GREENLAND: A TRIP ON THE ISLAND'S LONGEST ROAD AND A STROLL ON THE GREENLAND ICE SHEET

June 17, 2019

It had been a long day, starting with walking to the Ilulissat Icefjord, followed by eating lunch at Restaurant Mamartuk, catching a flight to Kangerlussuaq, and taking a bus to eat at Roklubben Restaurant. 

But Greenland is the land of the midnight sun, at least in June, and that means our day was far from over. We had one more adventure ahead, a trip down Greenland's longest road for an stroll on the Arctic ice sheet. 

We were picked up around 7:30 PM from Roklubben Restaurant by a long-haired, raspy-voiced Dane named Lars. The four-wheel drive vehicle we were expecting was a cargo truck front connected to a gigantic box with windows. The whole thing was perched so high off the ground that we had to use a ladder to get in and out.  It looked like it was part cattle car, part boxcar, and part prison transport vehicle.The only way to communicate between our "compartment" and the cab was with a walkie-talkie, and we learned later on that it was an unreliable form of communication. 

We set out on an 20-mile-long bumpy dirt and gravel road built by Volkswagen in the late 1990s to connect Kangerlussuaq with the inland edge of the Greenland Ice Sheet, which covers 81% of the island. Remember that no two towns or settlements in the country are connected by a road, and there are only about 100 miles of roads in the whole country, most of them unpaved. (A new airport is cheaper to build than a new road between settlements!) Volkswagen wanted a way to test their vehicles in extreme conditions, including driving on the ice sheet itself, so they decided to build their own road, the longest road in Greenland.

The road to the ice sheet was completed in 2001, but the road on the ice sheet was never built, and the whole project was abandoned in 2006. The government maintains the road--somewhat--and it is used for adventurous tourist trips inland, for hunting trips, and as an economical route to the ice sheet for environmental scientists. 

Luckily, I had enough Dramamine for myself and a few others in the vehicle, which looks quite nice inside, but no padding would be adequate for the bouncing and shifting and swaying. It was as good as any Disneyland ride except it didn't do any loop-de-loops. 

For some reason, I kept thinking of the old Disney movie The Gnome Mobile. 

The drive to the ice sheet took about an hour-and-a-half and included a couple of stops along the way. Our first stop was at the site of a US military plane crash that occurred in 1968. Three of eight planes flying in formation crashed after their pilots bailed out--all safely--during severe weather. This is what is left of one of the planes:

Considering the wreckage is over 50 years old and has been subjected to as many Greenland winters, it's astonishing that there is anything here:

The planes were Lockheed T-33s:

We got out one other time just to look around:

In some places the road paralleled a beautiful river, and in the distance we would catch glimpses of white--the massive ice field that feeds the river. It is hard for me to wrap my head around the juxtaposition of the ancient glacier and the transitory green growth of early summer:

I also had to keep reminding myself that it was night, perhaps 8:30 PM at this point. Shooting into the sun gives the illusion of darkness:

. . .  but it was broad daylight.

We finally arrived at The End of the Road. We had been to several other places in Greenland that felt remote enough to be The End of the Road, but this time it was literally true.  We disembarked from our luxury prison car and could see that we would have to cross a half-mile section of dirt and rock to get to the ice field:

I would guess the dirt is covered by snow and ice in the winter, and that possibly the ice sheet once stretched its frigid fingers to cover this section year-round but has receded in recent years just like every other glacier and ice field we visited in Greenland.

It was cold and windy, but we pressed forward, channeling Robert Perry and his guide Matthew Henson:

Who am I kidding? We were ten people in our late 50s and 60s with nice warm coats and good shoes on a sunny summer day. We didn't have much in common with the Arctic explorers of the late 19th and early 20th centuries.

Nevertheless, the journey had its moments:

Don't slip, don't slip, don't slip!

This is the spot where the mud and rock meets the dirt-blackened ice. It's not quite the romantic image of the Arctic that I had conjured up in my mind:

Ahead of us were mountains . . .

. . . and moonscapes:

The landscape is a weird twist on the setting of Frank Herbert's classic sci-fi novel Dune. It looks barren and seems to be covered with sand dunes, but instead of sand, the rolling dunes are made of ice that looks like the dirty snow that piles up next to the side of the road five or six days after a heavy winter storm:

I expected snow, but it is sharp, hard ice, the kind that crunches uncomfortably and unevenly under your shoes when you walk. I guess that's why it is called the Greenland ICE Sheet, right?

I'm telling you, no fancy cruise ship ice sculpture is as intriguing as this:

One benefit of the crystals was that the surface wasn't slippery at all:

Why is the snow so sooty? My first thought was, "Oh how awful. Look how pollution has drifted into the Arctic Circle." Now you probably expect me to say that isn't what causes it, right? Too bad, because that IS what causes it, at least in part.

According to scientists at Columbia University, "[T]he earth has seen year after year of record-breaking warmth, which can cause several seasons' worth of snowfall to melt. Additionally, soot from global wildfires or atmospheric dust that has settled year after year then gets concentrated on the ground as surrounding snow layers disappear. This mixture of melted snow and atmospheric dust causes the black appearance."  

As melting ice collects soot and other impurities, it causes the ice to soak up more heat, causing more melting. It's a vicious cycle.

Of course, some of the dirty ice is caused by the natural movement of the ice sheet and the tearing up of the ground and rocks underneath it. Those particles gradually rise to the surface. Scientists, however, say the ice sheet is getting dirtier, and the rate of change is accelerating.

Just a pause here to point out that it is after 10:00 PM:

It looks more like 10:00 AM:

There were definitely some places that were whiter than others. This looks almost fluffy . . . almost:

However, there were also places that looked like the slag heap next to a steel mill:

Some views had both clean and dirty ice:

When I was a kid, this is what I imagined the surface of Pluto might look like:

There were dozens of blue rivulets criss-crossing the ice field. Lars filled a bottle with the water. He said it is some of the purest water on earth. It was delicious (if water can be delicious) and somehow seemed to be even colder than ice. I definitely wouldn't want to go wading in this stream:

The electric blue color was almost shocking (no pun intended):

Again, such a weird twist on a traditional landscape:

This could almost be the Snake River slithering through Idaho in the winter, right?

There was something eerily lonely about the ice sheet. The eight of us (two had stayed in the vehicle) and our guide were the only living things visible in any direction:

Group photo:

After about an hour, it was time to head back to the gnome mobile luxury four-wheel drive box:

Hey, there's a fancy bus next to our vehicle! We aren't alone in the universe after all!

(Cue Gnome Mobile music):

We had hoped to see some musk oxen and were getting a little desperate, so when someone spotted this reindeer out on the field, we asked Lars to pull over. You can see it, right?

It's in plain sight!

Some of our group members were desperate for an animal photo, but I was happy with my seat in the heated box:

They took so long, however, that I eventually got out and took some pictures of the dainty flowers that seemed more suited to a greenhouse than to the tufted tundra:

A little later we saw the most ginormous rabbit I've ever seen. I think it might have been the White Rabbit from Alice in Wonderland. Bob says it was an Arctic hare, but I'm not convinced. Unfortunately, this was taken through the window at a distance.

Here is a cropped version. He was running as if he was late. Does he have a pocket watch?

We did make one final stop at another eye-poppingly gorgeous spot. If there are gnomes in Greenland, I think they live here at this waterfall:

The water fell into a pool that was edged by what looked like marble but was really a glacier:

Another waterfall cascaded down a rock face in the distance:

Our guide set up a spread of coffee, hot chocolate, and cookies for us, and we drank and chewed and oohed and aahed and soaked up every last bit of Greenland's savage beauty that we could.

The midnight sun (yes, it was just about midnight) played over the glacier, creating a fantastic light show. Greenland gave us quite a send-off, didn't it?

We made it back to our swanky digs at 12:43 AM, crawled into bed in Greenland for the last time, adjusted our eye masks, and fell asleep dreaming of gnomes and white rabbits and Plutonic landscapes--at least that's what I dreamt about!