Ready to launch!
A few miles north of Ilulissat we came across this ship graveyard. Looks like 2-3 boats were thrown here.
Please forgive the many photos of icebergs. That's a main reason we came here. I think icebergs are fascinating and beautiful, always morphing into a new forms, hissing, dripping, crackling, making huge crashes when pieces break off, and really fun to paddle around. The blue ice is the oldest. Having been compressed deep in a glacier for many (perhaps thousands) of years, these pieces have little oxygen in them so the blue wavelength of light penetrates deeply and they appear blue to us.
This is a tiny village called Oqaitsut (Danish name is Rodebay). We stopped here briefly on the way up north.
We only saw two whales on this trip, and here is one of them.
This beach and the nearby water was filled with small, dead fish.
The nearest iceberg is about to lose a large piece.
Here's the sea foam and small ice pieces that radiate outwards when a large piece falls off.
While I was climbing a small mountain during this non-paddling day, Lyn was saving a local family from having to swim. The bay behind our campsite had two tiny summer homes occupied by these fisher folk. The rope securing their motorboat had come lose. Lyn paddled her kayak to retrieve it. Then we were invited over for coffee and cake. Lovely people. The younger couple spoke some English.
They all live through the summer in this one-room house.
Here we are camped a few miles from Epiq Glacier.
Next day we paddled to the glacier and climbed up the lateral moraine to get a good look at it.
This large face on the left side of Eqip Glacier calved off the next day and made a huge amount of noise.
Same campsite, next day, too foggy to paddle safely with all those icebergs nearby.
Here we are approaching a small part of Kangilerngata Glacier. This floating ice looks dense but it is navigable. After visiting the glacier fairly close by in our kayaks, we tried paddling west to reach a new campsite. The ice closed in on us very tightly. There was no visible water--just brash ice, growlers, bergy bits, and some substantial icebergs. I acted as icebreaker, with Lyn following just behind me. It took about 45 nervous and strenuous minutes of paddling to find some navigable water again. We reached our intended campsite after a substantial detour.
The full width of Kangilerngata Glacier is visible here.
As we launched the next day, the glacier started calving ice in the longest session I've ever seen. For about 5 minutes we could see and hear pieces falling off. It sounded like an almost continuous artillery barrage. Then some small waves reached us despite the little islands between us and the glacier.
The left side of this one was just hanging in space. Don't know if it could last much longer.
The next fiord north had two more glaciers we wanted to visit, one seen here with a telephoto shot. The ice was so thick we didn't even think of paddling the 5 miles to reach this glacier. We tried paddling west through Qornoq passage, the only possibly navigable waterway to continue our circumnavigation of Arve Prinsens Island. The ice got denser and larger, so before getting fully surrounded again we backtracked and camped for a night hoping the ice would clear a bit.
Here is the campsite at which we waited for the ice to thin out.
The next day we got through.
Turns out a massive (3/4 mile wide) iceberg had partially blocked the narrow Qornoq passage. Here it is, now moved a bit out of the way.
Here we are approaching the village of Qeqertaq. Unlike the others we visited, this one seemed very impoverished, with a lot of garbage lying around.
Camping a few miles from Qeqertaq we found some graves near our tents. They may have been very old. The stone domes on two of them were missing. Here you can see a human skull and a bone.
One of the closed graves.
This iceberg is comprised entirely of water that had refrozen before calving off a glacier.
A dirty iceberg from part of a moraine.
No, neither of us dared paddle through any of the arch icebergs we saw.
Approaching the town of Saqqaq, which is just beautiful. They had a market where we got fresh bread, eggs, yoghurt. What a treat!
Lots of huskies where we landed. We got a howling greeting. Thankfully, all the adults are chained.
No idea who this is.
Don't know where these boats were headed.
Each village has benches on the highest lookouts.
The land mass in the distance is Disko Island.
We hiked to near this hanging glacier.
And we bathed in this very cold stream a couple miles below the glacier. The sun and lack of wind made it feel great.
A very foggy day, with periods of clearing.
The mapping GPS was very helpful on this day.
We approached an abandoned whaling station on the island of Agpat (Ritenbenk is the Danish name). One house was used as a summer place for a family of Greenlanders. A child handed Lyn her husky puppy while Lyn sat in the kayak. It was a total love-fest.
It took a while to get Lyn to relinquish the puppy.
The whaling station was abandoned in 1959.
This old wooden boat was partially buried.
Will someone please give this old guy a razor?
All night we heard many cracks and crashes as icebergs shed pieces. Only in the morning did the fog lift enough for us to see the bergs.
This large and nasty smelling piece of whale was too far gone to interest even the birds.
On our return to Qeqertoq (Rodebay in Danish) we visited the restaurant and ate the largest and most delicious portion of haddock I've ever seen.
In this picture you can barely see Lyn's red boat on the other side of the arch. A moment later, the inside part of the arch fell into the water. You can see the new shape in the next shot.
You can also see a small wave caused by the fallen ice.
We paddled a little south of Ilulissat and landed at the edge of the giant ice fiord. The Jakobshavns Glacier is the second most productive calving glacier in the world. It produces 20 million tons of ice per day. The glacier is about 35 miles inland. The tightly packed icebergs take between 3- 12 months to reach the sea.
Ooops. Guess we weren't supposed to be on that beach.
The ice is packed in like this the whole 35 miles to the glacier's face.
An inland lake above Ilulissat.
Lyn enjoys a libation with some ancient iceberg ice to celebrate our last night camping.
On the last day paddling to Ilulissat we passed the largest iceberg of the trip. This baby was at least a mile wide.
Sled crossing sign in Ilulissat.
On the flight back to Iceland (you can't fly from North America to Greenland except through Iceland or Denmark) we saw the eastern coast of Greenland below.
