trilogy
IC E
Frozen Island
[ by Tim Johnson ]
RISING VERT I CALLY OU T
of the fjord, with big chopper blades thumping hard above me, everything below is indigo and emerald, gray and white. The cold, clear water contrasts with bright, verdant shores and snow-capped peaks. It’s an arctic land in bloom, so rich in color, you’d be tempted to believe that old scoundrel Erik the Red was actually telling the truth. But soon, the pilot swings the big Bell helicopter around a corner and it’s all white and sky blue as far as the eye can see. “Here we go,” he says nonchalantly as we descend into a vast, unimaginable frozen world. In so many ways, Greenland is the ultimate land of ice. The birthplace of the most northern hemisphere icebergs, it’s also home to more glaciers than you can count, not to
50 | RANGE | APRIL 2023
mention the largest polar ice sheet north of the equator, covering a mind-bending 660,000 million square miles. I spent an entire week sailing around southern Greenland last summer. Now more accessible than it’s ever been, this Danish protectorate of 57,000 people is welcoming more expedition ships than ever before, too. And the notably non-icy name? That was essentially a canny marketing ploy. Banished from his Icelandic home in the year 982, the infamous Viking Erik the Red
tried to make this place sound as desirable as possible, in order to attract more recruits to his settlements in this windswept and woebegone place. (It didn’t work.) But even today, very little is green—the ice sheet alone covers 80 percent of the surface of this island, the world’s largest. Glaciers often run right down from the edge, frozen fingers reaching into every corner of this wild place. My ship was outfitted with two choppers, which dropped us onto hilltops for heli-hikes through territory
probably untrodden by any other human. We approached these mighty rivers of ice on an almost daily basis. “Oh, that one?” a guide asks when we inquire about the name of one particularly spectacular glacier, just at our feet. “I don’t think it has a name. Most of them here don’t.” I also cruise long, narrow inlets while sitting on the inflatable pontoon of a Zodiac, the calm waters full of icebergs—big ones, with a hole in the middle, or wrapped around a whole aquamarine lagoon.
PHOTOGRAPHY [GLACIER] ADAM LYBERTH/VISIT GREENLAND, [MATTAK] LOLA A. ÅKERSTRÖM/VISIT GREENLAND, [OTHERS] MADS PIHL/VISIT GREENLAND
More than half a million square miles of ice might not sound welcoming, but Greenland’s landscape, along with the Inuit culture and food, make for an incredible adventure.