N69°25.922 W45°30.343 Elevation 6972 feet

There isn’t much room for error when moving at 45 km/h over the ice, pulling heavy sledges behind you, flying amongst the flurries of snow drift that gallop with the wind and cover the ground with a blanket of liquid smoke. Things happen very quickly–you catch an edge, and a wipeout can be spectacular; and dangerous. The adrenaline rush is intense. As is the workout.

Through the day, planes left their mark in the sky

N67°06.340 W45°24.721 Elevation 7171 feet

Some things changed today. For one, we crossed the Arctic line as we push further North on our journey. We are now officially in the Arctic. But a striking difference came in the way of the sky; more specifically, the air traffic, up above. We are evidently coming upon a latitude commonly used by transatlantic carriers. And today’s beautiful deep blue sky was scarred for much of the day by the multiple crisscrossing of contrails left by jets coming to and from Europe to North America. This, as is traveling through Greenland, was new to me.

Representing Global Green on the Greenland Ice sheet.

We set up camp next to DYE II, and our tent is dwarfed by the five story building. Such a structure, incongruous in this setting, looks part cathedral, part sci-fi movie set. Its dominant feature: a radar dome that defined its purpose. During the cold war, the US army monitored the air for spook ballistic activity. Such structures were built in line–four across Greenland–and all the way into Canada and Alaska. Assignments there must have been bleak due to the temperatures, and the many months of darkness.