Day 8

After a really good sleep I woke as usual at 5am and snoozed for a 7am breakfast.  We then took our time getting ready for a 10am departure and a long day of touring.  Today’s itinerary started with an easy ascent to a col between Big Man and Fanibawz, a long but bumpy decent to sea level, with good snow in a protected wave feature. 

The start of the descent down to sea level.

I poke around the cracks in the ice at the water's edge as the other take a close up look at this small iceberg.  We found what we guessed to be Arctic Fox prints in the snow.

We then continued the circuit traversing the far edge of the island (a long haul), had lunch, climbed 400m to a wide col then descending via the long gentle route that we took on day 5.  This low-angle but extremely long glacier line was just as much fun second time around, but as usual left us an hour's hiking back to base camp.  On our way we were able to assess the hazard on a steep line from probably the best summit in the area.  It looked good, in terms of reward, but didn’t leave a whole lot of room for error and was very likely to offer challenging snow conditions.

The glacier in the background runs for miles to sea level (photo taken on day 5)

Myself on the glacier.  The snow was relatively smooth, fast and grippy.  But totally lacking in terrain features.

Apparently we covered about 17km that day and I had reasonably sore feet in my new boots that were not designed for footslogging nor had they been broken in.  The day had been blue and clear and about –15C in the shade.  It was great to see the far side of our island with a long traverse tour, but I’d liked to have taken on another summit in the process.

The evening was spent playing cards by most.  I read my book and fell asleep quite early.  By this stage I was missing Mio and her endless enthusiasm, joy for every event in the day no matter how small, and her sense of humour.

Day 9

During the night my aching shoulder caused me more unrest.  I was awake by 5am and the day was glum with thick high clouds and poor light.  The chances for another summit were looking slim as the weather was turning as predicted.  This was our last full day at base camp, yet there was still so much to do.  I was just settling into a comfortable rhythm and familiarity and didn’t want to leave.

We toured a moderate open face aspect of Wee Man (the peak climbed on climbed on day 5).  The pitch was long and good, with a steep entrance and great fall line.  But the sastrugi was huge and the upper section was icy or hardpack.  On top of this, visual contrast and depth perception had dropped to near zero as the clouds above us thickened.  It was difficult riding on average snow.  A pity, as the terrain was good.  This nice glaciated aspect allowed us to quickly traverse across to the top of the same long rewarding glacier run that we skied the previous day.  Our third hit on this amazingly long run, and the last of the trip.

By the time we returned to basecamp it was clear that the weather would continue to deteriorate and another summit hope was dashed.  I spent the remainder of the day reading in my sleeping bag as the wind picked up.  The dog sleds were scheduled to arrive at midday the next day.  I went to bed at 7.30pm relaxed and with a quiet mind. 

Day 10

During the night a storm hit which eventually broke our tent pole due to snowdrift load.  I woke at midnight and alighted the tent to check on our gear:  it was all secured well enough to endure the storm.  Sleep was broken thereafter by the intensity of the storm and my anxiety at possibly not being collected the next day and so missing our flight back to Iceland and my flight back to Japan. 

The three of us woke at about 2am and deliberated over what action to take as the tent began to get crushed on the side by wind and snowdrift.  My concern after discovering a snapped aluminium pole was that the sharp end would easily tear the agitated windblown tent.  The whole structure was really shuddering and shaking.  We got up and prepared for a blasting outside with gloves and goggles and lots of warm clothes.  The blasting was quite intense and we worked on removing the snowdrift for almost 2 hours.  I shored up the side of the tent with the rope from our drag pulk, wedging the pulk on the windward side of our large snow wall (which was being quickly eroded by the scouring wind).  This reduced the risk of the snapped pole cutting the fabric and indeed held the tent up very well.  By now it was getting light, perhaps 4am.  We returned to our tent a little frozen around the face, only to get out again another time to check if everything was alright.  Getting in and out meant I brought snow back to my sleeping bag, which melted and made me a little wet, but I still slept ok until 7.30am.

On a good day: our tent within its defensive wall.

Ben in Green and myself dig out our tent on the last morning after we collapsed it in preparation for departure.  One side was entirely buried unto the remains of the snowdrift.  You can see the moulded shape of the tent and pole.  It took a long time to dig the edge of the tent and the ‘pegs’ out of the buried ‘ground’ (for pegs we used bags filled with snow and buried in holes.)

The day was clear and windy.  We dug out the tents and collapsed camp in anticipation of the dog sleds' arrival. Everything was packed except the large mess tent, which was empty but remained standing for shelter as we waited.  The dogs came as planned and we packed the sleds in the wind and went towards Kulusuk across the frozen fjord.  I had a sled to myself on the way back with some soft comfortable bags to sit on.  There was no wind on the sea-level ice and the day was clear and blue so I really enjoyed the ride and chatted to the dog driver, who was also the chief of the town.   Here he is laying down the law when two dog teams got in a fight. The dogs were scared of him.

After we returned to the hotel we had a night before or flight back to Greenland.  I felt like drinking but it didn’t appear to be on the cards, although we did play some more of them.  By this stage I was craving fresh food more than beer anyway. 

And so our mini Greenland expedition ended.  It was early April and thankfully I still had two good months of warm spring touring ahead of me on my return to Japan, yet I was sad to see this trip end after so much effort and commitment to get there.

Iceland

Back in Iceland it was confirmed that BA had been unable to locate my bag.  Iceland appears to be an incredibly interesting place that would offer a quality of life I’d gladly enjoy.  We didn’t see much, but I’m glad to have seen what I did in our lay-over day.  If you ever visit, try the unexpectedly good (despite the tourist aspect) Blue Lagoon outdoor volcanic hotsprings.  It is a very modern and design orientated venue that has almost no patrons first thing in the morning.  The water and pure white silica mud is quite incredible and so is the overall facility, leaving anything I have seen in hotspring-mad Japan for dead.  Despite all the whale killing, Iceland also seems quite progressive in terms of energy where they generate electricity using gas from subterranean volcanically heated water.  They use the same water to heat their homes and if you take a shower there, you will notice that they use sulphur-stinky but naturally very hot water in their plumbing.  It is totally off topic, but Japan could do all of these things yet chooses to do none of them, except kill whales.  Iceland is ridiculously expensive but worth seeing especially if you like summer hiking and salmon fishing amongst the pure wilderness.

Snow quality and stability

The following is only for people who really get into this stuff, which is why I left it to the end.  If you read all of this Trip Report you will get a good impression of snow quality during late winter in Arctic Greenland:  wind packed, incredibly dense, hard, often very bumpy and the summits have wind scoured smooth ice (snow ice, not exposed water or glacial ice).  Doesn’t sound very nice and indeed we were there before the start of the touring season, which suited me just fine, despite the fact that Greenland must have an incredibly good spring corn season.

We enjoyed very sound glacial conditions, allowing us to easily move with freedom pretty much as we please.

Avalanche conditions were, to say the least, different than my hometown of Hakuba in Japan. Before arriving in Greenland I recorded about 80 snowpack observations in the field this season.  During the ten days of touring in Greenland I didn’t feel compelled to dig one pit.  It would have been pointless.  No one wanted to preempt fate, but the snow was bombproof.  We saw almost no evidence of past natural activity and in our travels only found a few instances where there were some indicators of risk.  Certainly we rode plenty of prime avalanche terrain and on the right day could probably have triggered something, most likely wind slab on smooth scoured ice.  One particular day early in the trip it was blowing hard over a convex roll that would have been accumulating some load, so we took a different route home.

Despite the high volumes of snow on the ground, it never really seemed to snow there during the storms.  Ice crystals were either added to the pack or stripped from it, all the time maintaining the same incredibly dense top few feet of snow. 

I was thinking about why everything was apparently so stable as we toured each day.  Some of my observations

• The upper snowpack was extremely hard.  In technical terms it was ‘Knife’ to Knife Plus’ hardness.  That kind of slab would be strong enough to bridge a good deal of weight.  Certainly strong enough most of the time to resist any natural triggers (wind, rapid additional snowloading)

• Other natural triggers in very cold places include serac fall and loading on very steep faces.  We had no hanging glaciers or seracs and the steeper peaks never seems to load up that much, although if it can happen at Denali or in the Himalayas, then it can happen in Greenland, and in the right places I’m sure it does.

• The weather is reliably cold so as to remove sudden temperature triggers.  A rapid warming after a storm may well bring down a slide naturally, but there was only limited evidence of that, and they were old single points, not slabs.  I didn’t see one proper crown wall on the whole trip.  Cold thin snowpack are persistently unstable.  Greenland is cold, but there is a limit to this theory and Greenland was beyond cold enough, and windy enough, that the deeper maritime snowpack was quite stable.

• Greenland gets no ski traffic, so there were no human triggers besides us all winter.  Most of the very hard slab would require more than the additional load of one skier to trigger an avalanche anyway.  There was almost zero boot penetration, which means almost zero snow for transportation by wind and therefore very slow windslab formation.  Most transported snow was removed from exposed steep slopes or scoured from the sastrugi ridden flat areas.  Besides around our tents, I have no idea where this was drifted and loaded as slab.

• There was very little variation in crystal form.  Typically we had either crusts on the surface or rounded and bonded grains through the action of wind and intense cold.  Minimal grain size and layer hardness variation means less differentiation between each layer which generally means more stable snow.  On most peaks I very predictably found large depth hoar (goblet) crystals around the rocks in shallow snow.  This stuff could be nasty if it were to get loaded by a deep windless storm, with the thinner rocky patches on some faces providing trigger points weak enough for one skier to start something.  We didn’t get those conditions and nor did we ski any thin snowpacks over rock on wide open faces, but such slopes were in the area and on the right day a group of skiers could probably get something to go.

• Finally, the temperature gradient would have been almost flat (except in the thin snowpack areas around rock as mentioned).  Because British Airways lost my snow thermometers I was unable to measure the gradient or snow temperature at all, but for the first few feet of snow I’d estimate it to be at least –30C most nights and no warmer than –20C during the day, except on sunny days where the top few cm would warm up as expected.  A very cold and flat temperature gradient with variation from night to day from like this would produce an increasingly stable pack, not weaken it with facet formation.

Thanks for reading.