Snowstorms and navigation challenges in Greenland

A completely different day with snow and poor visibility

That was quite a different day compared to yesterday. We woke up with a thick layer of snow on the tent. And not only that, there was also heavy low cloud cover, as it basically snowed all day. Because of those clouds, you could, well, you could see your hand in front of your face, but you couldn’t see any relief in the snow. And that was very difficult. It was a day with many challenges anyway.

Wet gear and sticky snow

With temperatures around zero, the snow falling on our Arctic Beddings melted. The Arctic Beddings is basically a kind of bag that holds your bed fully inflated. This ensures you don’t have to pack up your bed completely every day. So you don’t have to stuff your sleeping bag into a sack, deflate your mat every day, and blow it up again in the evening. So that’s super efficient and super easy. But a bag like that isn’t really waterproof. So the moment that snow starts melting, your bed gets wet. Additionally, with temperatures around zero, the snow gets very sticky. So you get clumping snow under your shoes. This means you have less grip with your crampons. And also, if you have to push a pulk uphill, for example, you get wet gloves much more easily. And everything that gets wet is cold later on, of course, as soon as it starts freezing again at night.

Difficult terrain and hardly any visibility

The terrain we went through today has much larger features. So where yesterday we could easily navigate around obstacles with a bit of micro-navigation, it was now much harder to even see where we needed to go. But also, when you do encounter an obstacle, you have to detour quite a long way.

Scouting like a blind mouse

To find a good route, we also went scouting often. So one or two people would try to find a good route, either around an obstacle or just walking ahead a bit to see if it was even doable. And to check if we weren’t running into any slopes going up or down. And that scouting was actually a bit like being a blind mouse. With your poles out in front, poking your poles first, slamming them hard into the snow to see if you aren’t accidentally standing on a snow bridge over a crevasse. And only then placing your foot. The moment you got a little sloppy with that because you wanted to pick up the pace, it could just happen that your pole suddenly gave way into thin air. Not necessarily because there was a crevasse, but because there was a slope down, that you were going over an edge you just couldn’t see, even if it was right in front of your boots. So that was super tricky.

Hard work and little progress

We moved forward very slowly there. And we probably took many more slopes than would have been strictly necessary. Especially many more steep slopes, because it was just almost impossible to see another route. So if you found something that was passable, we just went that way. But that often meant we had to go up steeply somewhere. And, especially with the clumping snow in your crampons, it was almost impossible to pull your pulk up yourself. So what we do then is: one person walks up with the pulk, and two or three or even all four push the pulk up. And then we all walk back and grab the next pulk. So we covered quite a few kilometers, but didn’t make that many kilometers of forward progress. But in any case, we are another bit closer to getting out of this crevasse terrain. And every little bit helps.

Clearing up the moment we stop

The funny thing is that we said all day: it would be so nice if we had a bit more visibility, it would be so nice. And at some point I said: let’s just set up camp. Everyone is tired and this doesn’t make much sense anymore. And maybe tomorrow we can do in one hour what took us two or three hours today. We put the first ice screw into the ice to secure the tent, and the sky clears up and the sun starts shining. A wonderful gift, because it allowed us to dry all our wet gear and sleeping bags and mats and down jackets. But it would have been nice if it had happened a little earlier in the day.

A bizarre landscape full of drop-offs

Anyway, we’re not going to complain. We still had a very beautiful view and it’s bizarre terrain where we are. It’s just one big Swiss cheese and valleys and, well, not really crevasses crevasses, but just drop-offs basically that you have to find your way through. And yeah, that takes a while. But hey, it’s only day two, and tomorrow is another day.