#1: Beautiful and awesome
#2: Looked like a lot of work. I don't see a tree for miles.
#3: How did you get a can into Greenland? Waitaminute...who's in charge of Greenland?
Last September, my hunting partner Ross and I traveled to Greenland for a muskox/caribou hunt with Lings Hunting Greenland. Given the state of play in air travel, the only route from the US to Greenland went through Copenhagen, Denmark. For me, that meant Florida to JFK to Copenhagen to Kangerlussuaq, Greenland, and the reverse on the return trip. We had overnight stays in Copenhagen on each end, and got a full day in the city on the way out. This complicated traveling with rifles, but Lings had offered to provide rifles and ammo at no charge. We’ve never done that before but decided to make life easier and try it.
We flew Delta out of JFK and arrived in Copenhagen early in the morning. We were booked into the Clarion airport hotel. In the states, Clarion is a budget brand, but there’s nothing budget about this hotel, very nice. After dumping the luggage, we took the train into the city. Copenhagen is clean, beautiful architecture and people, lots of bikes. A great walking city, Copenhagen has extensive green space, terrific restaurants and lots of cultural stuff to see. Malmo, Sweden is just across The Bridge (see the excellent Swedish TV series by that name), a quick train ride.
The next morning, we were on the Air Greenland flight to Kangerlussuaq. AG makes one round trip a day between Copenhagen and Kangerlussuaq. It takes 6 hours to fly from JFK to Copenhagen; 4 hours Copenhagen to Kangerlussuaq. The route takes you over Iceland which looks mountainous and small. AG has one jet for international travel, an Airbus A330-800, which just this month replaced the A330-200 we flew on. Kangerlussuaq, with a population of just over 500, is pretty much just the airport, Greenland’s only international airport. The airport, like most of the Kangerlussuaq infrastructure, was built by the US in the WWII to Cold War era. It sits on the western edge of the Greenland ice sheet, the world’s second largest, after the Antarctic ice sheet. The ice sheet covers about 80% of Greenland, is about 1,800 miles long, north-south, and averages a mile thick. There is a gravel road between Kangerlussuaq and the ice sheet, so we hitched a ride out there with Hannah Lings. It was my first trip to big ice, and it was humbling. We walked out on the ice for about an hour, and, with the heavy overcast, there was no horizon, just white as far as you could see. You feel pretty small. People do cross the sheet with dogsleds, but this seems like crossing the Denmark Strait in a canoe.
The western edge of the ice sheet.
Most of Greenland not under ice looks like this in the summer; tundra, hills and lakes.
The next morning, we flew to the hunting camp on one of Air Greenland’s two search and rescue helicopters, an Airbus H-225. It’s a three-day hike to camp, but the flight took about 15 minutes. There are no roads in this area. ATV use is heavily restricted, so all supplies are brought to camp by dogsled or helicopter. Lings Hunting has 4 camps in the area; use is determined by season of which there are two: summer and winter. Karsten Lings is the head of the family, a Viking who worked for many years as a commercial fisherman and now runs the hunting operation full-time. Hannah, his wife, and the kids Lukas and Vivi round out the family. Lukas and Vivi are both hunting guides. The week we were there, we had Karsten and Lukas on site, with two other hunters from Texas, and an Inuit kid, Paul, who was learning to be a guide. Karsten took the Texans, we had Lukas, and Paul alternated.
The camp consisted of two shacks, a cook shack with a large dining table and a set of bunk beds, a second smaller two-man shack and tents. We scored the small shack which was spartan but comfortable with a kerosene space heater, two beds with minimalist mattresses, sleeping bags and, amazingly given the middle-of-nowhere vibe, industrial outdoor carpeting on the floor. No cell service, no WiFi, no electricity (except for a small gas generator that was on during dinner), no running water. We rented a sat phone for this trip. Worked great for checking in back home. Drinking and cooking water came from the lake. The outhouse was a tent containing a plastic bag toilet. Temperatures were highs in the low 50’s, lows in the low 30’s. The wind blew constantly and, since it was mostly coming off the ice sheet, it was cold. It rained on and off for a couple of days, only one morning of heavy rain, so it wasn’t much of an issue. We had good gear and dressed in layers. As the day went on, layers would come off and go into the pack. Late in the day, the layers would go back on.
Originally Posted by Colt191145lover
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