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,” said the few people we knew who had been there. But what was it really like? We gathered boat routes and tracks from seasoned sailors, but only one had been into the fjord, and only part way in. The tracks stopped halfway, as did the charts, leaving that disconcerting blankness that is common to Greenland maps.
Despite Evighedsfjord being only about 40 km north of the ‘city’ of Maniitsoq, and about 180 km north of Nuuk, there are no scheduled local tourist trips. Even the few chartered ship-based skiiing trips venture only part way in to the more than 100 km long fjord. An alternative is to charter a heli-skiing trip, if you’re – for example – Bill Gates, who did indeed heli-ski here. The attraction for the super-rich is not just the natural beauty, but more so the isolation and anonymity; it’s possible to almost completely avoid people here, and the few you meet may not know, or care, who you are.
As we sailed into the mouth of Evighedsfjord, tantalising distant peaks protruded above a blanket of low cloud. Half way into the fjord, hills had grown to a thousand metres. Deeper in still, the clouds parted revealing mountains towering to over two thousand metres, closing around us, El Capitan-like peaks wrapped in their thick, white glacial blankets. Around each corner another glacier carved its way down a precipitous slope, or nestled in a high rocky bowl of its own making, one after another after another. I don’t know how many glaciers there are in Evighedsfjord; I stopped counting. There are at least dozens. From one anchorage we counted ten in our immediate, local view.
Toward the head of the fjord, leaving charted waters behind, glacier after glacier poured from cliffed walls, stretching for the water but rarely reaching it. Rocky moraines strewn before them signaled their former greatness, as they each crept back toward higher ground. The head of the fjord, within sight of the inland ice, is too far in for those skiing trips, and the locals fish farther out. I heard the distant roar of melt water tearing down sheer slopes, waterfalls plunging into the fjord, occassional rumbling rockfalls, or thunderous cracks from within the ice. But mostly it was quiet. During our week in the fjord, we saw and heard noone; no people, no boats, no mobile coverage, no radio communications.
Evighedsfjord has some of the most mountainous and icy terrain in west Greenland. I have no idea why it is not a premier tourist destination, rather than an out of the way fjord that few visit bar the super-adventurous or the super-rich. I don’t feel that we’re either. But we do own a boat – our ticket to holiday destinations of the super-rich.
