FIRE & ICE
Wildfires an unexpected sight while trekking along Greenland’s Arctic Circle Trail
Late on my fourth day hiking the 164-kilometre Arctic Circle Trail in western Greenland, I encountered smoke rising from the ground. White tendrils, sometimes columns, rose in all directions from charred soil and wisped out from an 244-metre-tall hummocky, granitic hillside to my left. To my right was the 6.5-km-long, stringbean-shaped Lake Amitsorsuaq, the biggest of the dozens of lakes we had hiked past since starting the trail. The smouldering ground extended to the lake’s shore and made the supersaturated blues of the water pop even more.
While it was plausible that we had wandered into an area dense with steaming thermal features, we hadn’t. My boyfriend Derek, our friend Larry and I had finally reached one of the wildfires that made international news when they started a few weeks before our 2017 trip.
When Larry approached Derek and me about doing the longdistance trek between the small community of Kangerlussuaq and Greenland’s second largest community, Sisimiut — population about 5,500 — we said yes before looking at any maps or photos of what we’d be hiking through. Larry had us at “Greenland,” an island three times the size of Texas, 80 per cent of which is covered by an ice sheet that’s between 400,000 and one million years old and between two and three km thick.
The trail starts near the western edge of the ice cap and continues across one of the island’s largest snow-and-ice-free expanses to Sisimiut and the Davis Strait, which separates the Labrador Sea and Baffin Bay.
I started researching the trail and found images of rolling, domed mountains; open, craggy valleys; and Caribbean-blue lakes ringed with blooms of purplish willow herbs, the national flower of Greenland. It was a mash-up of landscapes from Game of Thrones and Lord of the Rings, only without the anthropomorphic Ents — or any trees, really, since Greenland is so far north.
Because I had never before done such a long backpacking trip — in terms of mileage or nights out — and because I’m a compulsive listmaker, at this time I also started one in my journal: “Things We Might Encounter When Hiking for Nine Days in the Middle of Nowhere in Greenland.” As imaginative as many of the entries on this list were — a rabid musk ox or reindeer, or an August blizzard — wildfires never made the list.
A week before we left for Greenland, with concerned family and friends emailing us links to wildfire articles, Derek called the Sisimiut fire chief and got a more detailed description of the fire while Larry connected with an Arctic Circle Trail group on Facebook. We learned the trail was smack in the middle of the fire zone, but that hikers had been safely walking through it.
It was under clear, blue skies — no smoke or haze in sight or smell — that we set out from Kangerlussuaq, about 65 km from the wildfire and home to about 500 people and Greenland’s biggest airport, to start the trail.
Each of us carried all of the supplies and food we needed for the next nine days.
My research missed the fact that the “trail” from Kangerlussuaq itself is 17 km of gravel road until it reaches the trail proper.
Shortly after we hiked past a 32-metre diameter radar antenna at the Sondrestrom Upper Atmospheric Research Facility, all signs of civilization disappeared. Finally, the Arctic Circle Trail!
Like many long-distance treks, the trail has markers along its entire length. These are often at the top of a pile of rocks, called cairns, formed by hikers to be visible from a distance. The trail’s red half-moon markers are a nod to Greenland’s flag.
It wasn’t far past the first halfmoon that we found ourselves walking along the shore of a lake I thought I recognized from my research. We were too late in the season for the willow herbs along its shores to be in bloom, but I didn’t care because the water was bluer than Paul Newman’s eyes.
My research never revealed a definitive history of the Arctic Circle Trail. I learned that in the early 1990s, Sisimiut resident Johanne Bech — now 65 and still hiking the trail — was one of a small group of people tasked with erecting the first cairns. In 2010, Cicerone published Paddy Dillon’s Trekking in Greenland: The Arctic Circle Trail. At that time, about 300 people hiked the trail every summer. Last summer, when I did it, so did about 1,600 other hikers.
Long before hikers discovered the trail, though, the local Inuit (or Kalaallit in the Greenlandic language) used the route in winter, travelling along it on sledges pulled by dogs or snowmobiles. This past June, more than 3,885 square km of land in this area, including about half of the trail, was designated as a UNESCO World Heritage site for its “rich and wellpreserved material and intangible cultural heritage.” The Aasivissuit Nipisat Inuit Hunting Ground bears evidence of 4,200 years of human history.
The Hundeso Hunting Cabin, the first of the nine huts along the trail, is just south of the new World Heritage site. We spent our first night there. Hundeso is not a hut so much as a collection of campers haphazardly sewn together, onto the side of which a wood deck of indeterminate structural integrity has been built.
Our days developed a rhythm. We tried to sleep as long as possible after sunrise, which happens at about 2:30 a.m. When the sun got too bright and the symphony of birds became too loud to ignore, we emerged from our tent onto the shore of a lake that was every bit as glowy in the morning light as it was at sunset.
There were no other campers in sight. We made breakfast, broke down and packed up the tent, sterilized water to drink and, finally, switched from camp slippers (mine are Crocs) to hiking shoes and shouldered our packs, which weighed about 18 kilograms each. Then we started walking into a landscape that kept us in a constant state of awe with its beauty, scale and emptiness.
We spent an entire day walking along the shore of one lake. On another day, we spent hours climbing to the top of a valley only to reach a saddle that drops down into an improbably longer and broader valley; gaping at this new terrain, there wasn’t a single man-made structure we could see that wasn’t a cairn.
Because there was so much daylight, we were never in a hurry. We took frequent breaks for water and snacks; sometimes, we even took off our shoes and socks, and soaked our feet in a lake or creek. On the Arctic Circle Trail in August, we could set up camp at 9 p.m. and still have plenty of daylight.
Our third morning started by hiking past the second hut, Katiffik. At the eastern end of Lake Amitsorsuaq, the hut was painted red and white on the outside and was bright and clean inside. (A note tacked onto one wall read: “YOUR MOM IS NOT HERE! So pick up your trash and take it with you—alltheway.”)
Katiffik was about 19 km (as the crow flies) of the wildfire we had read all about. Still, as we sat outside, munching on salami and cheese, there was no sign of fire — no acrid smell in the air, no haze on the horizon. It stayed that way all day. Seeing a reindeer nonchalantly munching on berries and grass and a ptarmigan comfortably nestled in a patch of crowberry bushes led me to believe the fire was no longer an issue.
There was still no sign of the fire until we set up the night’s camp and started to fix dinner. Suddenly, the wind picked up. By the time our food was ready, there was so much smoke and haze we could no longer see more than a mile up the lake. We had no fear that the fire would reach us overnight — the Sisimiut fire chief told Derek it was a slowburning peat fire, but we decided to move our camp five km back to get away from the smoke.
At our new camp, rays from the setting sun were the colours of a three-day-old bruise and ominously stretched out like a welcome mat for the horsemen of the Apocalypse, but the air no longer smelled of smoke. We went to bed hoping the wind would die down overnight and, combined with cooler overnight temperatures, would dampen the smouldering and smoke.
That’s exactly what happened. We made it within about a mile of the fire before we saw any evidence — just smoking ground — of it again.
The closer we got to it, the more appropriate I felt my initial description of the trail’s landscape was. Here, it looked like the aftermath of an epic battle between Game of Thrones dragons and Lord of the Rings Orcs. Since the start of our hike, the days had been in the 20s C — the hottest (and driest) summer on record in Greenland. I was ready to tie a wet T-shirt around my face to protect myself from inhaling smoke, but I had been in smokier bars and clubs. Still, the scene was dramatic.
That night, we named our camp “Mediterranean Beach,” because that’s what it looked and felt like — except there were no crowds, and it was on the Arctic Circle.
Like wildfires, lake swimming — and anything related to hot weather — was absent from my list of things we might experience in Greenland. But the way-aboveaverage temperatures, combined with few clouds in the sky and the lack of shade trees, often made me feel like I was being roasted. So most days, I cooled off in a lake.
Two nights later, we found “Reindeer Beach” — a campsite we so named because there are no human footprints but dozens of reindeer tracks on it. Here, Derek and I did a pre-dinner full submersion. The conditions — temperature, latitude — were such that I was able to comfortably sunbathe long enough to accidentally get a mild sunburn.
The next evening was cool enough to finally wear one of the two pairs of pants I’d been carrying since Kangerlussuaq. The morning after that, there was a misty rain. Because this was the weather I’d expected to be hiking in the whole time (and because my single pair of shorts stank and were stiff with salt despite my daily rinsings) I was prepared: I mined some Gore-Tex rain gear from the depths of my pack. I was even better prepared for our last day on the trail. We woke up to the sound of driving rain and unzipped the tent to find we were in a cloud and that there was snow on a hillside above us. It wasn’t rain lashing our tent, but sleet — an August blizzard! — straight from my “Things We Might Encounter When Hiking for Nine Days in the Middle of Nowhere in Greenland” list.
For the final kilometres to Sisimiut, despite the weather, I was completely comfortable: I wore both pairs of my hiking pants, a hat, gloves and my Gore-Tex armour. I had only one problem: My rain jacket chafed my sunburned shoulders.
Four days later, our Air Greenland flight from Sisimiut back to Kangerlussuaq almost exactly tracked the trail. Lake Amitsorsuaq is easy to pick out.
And there was no smoke to be seen.