We’re still not done. As always the weather has been unfriendly – rain and snow the other day, but now the mountains are quite lovely with their slight dusting of snow. Summer has finished and winter is fast approaching. There’s a nice high pressure over the ice sheet and some nice lows offshore, so although the views are incredible, so are the winds, which are ferocious at the places we want to go. With the 222 helicopter disappearing to Nuuk to get new engines we now have to slot our work timetable into the 212's scheduled visits to the Kulusuk airport to pick up passengers and its scheduled, lifeline visits to outlying communities. If we had the work we think we could be put out in the morning and get picked up in the evening but we cannot really work in that mode ...

The site we installed at Koge Bugt was incomplete. The kind of helicopter we used meant that we just couldn’t take all the batteries with us. It's still running on a single battery just now, which won’t do much good with winter fast approaching. We’re going to need a second trip out there to put more batteries in. We started planning to do that over the next couple of days. Because, you know? What could go wrong? In the meantime more people we know had arrived in Angmassalik, and were staying at the Hotel Nansen. The hotel is owned by the same people as the one we’re in (I think) but allows you to cook for yourself. So Abbas was basically press ganged into cooking a curry, with pakora no less, for everyone. Thomas made a Swedish apple pie and I threw together a sala...

Submitted September 2: So its been a long time since I wrote anything, or at least it feels like a long time. To be blunt, not a huge hell of a lot has happened since then. The main feature has been rain, a little more rain and then some more rain, followed by rain and a little bit of wind. We have managed to get another site installed and partially installed a couple of other sites, but weather has not been friendly. I think we last left off on the 23rd of August, something to do with a boat trip to Isertoq if I can remember that far back correctly. That was over a week ago, so what has happened since then? Hmm. We fixed the antenna at the Helheim site, same kind of deal as the last visit to Helheim, crammed into a 212 helicopter this time. The first and only time we've be...

Submitted by Mike Willis on Monday, Aug 27: There's something about what's happening here In Greenland. I keep having unforgettable days. On Thursday we changed our modus operandi in a direction I really did not expect. The helicopters were totally booked up with shuttle service to Kulusuk and for some more local science projects up on the Helheim Glacier. Abbas the ever inventive therefore chartered a boat to take us to Isortoq, about 20 minutes by helicopter to the south, but 2 hours by boat. Again here in Greenland we had another absolutely unforgettable day. With help from Meredith Nettles from L...

Submitted Friday, August 24: Okay so lets see. Last blog update was ... Sunday. Sunday? Sunday was brilliant! Monday. what happened on Monday? Ah yes, it rained. And rained. And was foggy and windy. So we sat in the hotel and watched the rain. Tuesday was like Monday, only more so. Here's a consolation picture of a couple of sled dog puppies. Wednesday. Hmm Wednesday. That was... hmm two days ago! Feels like it was a long time ago. It rained and had low clouds and fog. But only for half the day. The rest o...

(Written on Sunday, submitted on Monday) Yesterday, which was Saturday, and today have been no fly days. Not due to the weather mind you, just the helicopter has been busy doing other things. Yesterday it had to take a party of New Zealand school girls up to Helheim Glacier, the weather wasn’t great so they didn’t go. Today it was a day off for everyone all round – no planned flights. So a couple of non weather-caused day offs. What to do, what to do, what to do? Hmm dissertation? Lets see, I could sit here at the hotel and stare out at the bay and the mountains and the icebergs while trying to finish another chapter… or Thomas could knock on my door and say “lets go for a hike up the flower valley walk." Oooh tough decisions. Oh listen, Thomas just knocked on my ...

Yesterday started out in the murk. Grey, with a visibility of about the end of your arm. Not much use getting out of bed I thought, thoroughly depressed. But as the minutes passed there were patches of blue that started to appear and by 10am the weather was worthy of a flight. We hustled down to the small heliport and met with Per who was pleased that we had shifted the coordinates a bit farther south and to a lower elevation. "Much more manageable” was his comment. 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 th...

Today we lost. And it started so well. Up at 7am, misty as anything. No view, no mountain, couldn't even see the airport. Another day of waiting for the weather to cooperate in Kulusuk. After a couple of days, there's not much to do in Kulusuk. But a Welshman and a Scotsman in the dining room of the hotel told us just to wait a bit, that the sun would burn off the mist in only a couple of hours. Before we knew it we started to see small patches of blue sky. Maybe today wasn't going to be a wash-out after all. By 10am the airport was receiving flights from Iceland. The hordes of Chinese tourists were pleased, as were we, as now we had a chance to go and do something! We loaded up the helicopter to head north - the northern sites being our priority just now as the equipment...

Written August 14, 2007. (To see more photos by Mike posted on Google Earth, open this link in Google Earth.) The weather didn't clear up much since last night. The mist rose but then hung around the mountaintops and the wind got up. Windy misty weather, I know it sounds like an oxymoron, but it is weather we see on "the ice" too. We tried to go north in the helicopter and got some of the way towards the fuel cache before turning round. We took 30 minutes to go north towards the fuel cache, but a "slight" tail wind allowed us to cover the same distance back to Kulusuk in 10 minutes. We repacked the helicopter with a different GPS site — it took about 10 minut...

The following was written on August 8: Today was a good day. Thomas and I took off on a DeHavilland Dash 7 at about 10:30 this morning and scored the front seats of the aircraft, right behind the cargo, so we had loads of room. I was surprised about how busy the Kangerlussuaq airport was. We saw several Dash 7s land, they hold about 50 people, and a Boeing of some sort landed too. The Boeing seemed to disgorge people for a good 15 minutes. The plane to Kulusuk took about an hour and a half, and was pretty full. Air Greenland served a complementary meal and several drinks (which is obviously a bad business practice since non of the airlines in the US do that anymore) . The complementary meal was meat and potatoes. Does anyone else spot a pattern here? ...