Reykjavík Grapevine - 04.12.2015, Blaðsíða 29

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29The Reykjavík GrapevineIssue 18 — 2015 TRAVEL
clothing, and look out across the frigid
bay. This is where the road out of Nuuk
ends.
"You have to be strong to live in
Greenland,” says Liini, back at the
cabin. "There are no roads between the
towns—people travel by boat or plane.
Further up north, it’s harder—when the
last boat leaves for the winter, you know
you're gonna be there for a while."
67º north
We take an early morning flight for two
days in Kangerlussuaq, a small settle-
ment 40 minutes from Nuuk, and just
inside the Arctic Circle at 67º north.
The town is built up around a small
international airport that was once a
US Air Force base called Sondrestrom.
The airport workers’ apartments—and
the scant shops and local amenities—
are mostly located in stark, functional
buildings whose clean-cut designs hint
at their military origins.
We’re picked up by Rasmus—a
young Danish tour guide and former
driver for the armoured division of the
Danish army—in an Iceland-modified
Toyota Land Cruiser 4x4. He arrives
straight from the visiting dentist; every-
one in town gets their teeth checked
for free once annually, in the space of a
single fortnight.
"I knew someone who worked here,
and applied for this job like a shot," re-
calls Rasmus, as we chug along under
a heavily laden sky. “I settled in quickly.
There are two bars, but in winter people
mostly stay home and watch movies, or
visit with each other. In the summer, it's
always light, so we barbecue and hunt.”
He pauses thoughtfully, finishing: "You
either love this life or hate it. And you
know pretty quickly which one it is."
The road ahead is the longest in
Greenland, clocking in at 40km from
harbour to ice cap. The landscape along
the way is both beautifully bleak and
surprisingly rich in features. We pass an
improbably located golf course, near-
invisible under deep snow. The road
continues around the edge of a test
track where car companies try out pro-
totypes, and then passes through a re-
stricted area. This swamp was marked
out after a kid on a school trip found
an old unexploded mortar shell from
a failed routine detonation of expired
munitions.
Soon after, we pass large chunks
of debris from a T-Bird training jet,
and some old Saqqaq-era (ca. 2500
BC – 800 BC) burial mounds. “You find
these all over Greenland,” says Rasmus.
“Sometimes, you can see the bones."
Combined with the various radars,
masts and weather stations silhouetted
on nearby mountaintops, the glacier
road is like a particularly eventful epi-
sode of ‘Lost'.
A shivering forest
The road also meanders through the
remains of a 1976 attempt to plant a
Greenlandic forest, with saplings tak-
en from similarly intemperate regions
such as Alaska, Siberia and northern
Scandinavia. Most of the trees died,
but a few lonely pines stand shivering
amongst the willow bushes. It's here
that we first encounter Greenland's
wildlife, when a fat arctic hare bounds
up a nearby ridge, its pure white coat
vivid even against the snow. Soon after,
the 4x4’s roaring engine startles a fam-
ily of grazing reindeer, who run along
the roadside before crossing in front
of us. They're magnificent, strong, ant-
lered animals who bound effortlessly
over the difficult terrain, then stare as
we plough onwards.
It's a short hike from the road to
the Russell Glacier, which was named
by glaciologist William Hobbs after his
professor, during his famous “Hobbs
expeditions” of the 1920s. In summer,
the glacier sits across a river, but as
winter sets in it freezes solid. As we
cross, the dramatic icefall comes into
view. We stop to catch our breath, tak-
ing in the spectacle—a 70m blue ice
cliff, the same height as Hallgrímskirkja.
This spot marks the most accessible
edge of the vast Greenlandic ice cap,
which contains 10% of all the world’s
freshwater reserves. The surface is
riven with seams, like the rings of a
tree, punctuated occasionally by col-
lapsed sections. We look across the
windswept vista in silent awe, listening
to the creaking of the vast ice wall. Ras-
mus lights up a cigarette. “Just another
day at the office,” he smiles. We laugh,
and start back towards the still-running
4x4 for the drive back.
"You have to be strong to live
in Greenland. There are no
roads between the towns—
people travel by boat or plane.
Further up north, it’s harder—
when the last boat leaves for
the winter, you know you're
gonna be there for a while."
-Liini, Inuk Hostel
Distance to Nuuk
1,434 km
Flights provided by AirIceland:
www.airiceland.is
Accommodation provided
by Visit Greenland:
www.greenland.com
Kept warm by 66º North’s
Jökla parka: www.66north.is