As on the mornings before, we met at the hotel breakfast buffet to eat cold cuts and cheese, dark bread with icelandic butter, skyr yoghurt, cucumbers. A few folks, gone native, were wolfing down pickled herring and squeeze-tube caviar. A good weather forecast had come in, and as evidence of our optimism, the table was scattered with our flight lunches, napkin-wrapped sandwiches prepared from the breakfast buffet. A little before 8 am, we got the call from Norlandair, suited up in our extreme-cold-weather gear, and departed the hotel.
In the long blue hours of twilight, the first group of five walked out onto the apron to board a red-and-white Twin Otter. The interior of the small aircraft was dominated by a large auxiliary fuel tank--a hulking, rounded cylinder in Soviet green, studded with bolted manifolds and valves. The only seating was in the far back of the plane, and I squeezed in next to Matt, straddling the tank. The co-pilot turned to face us through the open cockpit door, and yelled back that we could find a life-raft in the tail of the aircraft. We put in earplugs, the two turboprops fired up, and we were off.
Akureyri lies at the tip of a long fjord, and as we left, we travelled northward along this steep-walled strip of sea. We looked down on the neighborhood where we'd spent the last week in wait: the structures clustered against the waterfront, the angular church with its long staircase, the town pools at the top of the hill. Further towards the sea, the glacially carved landscape was frozen and weathered, but still bore a few signs of sparse human habitation.
The sun rose as we traversed the open ocean, filling the cabin with light and tracing the cloudtops below. Through openings to the sea, we began to spot white specks of sea ice, first single floes and dotted clusters, then patterned ribbons and streaks, then vast, packed fields that buttressed the Greenland landmass.
The Greenland coast was deep in winter. Wind-blown dunes bent from cliffs down to the sea in long, stretching arcs. The entire landscape was encased in frost, save for a few steep cliffs and wind-stripped prominences. Within the protection of the fjords, the sea surface was capped with an smooth expanse of ice. We landed at Constable Point, a basic airstrip and small collection of structures that provides fuel and essential services to aircraft and pilots. A way station. Without any associated settlement, the isolated strip is part of a spiritual brotherhood with lone desert gas stations and wave-battered maritime coaling stations.
Once again heavy with fuel, our plane bore inland. We looked down on a network of glacial valleys, some bare and some carrying massive, fractured glaciers, miles wide, towards the sea. Further upward, the mountain ranges began to disappear under the ice surface, so that only the highest prominences emerged--nunataks, islands in the ice.
As we approached Summit Camp, flying over the expanse of the ice sheet, it became nearly impossible to determine the scale of the landscape, or our altitude above the ice. Wind-sculpted sastrugi, also scaleless, extended across the surface. Our co-pilot turned to flash the 10-minute signal, and we moved to don our heavy gear. We landed on the snow surface in a plume of spindrift and thick fog from our combustion vapor. Taxiing towards the fueling equipment, human figures and machines appeared faintly through the haze. Because the engines would have difficulty starting in the –80°F conditions, the plane was kept running as we jumped down to the surface and refueling began. We moved back, away from the props, in a wash of exhaust and blown snow. A snowmobile materialized towing a dense plastic sled. We piled on, and were pulled back through the fog. The looming structure of the 'big house' appeared above us, on 15' stilts and heavily caked with inches of rime ice, and we looked up at the geodetic antenna dome and the big metal staircases. A exotic, space-age structure to call home. We climbed up to a deck, and watched as one aircraft took off, and the second carrying our crew mates landed.
