An Island That's Living Up to Its Name

By Doug Struck
Washington Post Foreign Service
Sunday, July 15, 2007

Erik the Red was lonely. Three years into his banishment -- first from Norway, then from Iceland -- for various murders, the redheaded Viking wanted company on the stark island on which he found himself. He invited some countrymen to join him in the place, which -- he assured them -- was "Green Land."

Twenty-five ships from Iceland took up his offer; 14 made it, with several hundred souls. When they arrived around the turn of the first millennium, they found a few patches of grass to give flimsy support for Erik's far-fetched promotion. But he survived their surprise, and the Vikings stayed for more than 400 years before their journey ended in mystery.

Journeys -- and their ends -- come easily to mind as you sit in the sun at midnight on the porch of the Hotel Arctic in Ilulissat, Greenland, sipping a Chilean wine and watching giant icebergs float by below on their own incredible trip.

You have come to see the beginning of their end, hastened on the journey from ice to water by global warming. In few places can you watch the metamorphoses brought by climate change so intimately as you can here, where the fastest glacier in the world delivers spectacular icebergs right to your camera lens.

These imposing structures were laid down as snow perhaps 10,000 years ago, when humans were still hunting the last mastodons with spears and etching on cave walls.

Crushed under the weight of year upon year of new snow, the compacted ice moved. Imperceptibly at first, then by a few inches a year, then a few feet, as it was inexorably drawn into a glacier that siphons the ice cap. This glacier river is a superhighway by comparison, but it still took thousands more years for the ice to reach the edge of the sea.

The massive frozen river ended there, at what is now Baffin Bay, until one summer's day, the wounds of thawing joined to drop a mighty chunk into the sea with a tremorous roar.

And there it is before you: an iceberg millenniums old, blue-cold, spiraled and peaked in frozen artistry. Its own journey will end gently, melting on a slow drift westward to Canada, or from there, on the left-turn leg down into the northern Atlantic Ocean.

Your own journey here is considerably quicker, and made more so by the inauguration in May of the first direct North American flights by Air Greenland from Baltimore. And an increasing number of cruise ships are adding stops in Greenland, a self-governing dependency of Denmark, to their northern Europe routes.

Greenland authorities are hoping travelers from the Americas will come to the world's largest island, which -- despite Erik's aggrandized label -- is 81 percent covered in ice. They will come, officials hope, to see the glorious icebergs, to travel by dog sled across the vast ice cap, to witness endless daylight, to explore the Viking ruins or to hike on the rocky coastline.

After the Vikings vanished, Danes and other Scandinavians eventually returned to join the Inuit who had walked across the ice from Canada 4,500 years ago and prowled the island in small family groups. The descendants of both immigrant groups number about 56,000 and live in towns along the edges and fiords of the island.

It is a huge island, three times the size of Texas. Its length stretches the equivalent distance from Chicago to Los Angeles, and it is 652 miles wide. The Arctic Circle intersects Greenland about a third of the way up the island. Above the Arctic Circle, the sun never sets in the summer (or rises in the winter); below it, there is a summer-twilight version of night for a few hours this time of year.

Back to Nature

The size of Greenland necessitates some choices for a traveler setting his own itinerary. There are no roads outside the towns, so the options for movement are plane, boat or dog sled.

Air Greenland's flight lands at Kangerlussuaq, a former U.S. air base with a long runway. There is little to keep one in "Kanger," as it is called, except the short drive out to the ice cap or a tour of nearby musk ox herds.

Back in a plane, flying north from there, you can find the icy essence of Greenland: majestic icebergs, snow adventures, arctic camping in an area so stunning it is designated a World Heritage Site. Or, flying south, you can plumb the Viking ruins and experience the culture in picturesque villages connected by ferries or helicopters.

In either direction, the star attraction is nature. On a walk in southern Greenland through the sheep farms resurging in a warmer climate, 41-year-old Kenneth Hoegh, whose ancestors came here 200 years ago from Denmark, described the lure:

"Have you ever heard the silence?" he asked me. "My brother-in-law was fishing with me here in Greenland, and suddenly he said to me, 'Kenneth, can you hear the silence?' There was not a word. No bird singing, no nothing. You could hear the air in your ears.

"I don't think many people in North America have experienced that silence."

Hoegh and many other Greenlanders are welcoming global warming, which is extending the short summer grazing season, making fatter animals for the island's 51 sheep farmers, and encouraging attempts to grow potatoes and other vegetables. An agricultural consultant, Hoegh thinks travelers would be intrigued by a visit to a working farm in the Arctic. It offers a glimpse at an isolated, honed-down existence.

"This is what it must have been like for American settlers," said Pia Rolsted Anderson, 51, working on her family's farm near Brattahlid, where Erik the Red settled. "It's hard work on a farm here. But there is freedom."

As she talked on the wooden walkway of the sheep shed, she kept an eye on the ewes. It was lambing season, and every hour a new lamb would emerge on the straw of the pens. For Anderson and her family, that meant shifts around the clock to oversee the births, helping if needed and ensuring that the newborns could breathe and struggle to their feet.

"What we have here is fresh air, healthy food, unpolluted water, and it's peaceful," said Anderson, a trained teacher who admits she has never been able to stray long from the farm.

Back to the Past?

The Viking ruins scattered over southern Greenland embrace both religion and mystery. Erik the Red's mother and son -- Leif Erikson, who sailed even farther west to America in 1000 -- established the first Christian church here. But the disappearance of the Norsemen sometime after 1408 has puzzled historians. Several theories are offered: conflicts with the Inuit, interruptions in the supply route to Europe that brought them goods in return for polar bear hides and narwhal tusks, even the lack of a Catholic bishop.

But the most widely accepted theory is that the Vikings left because of climate change, a sharp cooling called the Little Ice Age that made their tenuous farming a lost cause. In reverse, the climate changes occurring here now are a boon to humans but a threat to nature -- to the polar bears and seals that depend on the ice, and the fish and reindeer that have adapted to a cold climate. Scientists say those changes are happening fastest in the Arctic.

"We have the opportunity to show the rest of the world that what they are saying about global warming has something to it," said Anthon Frederiksen, the mayor of Ilulissat, 600 miles up the coast from southern Greenland's sheep country and 170 miles north of the Arctic Circle. "Tourists can come here to see it. Maybe it will cause some people to put on the brakes, to realize that global warming is real."

Ilulissat is a town of 4,600 who live in a pleasant scattering of colorful matchbox buildings perched on a majestic fiord. It is a fishing town. It still has muddy streets and the fishy proof in the air of its working nature. The town also has whole neighborhoods devoted to doghouses. There are more dogs in Ilulissat than people. No cuddling, thank you, these are scruffy working dogs used mainly for sled trips. They persistently give the town a howling serenade.

The town sits at the exit of the Jakobshavn Glacier, the world's fastest and most prolific producer of icebergs. That has made Frederiksen hopeful that the tourist trade will grow, even as fishing may falter as warmer seas drive away the shrimp that are the prime prey of the fleet.

"We are right next to nature here. The ice fiord can be a very dramatic experience for tourists," he said.

For the Daring, a Tent

The nature is surreal. In the summer, the sun finds a parking space above the horizon and seems not to move. The day lingers, and lingers. Your body is fooled: The bright light must mean there is more to do, until you realize it is almost midnight and you have not yet had dinner. You force yourself to bed, but sleeping in such bright light seems somehow wrong.

In the extended day, you can simply walk to the edge of the ice field to watch the bergs go by, or take a boat to weave in and out of the cold giants. The glaciers are crystalline blue sculptures on the flat surface of the sea.

There is a remote element of danger to add to the thrill. Icebergs melt from the bottom and may flip over when they become top-heavy. Some years ago, a family of tourists was rescued by fishermen when the group was dragged from shore by the tsunami-like wave created by a flipping iceberg, Frederiksen said.

Tour agencies in town offer other variations of the icy exotic: barbecues of whale and seal meat on the ice, igloo tours, kayaking, skimobiling, whale watching, and camping trips with dog teams pulling sleds.

The attractions have made Ilulissat the prime stop for tourists and a port of call for dozens of cruise ships. It has better-than-Greenland-average facilities. The Hotel Arctic is perched on a rocky promontory across from town and offers fresh new rooms and excellent dining. The Hotel Hvide Falk in town just remodeled its upper floor with lots of glass and outdoor decking.

Those facilities are the exception for Greenland travelers, however. Greenland is expensive to navigate on your own. It offers backpacker's amenities at business executive's prices. Hotel rooms typically start at $200 a night, and they're likely to be worn and smoky. There are hostels and shared-bathroom accommodations, but even these don't come cheap.

Camping is a good bet for the adventurous few willing to lather themselves with bug spray to repel the voracious mosquitoes that roar out of the tundra in the summer.

If you can meet its occasional schedule, the ferry that slowly plies the towns and hamlets along the western coastline offers a relaxing way to see the scenery and to witness small-town life in the Arctic. Because the ferry is the only affordable transit between towns, each stop offers scenes of tearful farewells, happy reunions and the bustle of cargo carried on and off.

Air Greenland offers puddle-jump service on Dash-7 and Twin Otter planes and Sikorsky helicopters to 17 towns in Greenland. But the schedule is bewildering, and the price of even a short leg is hundreds of dollars -- if you can get them to surrender a ticket. Despite a promising Web site, Air Greenland's paper-based ticketing system makes some Third World airlines look efficient. You know you're in trouble when the airline's ticketing counter is baffled by a credit card.

Arranged tours cut down on the exasperation. There are a great variety tailored for many tastes: camping trips for one night or one week, sailboats on the shores, helicopter overflights and boat rides among the icebergs. Winter tours offer the chance to camp out in gripping cold to watch the ethereal dance of the Northern Lights in the sky.

In every direction, any season, Greenland serves up the lure of the Arctic in glorious relief. The changing climate is slowly altering that scene, however. Before long, it may be a far different journey.

Doug Struck is The Post's Canada correspondent.