively large and well-preserved colonial sector (down near the harbor), as well as a reasonable commercial area (up a long steep hill) and a burgeoning “new town” (out near the airport).

As in Nuuk, the houses were mostly built on outcrops of rock, and not on the permafrost, so they faced every direction and were linked by long flights of wooden steps instead of streets. The houses in the colonial area were brightly painted and well-preserved, matching the idealized image of a Greenlandic town we had in our minds. They were, however, surrounded by grim 1960s-style apartment blocks that blight the outskirts of nearly all the larger Greenlandic towns.

We spent a week in Sisimiut — a long spell by many people’s standards — but were never bored. We used the time to explore the surrounding area in a series of long hikes. It took only a few minutes to reach the the western end of the Arctic Circle Trail on the edge of town where the road ended and the tundra began. We were again alone on the trail, experiencing isolation and true solitude that’s hard to find in the wilderness areas of North America. The scoopedout valley we hiked along was shadowed to the south by a ridge of snow-tipped peaks that became threatening later in the day as the blue of the sky faded to grey and rain started to spatter down on us. The path we followed was indistinct, but route finding was seldom a problem as we walked almost anywhere we liked across a peaty carpet of autumnal tundra.

We boulder-hopped across icy rivers that flowed down from the mountains, before scrambling up to a flat open area marked on our map as Qerrortusup Majoriaa. From there, the route zigzagged over rocks patterned with lichen and moss, then skirted a necklace of shallow lakes, until it finally brought us to an overlook with expansive views of the Kangerluarsuk Tulleq fjord. The peaks of Ungalliup Qaqqai, on the horizon, were topped by virgin snow that clearly said winter was coming, even though it had just departed. This was altogether harsher and more demanding terrain than the rolling hills we had hiked across at the eastern end of the trail.

We completed three more hikes from our base in Sisimiut. One took us to the summit of Palasip Qaqqaa, allowing us to see the ice-cap while simultaneously watching an Air Greenland plane take off nearly 2,000 feet below us from the town’s tiny airport. The second hike — on a wet and misty day — was over cliffs and along the coast towards Assaqutaq, a small village abandoned some 50 years ago when the fish had all disappearedthere. Lastly, the third hike was through an unnamed valley that took us alongside a river to a towering unnamed waterfall.

It was on this final walk that we heard the unmistakable sound of gunfire echoing from the surrounding hills. Guns and hunting are an integral part of Greenlandic tradition and culture, but gun ownership is tightly controlled. Would-be owners must undergo a background check and acquire a valid license (only available to people who’ve lived in the country for at least two years, tourists excepted); and all hunters must state the number of animals they plan to shoot, as well as provide a post-hunt report of their kill.

Back in Sisimiut, we watched four hunters unload their kill (or “harvest’” as they preferred to call it) from a boat in the harbor, carrying skinned portions of reindeer — haunches, ribs, shanks — up from the dock to their respective cars. The men wore every day jeans and jackets that were soon stained a dull red. But they didn’t seem to mind. To them the hunt was just another day at the office.

Read more about Richard and Miriam’s adventures in Greenland for $1.99, a short illustrated e-book, available in a Kindle edition from amazon.com. To learn more about the authors visit www.starksmurcutt.com