Tag: Greenland

I am not a risk taker

leapingwaterLeave a comment

I am watching a documentary in AP Environmental Science right now about this group of climbers who went to Greenland to climb a never-climbed-before rock face that is 4,000 feet tall. It has literally NEVER been climbed. Also, to make it even scarier, they aren’t using ropes, but buckling themselves up the rock as they go by sticking stake-like things into the cracks of the rock. They are basically there to not only climb but to collect data about climate change for a scientist named Heidi. And guess what? She has never climbed before but she is doing it with them. There is also another man who never climbed before that is going with them. Oh also, before they climbed the 4,000 foot rock face, they had to climb a 1,000 foot rock face which was already terrifying enough. After that they went on skis with their packs dragged behind them over super windy, stormy, and powdery flat snow. All of this is done while being entirely isolated. There is nothing near them and all of these lands have never been explored. They even named the rock faces themselves. There is one specific climber named Alex Honold who is leading the expedition and is just so daring. He has no fears, and seeing these huge mountains just excite him instead of making him nervous. I have not yet finished the documentary so I am excited to see how the rest of it goes. Moral of the story, I will never understand how some humans have the mental and physical strength to do these types of expeditions, and I will most definitely not be doing this anytime soon, if you know what I mean.

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a quick view into a Frozen Dream

brachiosaurus15Leave a comment

The igloo that I inhabit is purely built out of ice. Blocks of ice stacked on top of one another until they create a dome that only raises about 3 feet off the ground. Before I assembled the dome, I had dug a pit that was about 3 feet deep into the frozen crust, under where I would eventually build my icy dome.

I had finished my igloo project, filling it with a deer and bear skin bed along with a small, vintage wood stove. Although the wood stove did little for me on the treeless coast of Greenland, I got creative and burned the oil collected from the fish I caught. I also brought with me a huge collection of Dura-logs which would sustain me for my stay in Greenland.

Every night I clung to the skins that entrapped my body in a cocoon of unsatisfactory temperatures, not cold enough to freeze but not warm enough to not question why in hell I would leave the Southern Californian bliss to come to the frozen tundra of despair.

But what made it all worth it was my constant adventure of navigating extreme winter conditions and the amazing art that lives and breathes in this magical place. My mornings consisted of sitting up and rotating 90 degrees to my heater where I boil coffee. The warm liquid slipped down my throat, heating my insides. My usual days consisted of taking an extremely long time to slip myself into the thick snow gear. Fur lined my hood and tickled my windburned cheeks as I crawled through the tunnel of ice that leads in and out of my igloo. From there I set off on the deserted icy planes, passing the occasional seal, with the intention of continuing my photography collection on the yearly migrating walruses.

image found on Pinterest