Fifty words for snow: A micro-expedition to Scoresby Sound

'Nutaryuk' ('fresh snow') and 'Muruaneq' ('soft deep snow'). The Arctic Inuit have over fifty words for snow and ice in their Inuktitut language, reflecting its importance in everyday life. This was, however, fewer than the amount of superlatives I could muster as we first sailed into an alley of icebergs off the Eastern Greenland coast. 

As the setting sun began its nightly three-hour smoulder in the world's most extensive fjord system at Scoresby Sound, all nine of my fellow passengers were out on the raised metal bow of the MV Vikingfjord - an indomitable, now retrofitted small vessel from 1974. "Let's go play with some icebergs," John Rodsted, our Australian expedition leader, had said before our experienced Russian sea captain, Sergey, pirouetted us around the bergs. With sheer faces streaked by inky-blue freshwater veins, some of the icebergs rose forty to fifty metres high. Sometimes, they have acquired a chalky blue appearance, but they are mostly brilliant white, glistening like moulds of fine porcelain. The more translucent glassy ice was hundreds of thousands of years old. All were drifting south, like ghostly apparitions of the Mary Celeste, breaking away from Greenland's ever-receding glaciers - iced tongues that protrude from the island's colossal ice sheet.

The excitement of these supernatural forms induced a childlike game on the deck of assigning silly names to them. Emilie, a Parisian photographer, was adamant she could see a boot and a couch, while my interpretations stretched to Mr Whippy (a famous ice cream) and a Sphinx with no head. Every other iceberg drew comparisons with Cathedrals and citadels, their massive, straight, and impenetrable walls capped by fractured tops weathered into churchlike spires and belltowers. 

There is no doubt their sense of immensity was enhanced by the small size of our vessel. On a large cruise ship with a dozen decks, you could look down on these icebergs from high and almost certainly from afar as your vessel exercised titanic caution. Yet I was on a micro-expedition vessel. Up close and personal to these icy leviathans. Close enough to shiver at their chill and feel diminutive in their behemoth presence. With just six double cabins and four decks, the 42 metre-long MV Vikingfjord was a nimble and intimate way to explore East Greenland’s indented fjordic coastline. The ship’s shallow draft enabled it to get close to the shoreline to launch on a whim our two zodiacs for excursions on land, and with two expedition staff plus eight crewmembers, the ratio for passengers to staff was almost 1:1, so service and flexibility was excellent. Environmentally, small was undoubtedly beautiful as the ship’s updated propulsion ensured 95% of harmful Nitrogen Oxides were removed at the source.

That theme of being less impactful due to our small size was extended during landings when we encountered the sole Inuit community of our eight-day voyage and when we went ashore to seek out always watchful wildlife. “With a maximum of six people per zodiac (typically ten on larger vessels), expeditions to land are a more intimate experience,” said Lewis Morcombe, who is on my voyage. He is an expedition specialist for the company that has chartered Vikingfjord for East Greenland’s short summer season when the coast is mainly free from sea ice from early August to October. “When making a landing, you don’t feel like you are intruding on a landscape in the same way a ship carrying one hundred passengers would. And when visiting in small numbers, local communities are more receptive as you are not overrunning their settlement,” he added.

Shortly after boarding Vikingfjord offshore of Eastern Greenland’s most northerly airport, a compacted dirt runway at Constable Point, we first visited a tongue-twister of a settlement called Ittoqqortoomiit at the marine entranceway into Scoresby Sound. During the brief summer months, small vessels such as Vikingfjord easily enter its broad bay, even as a few icebergs loiter close to land. We’d planned to visit Ittoqqortoomiit and its 360 hardy souls near the end of our voyage, yet a storm in the Greenland Sea forced us to seek shelter. Along Greenland’s 2700-kilometre coast, just 3000 people live out a remote existence. Many are Tunumiit Inuit, who have a dialect that is distinctive to those from the more populous West Greenland coast. Ittoqqortoomiit’s residents are blocked in by sea ice for nearly nine months yearly, although a helicopter maintains a winter link to the outside world. Their isolation is inescapable, with the nearest settlement on the coast 800 kilometres away south.

Behind a pretty façade of prefabricated houses painted brightly mustard-yellow, blue, grassy green, and mauve is a gritty working town. It has embraced tourism to a limited degree yet makes few concessions to outsiders regarding gentrification. With a rough map and no local guides available as they’d gone hunting, I wandered around, meeting only a few locals buzzing by on quadbikes. The skins of musk ox and polar bears - the latter of which the local Inuit have a quota to hunt - hung drying in the cold breeze. The skulls of both species are positioned around town as trophies of animals where every morsel will be used as food and to make clothing. I saw concessions to the modern world. Mobile phones have reached people’s pockets, yet this is a frontier town still embracing its past hunting traditions to secure fresh meat. Nowadays, there is a well-stocked convenience store, although a local told me once a larger cruise vessel had arrived and bought up all the fresh fruit in it, much to local consternation, even if a sole banana does cost €2. Seeing Ittoqqortoomiit on a small expedition felt like a far lighter touch as we were scarcely noticed.

The decision to head into Scoresby Sound early proved correct as, by now, the Greenland Sea had been whipped into a frenzy. Again, a smaller craft offers more flexibility to tinker with our itinerary as we went. Scoresby Sound, at 370 kilometres long, is an immense nebulous network of seawater fjords gouged out during successive Ice Ages. Hundreds of valley glaciers leak glacial sediments into the fjords, turning them into effervescent turquoise. 

Life onboard is fluid and comfortable. With a smaller vessel, less thought is required to where to harbour each evening, so we travelled with few restraints. With 20 hours of daylight at 70ºN, I rose early, swaddled in warm gear, to the bow with a mug of hot coffee to try to spot wildlife. I delighted in the kittiwakes swinging around the ship in a pendulous flight and little auks revving up like paddle steamers to avoid Vikingfjord. The cold was excoriating, yet I was uplifted by the silent, frigid beauty of sawtoothed mountains and glaciers. After a while, the smell of fresh bread baked by the American chef, Josh, lured me back into the galley for breakfast.

Excursions off the ship occurred daily, usually after lunch and before two-course evening dinners featuring ingredients acquired from around the Arctic, such as the lingonberries in my sorbet. Excursions included zodiac cruises to spot wildlife: we explored the narrow channels around the bare-rock Bjorne Islands one day to encounter a frantic arctic tern colony, and a dozing bearded seal flopped out on a floating chunk of ice. At other times, we hiked along the flower and berry-rich tundra and along beaches that were either roughly stoned or sandy, where we swam (more a five-second dip and scream) and collected tidal plastic litter including ghost nets washed up from the ocean, which we removed back to Vikingfjord for eventual clean disposal. By night, although it was slightly too early (I travelled in late August), we hoped for the Northern Lights and marvelled at sparkling starry galaxies when the sky was clear. If you want to experience Aurora borealis, I’d recommend travelling as late as possible during the East Greenland cruise season for darker skies on voyages that often include a specialist photographer.

It is also essential travelling here to manage expectations regarding encountering wildlife. I had polar bears and narwhals at the top of my wishlist for the trip but saw neither. There was a brief flurry of excitement when entering the North East Greenland National Park, further up the coast - 18 hours sailing from Ittoqqortoomiit. Turning into the mighty King Oscar Sound, past mountainous fjord walls banded by purple sandstone, Captain Sergey exclaimed from the bridge ‘two bears at twelve o’clock’. The suspected Ursa were far away but induced a frenzied scramble to the bridge. Eventually, my 600mm zoom lens picked out two white glacially-deposited boulders. I was hoping also to break my duck on narwhals. During many Arctic sea voyages, I’d failed to see these famed unicorn whales, but this did not change on the voyage. Inuit still have a quota to hunt, and these secretive cetaceans remain elusive.  

There were, however, exciting animal encounters ahead in the national park, which, at nearly one million square kilometres, is the largest protected reserve on Earth and completely uninhabited. As we probed further into the labyrinth of fjords during springy hikes across tundra flowering with crowberries, we encountered small musk ox herds. “Stick together,” said Mette Eliseussen, the Norwegian assistant expedition leader, during a walk at Karl Jakobsen Bay. “If the male sees a single person alone, he may charge thinking it’s a rival”. 

Our encounter was peaceful, however. I felt awe at their size in such a spartan environment, wondering how these bison-like heavyweights can bulk up to 400kg on such sparse tundra pickings. As we watched them grazing from a safe distance away, ring-tailed plovers’ plaintive calls caught the Arctic wind and snow buntings scudded by like frantic snowballs.

The flexibility of a small vessel was never so evident when, on a whim in the national park as the sun shone, we quickly moored and had both zodiacs off the ship within 15 minutes. This was our final excursion into the park at a place called Hulm Bay, where a 1932 wooden fur trappers hut defies Greenland’s visceral winters and the tundra inland gave way to a glorious braided river resembling a Celtic silverware broach, hurrying from a glacier. The low sun fashioned a dazzling and abstract monochromatic landscape that sheltered as we trekked along a riverbank a grey-furred Arctic fox that broke its perfect camouflage and jogged away until unseen. 

Such fleeting snapshots of wildlife are a product of the immensity of the East Greenlandic coast, as seeking animals without the tracking skills of the Inuit is somewhat like finding a needle in a haystack. Yet, as we sailed back to Constable Point to disembark, I was certain that the best way to truly experience the heartbeat of this coastline and to feel its nuanced subtlety is to do so by small vessel. Throughout, I wondered how many superlatives existed in Inuktitut for majestic.