LEFT TO RIGHT All aboard. Jess waits for Ben to pick her up in the dinghy after evening turns in Greenland’s eerie waning light. Photo: Sophie Danison “Jess makes her way down from our fist Greenlandic summit of the 2019 trip, a several-thousand-foot run on perfect corn in the receding daylight. We would often find ourselves skiing late into the evening with the long days of spring in effect at that high latitude.” Photo: Joey Schusler MORNING FINALLY CAME , and with it another ski day. Our anchor had held and water conditions had improved, but the snow was another story entirely. Conditions in Greenland are variable—every day and every zone another adventure. It wasn’t all powder—in fact most of it wasn’t. We had put all of our snow skills to the test on white ice, breakable crust and deep isothermal snowpack to enjoy a few buttery soft turns. Still, sometimes that reward was worth it, for instance our first descent of the Narcolarctic Couloir. Named after our zero-sleep sail (and the vomit-splashed decks that stained our collective memory), the 4,000-foot shot skied right to the ocean. After failing to climb it on our first attempt, our second-day success was that much sweeter. Atop the line, taking in the mile-wide river of ice pouring from the ice sheet, tears flowed freely from my eyes before freezing to my cheeks. Spanning over 660,000 square miles and reaching depths of almost 10,000 feet, it was part of an ice-sheet system between Greenland and Antarctica accounting for nearly 99 percent of the world’s freshwater. Now we were here among it, sliding across the ice to reach one of the best runs of our trip. Flirting with the Arctic Circle, we initiated turns in sunset light, each arc appearing to be the last before darkness came. But that close to the North Pole the sun waltzed along a mountainous ho-rizon line, pulsing between peaks as the symphony of colors lasted for hours on end. And so we skied breathless, basking in pink and yellow light—thousands of feet down to a sailboat anchored next to a glacier wall, visions of stormy seas temporarily obscured by mind-blowing lines. Those good memories were often the I fuel needed to keep going. In many ways, this expedition pushed me to my maximum. One day I caught myself scribbling, “I’m sick of being scared,” into my onboard journal. I wasn’t craving that sort of fear-saturated adventure, but there I was, without an anchor, without power, heading toward a 40-knot Arctic storm. There’s nothing easy about sailing at the 65 th parallel, and that difficulty is multiplied aboard a sustainable vessel like the Eco-Knut. But, truly reliant upon Mother Nature and no longer able to continue forward burning fossil fuels, we embraced the struggle as a necessary one—one to protect this place that had been seared into our collective brains forever. Ben saw it, and we willingly went along for the ride, sometimes chart-ing beautiful unskied lines, but more often than not holding onto whatever piece of ship we could grab to avoid being flung into the icy ocean. In the end, it was his vision, the pursuit of Greenland’s power at its most honest, that became our true adventure. 062 The Ski Journal
The Ski Journal Volume 16, Issue 3: Page 62
