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Linda On Ice
By Linda Schlencker
Hey look--there's an iceberg over there…and another, and another.... There we were, left alone watching our twin Otter take off from the small, makeshift, tundra airstrip, over the icebergs into the misty clouds and slowly out of sight. So, this is Greenland and the Arctic Circle?From this second onwards, we put our lives into the hands of our Danish guide, Ulrik. Trained by the Danish special forces, Ulrik had spent two years of his life patrolling this region by dog sled, kayak, boat, and foot, so I must admit, we felt pretty safe (Greenland is a dependency of Denmark). Stories of how he had once saved his sled dogs from freezing cold water and given them mouth to snout resuscitation pushed the confidence scale to 11 out of 10. This 32-year-old knows how to handle the Arctic! Fortunately his military career had not eliminated his personality and we were not subject to 20 push-ups for every dumb question we asked. The best description I have ever come across for Greenland is by a Greenlandic poet, "I get dizzy of all this beauty and shiver with happiness". An interesting point to note is that this island was called "Greenland" by Eric the Red, a Norwegian who fled to Iceland after being exiled from Norway, purely to attract Icelandic inhabitants to settle there back in 986. If Eric the Red was alive today, he would be a highly paid marketing executive, as he convinced 25 ships of Icelanders to follow him back to Greenland to settle in a new country. Greenland is the world's largest island (Australia is not actually an island--it's a continent!) and is the most northern country in the world. The locals call it Kalaallit Nunaat--the 'land of the people'. Unless they meant our motley crew, we didn't see any people, so they couldn't be referring to the part of the country we visited! Most of it lies beneath a sheet of ice, called the polar-ice-cap that is up to 3,000 m thick, 2,500 km form north to south and 1,000 km from east to west. In fact, there is so much ice that if it were to melt, it is estimated that the world's sea level would rise six metres putting a lot of coastal cities very close to the water indeed! And hey, if you are into rocks, Greenland has the oldest rock ever discovered. So, as you are beginning to understand, 'Greenland' really is a misnomer! One final piece of information (there will be a quiz later so pay attention) is that the qajaq (kayak) was the invention of the Thule people, an ancient culture in Greenland.There were only eight passengers in our qajaqing group operated by Mountain Travel Sobek, a US-based adventure company that is celebrating its 30th anniversary in the adventure business. Countries represented were Denmark, South Africa, USA and Australia. Our ages and kayaking abilities ranged--this is not a trip for a first time kayaker--you need to be prepared for up to six hours in a kayak (with breaks of course), but this doesn't mean you have to be of Olympian quality. The oldest members of our group were in their late 60s and although they might have been a little slower at the end of a long day kayaking, they coped extremely well! Starring in the kayaks we had:Kayak #1 - The lead boat. Ulrik and Don. Ulrik's credentials have already been outlined above. Don is a Human Resources consultant with his own company. His quirks were smoking his pipe every night, recording his journal and other sounds on his Dictaphone, and snoring like a foghorn. This resulted in the "snore-free zone" being established at every new camp site. Kayak #2 - The Bobbing Bobs. Bob in the bow seat is an archaeologist. He didn't say much, but when he did, he would have us in stitches. His favorite saying during picture taking was "Say Sh*t," obviously the Californian version of "Cheese." Bob, in the stern seat, is a teacher. We called him Oddo, his last name, to reduce confusion of the Bobs paddling together. He spoke of a checkered career that included being a jewel dealer in New York's Diamond district, toting a gun and paying protection money to the local cops; we learned that he was a lover of martial arts. It was difficult to imagine him with his opponent in a Judo chokehold until they turned blue, as he seemed to be a passive, fun-loving kind of guy. Kayak #3 - The lawyer's boat. There was a lot of talk going on in this boat, resonating off the icebergs and into our ears at every stroke of the paddle. Janet was a lawyer from Connecticut who seemed to be the “listener” while Peter (apparently the inventor of voice mail) was definitely the “talker”. This was the kayak containing the most inquisitive pair. Non-stop questions and answers! The joke of the group soon became, "So, Ulrik, how far is the next campsite?" "Just around the point." It is truly amazing how many points Greenland has and how far away they always seem. Kayak #4 - The singing boat - Adrian and me. Adrian claims to be a student of politics at Oxford. However, when pushed he admits that this is just a front to give him time to kayak in marathon races without sounding like a 29-year-old kayak bum. After about Day 3 we began our own Greenland megamix, passing the six-hour paddling days singing as much as we could remember of songs that spanned the gamut from Patsy Cline to Bob Dylan. I think by about Day 10 the group was really sick of the singing, as whenever we approached their paddling cadence increased. Luckily we had the power in our boat to keep up the pace, as well as the singing! The group soon realized that the only way to shut our mouths was to put food in them, so the snack breaks increased in frequency as the trip progressed. If I had to choose just one word to sum up what was a typical day of kayaking in the Arctic Circle is like, it would be--BUSY! Up at 8 a.m. to fetch the water, prepare lunch by boiling the water to put with the delicious Ramen noodles in one thermos and Swiss Miss hot chocolate mix in the other, pack the sleeping bag and clothes, pull down the tent, and then pack the kayak. This took about two hours. Then it was time to get our butts into the kayaks and paddle for four to six hours. We did stop frequently, rafting up in the kayaks to munch on a snack or two, and we always stopped for about 45 minutes for lunch. Then the unpacking starts again, the tent goes up, the dinner is cooked, and finally the relaxing starts, about an hour or two a day before crawling into our tents at 11 p.m. It was 24-hour daylight, which I had thought would make sleeping hard, but within about 20 minutes we were dead to the world. Well, at least Adrian and I were as we set the tent up in the snore-free zone every night. We had a couple of days that were “rest days,” which typically involved no rest and some sort of a day hike to a glacier or beside a huge waterfall. There are many alpine lakes high up in the mountains that are relatively warm at about 10 degrees Celsius. The water in the fjords is about 1 to 2 degrees and will make you unconscious after two minutes of immersion. Yes, some of us did swim (well, we had to, it was summer!). I guess “swim” is the wrong word, thoug--thrash about wildly for 15 seconds, is probably more accurate! The scenery is like a chaotic junkyard of icebergs from ice cube size to 64-million-ton size. We were in Scoresbysund, a 300-mile-long fjord system at 70 degrees latitude. Two thousand metre-high rocky mountains support the enormous glaciers formed from the downward pressure of the 3000-metre-thick polar ice cap. The result of these glaciers is fjord after fjord of iceberg-packed, clear freezing water. The biggest berg we saw was about 800 meters long and 40 meters high--and that was just the one tenth that we could see! This place is absolutely stunning. It is impossible to describe how vast and remote it is. None of my photos or video will do it justice. You just have to see it for yourself. The wildlife was pretty good too--musk oxen (looks like a really woolly yak), seals, birds, foxes, and on the last day we paddled with a pod of narwhal whales. The sounds in this part of remote Greenland are all natural! When there is no wind, the only sounds you hear are birds, waterfalls, lapping water on the base of icebergs, and thunder that is not thunder. It is the sound that cracking ice makes. Paddling past a berg that decides to move a little or shed a little can give you one hell of a fright, as it usually starts with a sound like a gunshot. When part of an iceberg falls off it creates a wave that can reach 20 feet high if the berg is a biggie. Each night we were very careful to pull the kayaks way out of the water and tie them up to a VERY large, stable looking rock. Just in case. With all that ice you might think that we must have been freezing up there? It was about 5 - 18 degrees Celsius. 18 degrees happened maybe twice on the nice sunny days--those were perfect! Most days it was just a little overcast with wispy low-flying clouds. We had one day when it rained all day; we were pretty happy when the sun came out the next morning and our campsite soon looked like a laundry as we tried to dry everything out! All too soon we were back at the pickup point listening for the twin Otter (or seal otter as Oddo mistakenly kept calling it) to return. It arrived with another bunch of kayakers looking bright-eyed and fresh as I was cooking our last pancake. A mad dash to wash up, pack up, and choke down the pancakes - didn't even have time to put the jam on. We quickly loaded up our smelly luggage for the journey home. Ulrik stayed on for the next group and we watched him disappear in the distance--he was probably missing Adrian and my singing already! It was pretty quiet in the twin Otter on the way out. We were all sad to leave, even though the first hot shower and beers in two weeks were sounding really attractive, and everyone was concentrating on imprinting in our memories the last glimpses of the fjord below.
Date Entered: 4/4/2000
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