Written on 13th August 2007:

I am writing this on Monday night, with the sun streaming through the fog into my hotel room, and right into my face. There's only one desk to write at so I am wearing my darkest sunglasses. I could close the curtains, but that would spoil the view, which is pure magic. The mountains on the far side of the fjord are higher than the fog, and the icebergs are eerily poking through the murk and everything is changing from minute to minute.

Anyway, its Monday, but let's pretend its Saturday. Saturday was a bit special. No, Saturday was a lot special. So cue up some sort of flashback special effect; you can add music, if you like.

We were up at around 6:30 am, nowhere near the crack of dawn (which is 4 am and is spectacular) and managed somehow to snag breakfast. Thomas figured out they put the food out early at the hotel (usually around 7:30 am) before opening the dining room at 8:00 am. We did our daily commute, the 1/2 mile or so up to the airport, and waited with anticipation for the womp-womp-womp of the helicopter coming from Tasillaq to pick us up. Abbas Kahn, our Danish colleague was already on board. The pilot, a wonderful chap called Per who has been flying around these parts for about 45 years, was a man who looked to be happy flying that day. There was no wind what-so-ever and the sky was a deep azure blue.

After loading ridiculous amounts of gear in to the not-cavernous-at-all interior of the Bell 222 (think back, if you are old enough to remember, to the naff TV show "Airwolf" - same kind of helicopter, but fewer guns). We had an aluminum frame, a bunch of solar panels, a load of survival gear, tools, the kitchen sink, GPS receivers and just about anything else you can imagine in there. Poor Thomas and Abbas crammed in the back with the gear, I sat up front in luxury with the pilot. I am used to helicopters in the Antarctic, where I usually chatter away with the pilots, but I spent most of this flight quiet as I couldn't figure out how the internal comms system worked. There was no button to push or slider to slide. So I presumed I couldn't talk, I find out later its a dynamic microphone. You talk, the pilot hears. I'll know for next time.

We flew north from Kulusuk across an impossible landscape. Words cannot describe it, but it was rugged and raw and mystifying and lonely and amazing all at once. We were heading for Tugtiilip where the Twin Otter, piloted by Johans and Ingmar, had been ferrying even more of our gear over the previous days. We find out over beer later that the landing strip hasn't been used for 15 years. Even so it looked perfect, flat and smooth and quite quite quite short. Really no problem for the Twin Otter, a plane that thinks it's a helicopter.

Jonas told us a story that once when flying into Reykjavik his brother-in-law was in the control tower and was distracted for a minute and told Jonas as he was on approach to "wait a minute." It was a windy day and Jonas did exactly that, full flaps, nose up a bit, and throttled back - he hovered the aircraft. His brother-in-law, watching the radar, noticed. "I shouldn't have said that," he ruefully said. "I shouldn't have said that, Not to you!" It really is an amazing plane, piloted by amazing people.

We landed at Tugtiilip and started to figure out what we needed to take off the helo, and what we needed to add in order to get the prospective site at Pilgupik Island going. It was a further 25 minutes to the "X" on the map. I designed the network for Greenland, but this was one of the sites that Finn Bo Madsen of the Danish National Space Center had moved one of my "X" marks to. From the map and satellite imagery I didn't know what we were getting into. All I had was a 2000 paper from Geology that briefly mentioned the island. From the photos in the paper it looked as though we had bitten off more than we could chew. Rugged mountain peaks were in every photo. Where were we going to put the GPS system? We needed flat bedrock for both the main instrument and the power system. The power system had to face south, so the solar panels could catch the sun early and late in the year. We needed a flat area to land the helicopter, we needed to be on a high spot and we needed to land close to where we were going to install the system. Lugging eighteen 35 kg batteries more than 100m would be torture and take up too much time.

We settled on loading 6 batteries into the helicopter and Abbas — bless him — said he'd stay behind as we started the system and then when the helicopter came back to pick up the next 12 batteries he would come north to the site. Abbas is a brave man. He stayed at Tugtiilip for over an hour, by himself. He was kitted out, true, but the mosquitoes were giving him a complete seeing to. Greenland mosquitoes seem to treat mosquito repellent as a kind of condiment that makes their meal a little more interesting that day. They were vicious. We left him with a radio, an iridium phone, a fetching mosquito net and a rifle and flew the short way to Piglupik.



I find this hard to say but the landscape between Tugtiilip and Pilgupik was even more stunning. Superlatives fail. It was simply the most amazing flight I have ever been on. The Dry Valleys in Antarctica are food for the soul, the Canadian Rockies around Banff, something special, the Scottish Highland awesome, but this landscape; this landscape was heartbreakingly beautiful. Gut wrenchingly majestic. I cannot do it justice with words. I feel honoured to have seen it.

Glaciers spill into the sea, a deep dark blue sea, except where the icebergs show through from underwater as the most blinding blue you can imagine. Everything had a perfect reflection. And everything was steep, impossibly steep. Shear cliffs from razor sharp ridgelines, plunging straight into the sea.

How on Earth were we going to find a place to put the GPS? But Finn Bo obviously knows his stuff. After 20 minutes we topped another arête; there lay the lovely lovely Pilgapik Island, surrounded on three sides by icebergs and cliffs. And right on top a glacially planed, flat as a pancake expanse of beautifully polished bedrock. Perfect for the job. Admittedly with GPS you want everything else around you to be lower than your instrument - what we call perfect sky view. This site did not have perfect sky view. It did have the perfect view. There really wasn't anywhere nearby we could use.

We landed and set about putting up the system like we had practiced over the last week. The helicopter left to go and grab Abbas while Thomas and I drilled the bedrock monument into place. Despite the majesty of the place, we kept our eyes peeled for polar bears. At least on the island and with the glassy sea we would see one coming. At least we hoped we would. I spotted a walrus some way away beneath the water; the silence of the place was punctuated by the occasional roar as an iceberg calved from the nearby glaciers or an iceberg rolled over in the bay.

The silence was not the absolute silence of some of our sites in Antarctica. Those on the edge of the East Antarctic plateau can be so quiet, when the wind dies, that the only noise you can here is this strange thump thump noise, with a bit of a weird low roar. That would be my own heartbeat and the blood moving in my veins.

Pilgapik was different. It was more of an expectant silence. Those glaciers just waiting to give you a thunderous shock as they fall into the sea.

Abbas arrived and immediately started lugging batteries from the landing site to the power system. We hope the system is strong enough to sustain the vagaries of the weather here. We have been hearing stories of the bonnet being ripped off cars in the winds around here, and the Kulusuk airport being buried under 5 meters of snow, but still being open — the staff dug a trench for the runway — I can't see that happening in the US!

We did our best and finished building the system in under four hours. They said it couldn't be done! Ha!

Thomas sat in the front on the way back. Abbas had sat in the front coming up from Tugtillip. From the back the view is less spectacular as the windows are tinted. Up front Thomas opened a window and I started to regret just wearing a T-shirt and jeans. I had the full complement of every high tech fleece, poly pro and thermal I could want but it was a baking hot day, and jeans and T-shirt were just fine. Until Thomas opened the window. Even so the cabin thermometer read 7 C. I got a few goosebumps but was none the worse when we landed.

I think the goosebumps were from the landscape, not the cold.

Fast forwarding to now. We spent the last two days working at the airport prepping the systems we need for the next week or two. We're going camping to Kron Prins Fredericks Bjerg tomorrow and Kangerlussudaq glacier the next day before coming back to the hotel on Thursday. Abbas says the landscape around the glacier is even more spectacular than that at Pilugpik. I find it hard to believe that is possible, but I cannot wait to find out.

The mist has rolled in more, the sun has gone down. The view out my window is of a featureless grey-white sheet. I hope it clears up by tomorrow.