Off the Grid in East Greenland

We are out of food. And still, there is no sign of our friend Dines or his boat.

“I kind of like running out of food,” says our friend Craig Augustinski. His eyes are fixated on some distant point across the fjord. Craig’s comment does not surprise us—he’s put in his time on the wild side. Besides, how bad can a steady diet of mussels and dandelions be?

Brennan Severance (aka Rumpel) starts talking about cod again. He’s been catching fjord cod—uugag—all week. But here we are, stranded on a remote north Atlantic island, and Rumpel can’t catch a cod.

And Rumpel’s pretty bent out of shape about it. First, he didn’t get his coffee this morning. Then we started calling him Grumpel. To make matters worse, he burned the last of his calories yesterday skiing the 1,000-meter peak above our seashore camp, while the rest of us took signs from the mountain to relax.

“Where’s The Provider?” Emily asks. “He’d catch us some cod.”

If all had gone according to plan, we would have been toasting with Dines (pronounced Dee-niss) aboard his boat nearly 24 hours ago. But this was East Greenland.

This all starts in the colorful streets of Tasiilaq on a flawless late June day. The Provider (aka John Seibert) is with us as we walk to meet Anders Stenbakken, the director of East Greenland’s tourism office.

The fjord below Tasiilaq shimmers with a broken cover of sea ice. Families haul their weekend catches of seal and fish to shore. And music is in the air—a melody of howling sled dogs combined with persistent rumbles of “northern thunder,” that unmistakable sound of a calving iceberg.

We find Anders at the center of town. He escorts us to his cozy home, where his wife and kids welcome us. Of Danish descent, Anders and his family have spent much of their lives in East Greenland yet, unlike most East Greenlanders, have fair skin and can speak English.

“I’d rather raise my kids here than back in Denmark,” says Anders. “We are very much immersed in nature here.”

Incredibly, East Greenland is home to just 3,000 inhabitants—most of whom live in Tasiilaq and its surrounding settlements. East Greenlanders are their own special breed, having descended from the same Arctic indigenous peoples who migrated from Siberia to northern Canada. They are unique in that they have remained isolated—thanks to the region’s exceptionally stubborn sea ice—in comparison to many other indigenous strongholds in the Arctic, including their fellow Greenlanders across the ice cap to the west.

As a result, many traditions, like summer hunting and fishing camps, remain intact. And although the power boat is replacing most traditional uses of the kayak and umiaq—“the woman’s boat”—the dogsled continues to rule out almost any use of the snowmobile for winter travel.

“The snowmobile simply cannot go where the dogsled goes,” says Anders.

Rumpel passes the hot drinks. We huddle around the map. The town of Tasiilaq, and the larger Ammassalik Island on which it lies, are less than 100 miles south of the Arctic Circle. We are at the edge of the great Greenlandic ice cap, in a region defined by great fjords, glaciers, towering peaks of solid granite, green valleys and sea ice. It is where Greenland’s highest mountains—the Schweizerland Alps—leap from the sea and extend northward for hundreds of miles. And it is where we have come in search of fresh fish and unexplored ski descents.

Anders confirms that the sea-ice conditions will likely allow us to access the first of our two skiing base camps by boat. We hammer out a few lingering details.

“How’s the fishing up there?” Craig asks, pointing to the upper reaches of the mighty Sermilik Fjord on the map.

“I’ve never been that far up the fjord,” says Anders, “but this is the time of year when the char are heading for the river mouths.”

Rumpel smiles at each of us, and sips his coffee...