The huts of northeast Greenland

Shuffling in my warm sleeping bag, I wondered who had slept on this small wooden bed before me. Who had seen out dark, cold winters in this one small room, cramped in here with a fellow hunter? What were their stories when this was their home? Now it was my home for the night – a black felt-roofed hut in northeast Greenland.

The northeast Greenland National Park is an area of almost a million square kilometres, about one a half times the size of France. And while noone lives permanently north of Ittoqqortoormiit, at seventy degrees north, hundreds of small huts are scattered up and down the coast and fjords. The huts are the physical memory of a recent history of northeast Greenland. Most of them were built by Danish and Norwegian fox trappers in the first half of the twentieth century, to support their trapping expeditions – expeditions that would run through the winter and feed the lucrative European fur trade. Some huts are now only splintered and scattered wooden boards, torn to shreds by powerful storms, and by bears. But some huts are in prime condition, in large part because of Nanok volunteers. ‘Nanok’ers are mainly old Sirius military patrol guys who can’t get Greenland out from under their skin. Each year they visit and restore these old huts, in the process restoring an important part of Greenland’s history. Some huts are just a shelter from the wind, barely tall enough to stand in, some have more than one room, mattressed beds, tables, lamps. But each that is still sound will hold a stove with fuel, and a matchbox with one or two matches placed carefully in the mouth, ready to strike. So that even someone stumbling in with frozen fingers might still be able to light that precious stove, and wake up again tomorrow.