S T A N D I N G W a V e s
seeinG GReen
PERCHED LARGELY ABOVE the Arctic Circle
between the 60th and 85th parallels, Greenland
stores 10 per cent of the earth’s freshwater re-
serves in the form of a giant ice cap slowly melting
into the sea. The island’s rivers flow straight off this
ice cap, tumbling furiously down mountainsides
and into barren valleys home only to caribou and
the occasional stray polar bear.
SAMPLING THE WHITEWATER WEALTH OF GREENLAND
Yet Greenland is also the birthplace of kayak-
ing. The first qajaqs were constructed of sealskin
stretched over driftwood and bone 2,000 years ago.
Since then, generations of the native Inuit people
have paddled, hunted and fished along the island’s
treacherous coastline using these seafaring crafts.
One place they never ventured was inland to ply
the rivers. They simply had no reason to.
In 2007, English adventurers Ali Marshall and
Simon Tapley became the first paddlers to explore
Greenland’s largely untracked interior in search of
runnable whitewater. The two-man expedition was
challenged by the difficulty of running adequate
safety on the river, viscious weather and sketchy
information and transportation.
“We’d gamble on valleys sometimes three days’
walk away to find all the gradient lost in big falls
too high to paddle,” says Marshall.
The hit-or-miss nature of their six-week expedi-
tion only made the reward of good whitewater that
much greater. After sailing down the island’s west
coast with a great Danish cod fisherman in a boat
called Nardvhalen—and later being rescued by
the same when a storm blew their tent and kit into
the sea—the men launched a two-week assault on
the rivers flowing into the Bjornesund Fiord.
“It was a true wilderness at least 100 kilome-
tres from other people,” says Marshall. “It really
summed up the reasons we came to Greenland:
warm weather melting a seemingly infinite snow
pack, smooth ancient granite and good gradient.”
The promise of more undiscovered whitewater
lured Marshall and Tapley back to Greenland in the
summer of 2008, this time better prepared and with
the addition of two more paddling friends, Mike
Scutt and Graham Milton. The short, plastic creek
boats they brought with them—evolved from the
ancient qajaq design to perform in a different me-
dium—were nearly unrecognizable to the locals.
“We stopped in Qaqortoq where a man hand
crafted traditional Inuit kayaks,” Scutt recalls. A
thriving local qajaq club let the visitors try their
seaworthy speed machines but declined an offer
Gnarly walls and narwhals.
to demo the team’s strangely-shaped, garishly-co-
loured boats. “They laughed at our plastic white-
water boats,” continues Scutt.
The English paddlers described their experi-
ences to the qajaq club. How they had spent two
weeks crossing fiords, walking over land, hitch-
ing rides on tractors and quad bikes and being
dropped off by speedboat at the mouth of a brown,
silty river churning through an impassable canyon.
They told the Inuit kayakers about the arduous trek
up around the canyon into a tributary full of water-
falls, smooth slides and beautiful, blue snow-melt
water. After showing the local paddlers footage of
running a long, steep slide, Milton told them that
all the pain and struggle to get there was worth it
P
for that moment of ecstasy he felt in the pool look-
hoto
ing back at that monster.
S The locals’ reaction? “I think part of our descrip-
ali
SD
tions were lost in translation,” says Milton. —Simon
ai
R M
Tapley
a
RS
View the expedition in its entirety in the film 60 Degrees North by Fat
the second assault.
hall
Cats Productions.
12 Rapid early summer 2009
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