Our arrival in Danish military base, Daneborg, was not fun. Daneborg is seventy-four degrees north, in northeast Greenland. To get there we flew from Iceland on a forty-seater Dash-8 aircraft to the gravel airstrip at Constable Point, the official point of entry into the Northeast Greenland National Park – the largest national park in the …

The back of our house looks on to a rocky mountain slope. Now and then we hear the bird-like cries of an Arctic fox calling, a sound half way between a howl and a bark. My son loves it. He calls back to the fox and sometimes gets a reply. And every once in a …

Until a week before our journey, we hadn’t decided if we would sail north or south. In the end, the lure of Evighedsfjord – Eternity Fjord – drew us north. If our nebulous, go-where-the-wind-takes-us summer holiday had a destination, Evighedsfjord filled that fuzzy role, particularly fuzzy because we knew virtually nothing about it. “Beautiful,” “stunning,” …

Glaciers kind of freak me out. They’re beautiful, even awe-inspiring. But also freaky. Huge silent walls of frozen water that sit around doing nothing and then break unexpectedly and frighteningly with a sound like a gunshot. I’ve read too many stories of people who ended up in crevasses, and mostly didn’t get out again, to …

Last week was the longest day of the year, June 21, when in Nuuk the sun rose at 2:53 am and set four minutes after midnight the next day. This strange phenomenon – the setting of the sun after midnight – happens for just a few days around this time of year. But then something …

This picture shows where we anchored our boat on the weekend. Do you notice something odd? Our boat was apparently on land. It’s not because we ran aground. We were indeed afloat. It’s because the maps are wrong. The coastline of Greenland is probably one of the worst mapped coastlines in the world. The Danish …