We did a quick, relatively empty flight up to Tugtillip where we had stashed all the gear. On the way we passed the Bluie One East Airstrip that the US installed in WWII. It still looks very useable. Once at Tugtillip we again left Abbas to fend for himself for an hour as we headed inland. He told me later there were lots of seals in the bay so he headed off to see if he could find any polar bears. I am beginning to question his sanity!
Thomas and I ended up on a ridgeline west of where we wanted to be, but the landscape is so tortured, so rugged and jagged that there really wasn’t any alternative. There was either nowhere to land or the bedrock that we were after was too fractured and smashed up by frost action. On this particular ridge, at the side of the Northern Steenstrup Glacier there was at least one or two places we could land and someone had obviously been there before. There was a fuel drum sitting smack bang in the middle of the ridge. I figured someone had used it as a fuel depot in the last couple of years. While Thomas and I went searching for bedrock, Per checked out the drum. It turns out it had been there for 32 years! Although it looked as though it was put there very recently. Like Antarctica things here don’t weather or break down as fast as in lower latitudes. Any trash stays around for a very long time.
I slogged to the top of the ridgeline, while Thomas went eastwards and down the ridge. I found a couple of promising spots but there was nowhere to put the solar panels, or the helicopter for that matter, and it was a good 300m climb to where the monument would go. Thomas had more luck finding a spot which stuck out from the ridge with a couple of good chunks of exposed bedrock on it and good landing spots nearby. We moved the helicopter to the much lower elevation site.
It’s a scary site if you have vertigo. It drops a long long way on three sides, all the way to the glacier. I was more bothered that the drilling we were doing seemed far too easy, with the drill moving at erratic speeds into the rock. It usually means the rock is fractured and not suitable for a monument. We moved again, only a few meters away and started drilling again. This was the start of the most frustrating install I have ever done. First we couldn’t get the drill jig completely level -- the jig helps us drill supposedly vertical holes. Then I must have done something wrong as after drilling and epoxying in four bolts the mast would not fit. I tried every trick I knew to get the mast to fit, but eventually I managed to snap a bedrock bolt. This is bad news. It means starting from scratch.
We tried to stay on the same small section of rock, but it was in a very small bowl, probably a meter across by a meter wide. Within that space we had three and a bit exposed bolts and the new bolts that Abbas, who had long since arrived, brought. When you do this work you’re often pulling on wrenches as hard as you can while sitting down. Two tips – try not to rake the top of your hands across the bedrock as you pull on the wrench. The rock turns red rather too quickly. Second tip, don’t lose your balance and end up sitting down hard on to an exposed bedrock bolt. I didn’t know it was possible to get a bump on your butt, but I now have a glorious walnut sized bump that makes sitting a literal pain in the butt.
With ragged bleeding knuckles and the start of a nice bruise, we kept working away in this tiny sharp space to get the monument in and level. When finished it was not a site that would win any beauty contests and not a site that I am particularly happy with. The monument is as good as I could get it, and I have seen many which are worse, but it just didn’t look good. Per came over to say that the airport at Kulusuk was being closed due to fog and that Angmassalik was usually only a few minutes behind in following suit. More time pressure then and nothing I could do to clean up my work. We started rocking equipment down and finishing up as fast as we could before flying back south. We didn’t need to refuel and basically made a bee line straight home. Again the landscape was wondrous, a rock climber's paradise, I have no doubt. This time the treat was from medial moraines and ogives (looped rock bands) on some of the glaciers. Some of the patterns seemed physically impossible. Glaciers that turn 90 degree bends, or seem to have been flowing one way and then switching direction. At one place a west-to-east flowing glacier meets a north-to-south flowing glacier and they seem to be having a contest on which one dominates, producing very strange flow patterns indeed.
Angmassalik thankfully was spared the fog and even though we were all physically exhausted and surely hours and hours had passed, we had only been out 4 hours and were back in time for tea. I will write about today tomorrow as we are having a couple of no fly days and I am beat.
We’re down to seven sites to install and it really does feel as though time is going to soon run out.
(More goereferenced photos in Google Earth here.)