Photographic reproduction and mass tourism are now commonplace and diminish a family of qualities broader than, though including, our experience of art: aura is affected, but so is wildness, spirit, enchantment, the sacred, holiness, magic, and soul.  –Jack Turner, The Abstract Wild ¹

Immensity is within ourselves. It is attached to a sort of expansion of being that life curbs and caution arrests, but which starts again when we are alone. –Gaston Bachelard, The Poetics of Space ²

Glacier, iceberg, fjord—perhaps the most common images that convey the lure of the Arctic. Is this what drew me to sign up for the trek in Greenland? Travel advertisers make the most of these iconic features, and when we travel, we follow suit and this is precisely what we tend to photograph—what we expect to see in the Arctic, what we believe our viewers want us to show as evidence we were there.

Are these iconic representations ultimately a fantasy, like the popular image associated with the word “island,” of a lush tropical paradise with swaying palm trees and long sandy beaches? The southern Caribbean island where I grew up is arid, a rocky desert island, with small, intimate coves, not always sandy. On the other hand, there is much more to the image of ‘island’ as a lived experience—in terms of what it means to be both self-sufficient and cut off from the world.

Similarly, the desert holds that mystique for many, but the image of the desert often consists of sand dunes with camel caravans casting long shadows at sunset. In contrast, the deserts in Israel, the Sinai and Jordan where I have trekked, are stony, with craggy canyons and sheer cliff walls. Do they still have the same appeal? And so, was my image of glaciers and icebergs shallow and stereotyped, determined by some commercialized picture of the Arctic? Would I be able to return with photographs that reflect a more complex reality, beyond the picture postcard?

The actual landscape that strikes me as we land in the little town of Kulusuk, on the island with the same name, is marked by rugged mountains partially covered with snow. Even though I had seen photos of the region, including those taken by a friend who had done the same trek just two weeks prior to ours, my mind did not take note of these mountains. Perhaps my vision was determined by the predictable image of glaciers and icebergs.

These are steep mountains with sharp ridges and peaks. One would not expect such sharp edges from the oldest massif on earth—erosion would have molded them into gentler, more rounded rock faces. Apparently, it is because over the ages, as more of the earth underneath the Greenland icecap became exposed, the glaciers continued their carving of the rocks, sharpening the mountaintops.

To see the mountains from the airplane excites me—the thought that we will be walking in a rough, wild landscape that few have explored. But they also frighten me, those bare mountains that dip steeply into the fjords—it does not seem there is any shore left to walk along, and we will have to climb high on their scree slopes, which with my lingering fear of heights is not an encouraging prospect.

As we begin our trek, I am relieved to see there is a strip of tundra at the foot of the mountains, at least on our side of the fjord where the slopes are gentler and formed by a different kind of rock. For the first three days, we walk along the shores, near icebergs stranded by the tides, through mossy tundra slopes with small wildflowers and lichen, over sandbanks while fording icy mountain streams close to the sea, where they might be wider, but also shallower and calmer.

All the time, I ask myself: is this a wilderness? Is this the wilderness that I sought, that we were promised by the organizers of the trek? It is that sense of total wilderness that excited me about the idea of going to Greenland, to a place where few foreigners visit, let alone go on a camping trek. In this boat-supported trek, the Inuit fishing boats hired by our trekking company pick up our bags with our camping gear and drop them off at our next campsite. Today these fishing boats are equipped with outboard motors and satellite radio communication, and we can call them to pick us up whenever we want. Is that wilderness?

Still, there is the remoteness of East Greenland, also known as Tunu—the backwaters. With Greenland’s icecap covering 80 percent of its territory and with only 56,000 inhabitants total, the East is an even more forgotten area with five tiny, isolated Inuit communities, counting no more than 3,000 souls altogether, who speak their own language. There is only a minimal tourist infrastructure and one daily passenger flight from Reykjavik that cannot land on the little airstrip in Kulusuk in heavy mist. In fact, our flight was canceled for three consecutive days because of weather conditions. Just as we were about to give up and trek in Iceland instead, our propeller plane was finally allowed to take off. This means that rescue, in case of serious injury, without any hospitals or adequate medical services in Kulusuk, can take several days.

True, this is a landscape with few signs of human presence. There are no marked trails, not even footpaths, as the local Inuit do not move around on foot—they travel by boat in summer and by dogsled over the frozen fjords in winter. With no trodden paths, we must check out the earth where we set our foot, taking note where the hiker in front of us has stepped.

On the boat ride through the fjords to our trailhead, the Inuit captain of our motorboat and his son spot two humpback whales. Excitedly, they gesture to each other, draw closer and then turn off the motor. We watch, speechless, as two enormous humpbacks court, dance, play, with their fins, then their tails sliding in and out of the water, almost in slow-motion. It is a gift to watch these huge animals in the wild—even more than on a commercial whale watch, when you expect to see them. Does that give us a sense of being closer to the wildness in nature?

Our captain and his son point to smaller whales in the distance—pilot or minke, more like dolphins. For the Inuit, the whale means food—and they work together as a team, with several small fishing boats, to hunt these wild animals. In fact, on our return to Kulusuk, at the end of our trek, we see that our captain is awarded the largest and best chunk of meat for being the first to harpoon that pilot whale earlier in the day.

Polar bears, looking for food, have attacked campgrounds in the past, we are warned, and so we must alternate keeping watch at night. Should a bear approach our camp, we must make a lot of noise to scare it away and wake up our two guides, who each carry a large rifle throughout the trek. I wonder what happens if you kill a bear in self-defense, in a place where polar bears are strictly protected. The Inuit of East Greenland, for whom hunting and fishing is still their main source of living, are permitted to hunt only 25 bears a year in total, and then only male animals.

During my turn on the nightly bear watch, I look out far into the dark waters of the fjord with its icebergs drifting by, fearful a bear might come ashore but at the same time fervently hoping I will be the one to spot the elusive white animal. Perhaps it is there, aware of my presence, like the snow leopard in Peter Matthiessen’s eponymous book that recounts his trek in the Himalayan mountains, where he senses the leopard eying him, but he is never blessed with its sight. Our guide’s dog Nanook—the Inuit word for polar bear—with the same white coat, will have to substitute as a model for our iconic pictures of the Arctic.

Wilderness or not, there is something that starts to grow on you. On our first days on the trek, it is not the drama of the images such as iceberg and fjord, but rather the immersion in the landscape which typifies the experience of trekking, of walking day to day, feeling the earth under my feet, crossing the icy streams, and sitting on the polar bear watch.

It is experiencing the change of light—the low sun, peeking occasionally through the mostly cloudy skies, lighting up an iceberg, a mountain peak. In this season, at this latitude, the sun only sets at 11 p.m., painting the skies red. It never gets fully dark—in the blueish night you do not see the stars. Then the sun rises again at 3:00 a.m. in all its glory. I see and photograph this otherworldly light on my bear watch, and when I wake up in the nights and sit for a while on a rock outside my tent.

And it is the ebb and flow that we follow by the hour as the sea retreats, exposing a wide expanse of sand and mud, with branching rivulets running through like line drawings, beds of seaweed, and a lone, abandoned iceberg. Then the waters return in tender waves that increase in force, each time reaching a little further ashore. All this, we would not experience if we were just passing by in a sightseeing boat.

On the third day, after crossing the sandy delta of a mountain stream, the tundra gives way to a beach strewn with large stones and boulders, rocks from the core of the earth that have been polished, curved by wind and sea. It is not easy balancing on these stones, hopping from one boulder to another.

I realize we are now rounding a cape, a headland that leads to the bay where our next camp will be. Rounding a cape builds up an expectation—of something beyond the bend, something new, different. At what point does the view open up? But no, our cape keeps rounding out more and more, and we do not even glimpse the next bay. Until we reach a high cliff that marks the end of our stony beach, and we will have to climb a scree slope that looks rather scary. Many of us are tired of a long day on difficult terrain, not only on the loose stones but also on the steep tundra slopes where we must forge a path on ground that is never level—a good, but exhausting, exercise for the muscles of our feet. Our guides decide to call the boat to take us to our campsite—at a lovely bay with striking rock formations. Rounding the cape by boat is certainly not the same as when you are walking, filled with anticipation, and the next bay suddenly leaps into view.

As if to make up for the loss, the following day brings us the crossing of a pass—another archetypal image arousing deep associations. We finally leave the coast and go inland, walking up the stream that brought fresh water to our camp, and then begin to climb the side of the U-shaped valley carved out by a glacier millennia ago. As we make our way through slanted tundra slopes with patches of snow here and there, we approach the top and then, wow!—the view suddenly opens up and we face the aquamarine waters of a fjord with an enormous glacier at its head.

Like the rounding of a cape, the exhilaration of reaching a pass lies in the sudden view of what was not visible before, a reward, after the strenuous effort of climbing, but it is also the prospect of going down into an entirely different realm. Compared to the visual images of iceberg, fjord, glacier, the image of the pass is more experiential, even existential. It is much more than physically going from one side of the mountain to the other, while surmounting a challenging obstacle, testing our persistence—it is the crossing of a threshold, when something happens to our inner selves, touching on a primal, archetypal kind of knowledge (1). As in crossing a desert or a sea—or circumambulating a mountain massif.

The next two nights, we camp on a beach at a magnificent fjord. In addition to the large glacier that burst into sight on that windy pass, four other glaciers flow into the Sermiligaq Fjord that forms a secluded bay near our campsite—it feels like the most beautiful, most serene place on earth. What a privilege it is to be here.

And just now, the sun comes out after several greyish days, and the skies finally turn blue. Sitting at the shores of this fjord, I look at the mountains around me. They are only 1,200-1,500 meters high in this part of Greenland, but because of the Arctic latitude, they are covered in snow and ice. If we would be in the Alps and imagine these tranquil fjord-waters to be a lake, the elevation of these mountains could very well be 4,000-5,000 meters.

It is hard to believe that this transcendent, hidden corner of the world also harbors the clearest material evidence of global warming. Here, we can sense it in our very physical being. On our map that was charted about forty years ago, our quiet beach does not exist—it lies buried beneath the mighty Karale Glacier. This glacier has since retreated so far that not only was the bay with our lovely campsite created, the former tributaries no longer feed the main glacier and instead flow directly into the fjord, becoming separate glaciers in their own right.

The following morning, we walk along the ebbing shoreline toward the glaciers, turning inland to climb to an overlook, a little lower and less rugged than the snowy mountains around us, but rising right above the edge of the fifth glacier that was hidden from view before. Reaching the top of the hill, the summit—another archetypal image—allows you to suddenly see what you do not see from below, in an all-round view. Here, it is the fifth glacier and the great distances into a world of ice and rock, where the imagination travels to where the glaciers are formed, beyond the bend, beyond these mountains. And on the other end of the flat summit is the fjord, shining now in sunlight, and a view of the other “young” glaciers as they reach the water. It is a moment of silence to confront this landscape and each of us finds our own perch to take in the view.

If we thought this was the climax of the trek, the next day brings us an even closer encounter with a glacier—the largest of the five, named after the Arctic explorer and collector of Inuit folktales, Knud Rasmussen. One of the Inuit fishing boats takes us across the fjord, fording its way through the dense ice floes as we near the glacier and dropping us off at the shore, still quite a distance away from the glacier’s head. As we walk toward the glacier, we sense its grandeur, rising seventy meters above the water, more and more not only with our eyes, but with our entire body.

On a raised rock platform—a podium—not far from the glacier, we sit and watch. The water below the great wall of ice is like a deep blue mirror, as if it is covered by a thin sheet of ice—or is it just the tiny particles of ice that give that reflective surface of total stillness? Icebergs of every size and shape float out of the bay into the fjord.

Every so often, the silence is broken by a thundering roar, like dynamited destruction, like the drop of a bomb. We look up every time, we have to look up, stop our conversations, to see where a chunk of the ice drops into the water, leaving behind a blue-green wound in the ice face. Then splashes of water—or is it ice?—rise like dust after an explosion, while slowly the ripples in the fjord expand and expand, becoming waves that can endanger boats if they come too close.

This is my lived experience of the Arctic. It has more to do with the visceral than the visual, the actual confrontation with the glaciers, to feel how small we are next to them, to hear them calving—an unusual connotation in that word of giving birth to little, or large, icebergs. But with our awareness of global warming, the calving also means the death of the glacier. And of the earth.

To be near, to see how the glaciers change in the light of the day, is the big difference between a visual, iconic representation of the Arctic as glacier, iceberg, fjord, and the experience of the glaciers, icebergs, fjords, up close.

It is the extremes of the earth that speak to me, in body and spirit—the desert, the high mountains, the Arctic. Perhaps it is because here I can see the forces of nature at work, the exposed surface of the earth with its strata, its ravages, and fissures. And hear the thunder of its calving glaciers.

Even more so, these are places that enable the confrontation with immensity—an immensity that resonates with the immensity within—an intimate immensity. Places that fill you with awe. Where a godly presence reigns.

Author’s Note: Photos from my trek in East Greenland can be seen at www.ritamendesflohr.com/photography#/travels-east-greenland.

References

1. Jack Turner. The Abstract Wild. University of Arizona Press, Tucson, 1996, p. 15.
2. The French philosopher Gaston Bachelard connects the poetic image to “archetypes lying dormant in the depths of the unconscious.” Bachelard goes on to examine poetic images of the house—attic, cellar, tower, nooks and crannies. Writing about my hiking and trekking experience in the desert, I have expanded on these images to include phenomena in nature—canyon, gorge, cave, underground waters, summit, cliff, precipice, the plains. These images are experiential, like the distinction made by the romantic image of a tropical island, in contrast to the essence of an island depicted as being both self-sufficient and cut off from the world.

  Gaston Bachelard. The Poetics of Space. Beacon Press, Boston, 1969.