Navigating in Greenland: tips for keeping a straight course

Early wake-up and departure

We got up quite early this morning after a fairly short night because we kept going for so long yesterday. We got up at five-thirty and for the first time we were ready to hit the trail within two hours, including the check-in. Great job. During the check-in, the Icetrack cavalry passed by. That’s the group of ten people and two guides, so twelve in total. Even though we set off with our own plan today, we hiked reasonably close to each other. If you looked to the left—we were on a slightly more northerly course—you could see them walking. That was pretty funny.

Navigating your own course

Following our own plan basically meant that we walked our own course. As it turns out, when you start walking on a heading and you have absolutely no reference points, it’s actually incredibly difficult to walk in a straight line. Of course, we have a few tricks for that. Because the weather today was much nicer than predicted, we took the time to dive a bit deeper into that and explain the navigation properly. That starts with holding your compass correctly: how do you do it, how do you place it on your hand, what should you look out for, and especially where should you not hold it? Once you’ve determined the course you want to take, you have to position your skis just right so they align exactly with the line on your compass showing where you want to go.

Tricks to stay walking straight

You basically only see a white horizon in front of you, so how do you ensure you’re walking in a straight line? There are a few tricks for that. Since you have no visual points, you can look at the sun: where is it on my glasses? What angle does my shadow make with myself? How is the wind blowing and on which side of my face do I feel it? You also have wind vanes on your poles, so you can see what angle those vanes make with your pole. Once you’ve found some solid ground like that, set your ski poles in the right direction, and determined which angles you can use, it’s basically just a matter of switching off your brain and going for it.

Working in shifts and checking progress

Today we did shifts of 12 minutes each again. Everyone leads for 12 minutes, then steps out of the path and number 2 passes by. Then we give a high five and the person who just finished their shift joins the back of the line. This way we can do five 12-minute stints and then it’s time to stop and look back: what have we actually done, did we walk in a straight line? At the start of the day, we were actually just as much of a drunken snake as the track we followed yesterday. But as the day went on, it kept getting better. I have to say there are a few people in this group who can actually walk in a straighter line than I can, so that’s great. We learned a lot here again.

Change in weather and adjusting the plan

Because the weather was much better than forecast, I secretly started thinking about food. I didn’t want to turn it into a strange day, because you might as well take advantage of it. But around 1 o’clock, it suddenly got really warm. I think it hit plus 8 degrees and the snow started sticking to the skis like crazy. We have skins on the bottom of the skis for grip on the snow, so we took those off. But in the deep snow, it was actually no longer doable to break our own trail. We were wasting a lot of energy for relatively little progress. So we changed our plan and actually made it a short day. We set up camp as early as 2 o’clock.

New rhythm and sleep times

The intention was to go to bed at 9 o’clock. I don’t think I quite made that. After that, we’ll get up again at 3 o’clock. Then we’ll have had 8 hours of sleep and we’ll head out again around 5 o’clock. That’s actually the coldest part of the day. Then the snow is nice and hard and suddenly it’s actually quite easy and not like there are rocks in it.