road trip

On Saturday, Sparky loaded up the old Ford 4x4 and drove a group of us up to the edge of the ice cap. There is a long, sandy road that winds out of Kangerlussuaq along the Watson river to where the rock and heath end and the ice begins. A few miles before one parks, abruptly against the wall of seracs, the road turns into a jeep track. Muddied and rutted, steep and boggy, any attempt to drive out here is certainly not for the unordained - offroader; it is an experiment in the physics of torsional chassis dynamics and luck. We made it to the Russel's glacier just as the sun erupted from the overcast sky.
Covering the rock is a soil that is only about a foot deep. In this soil grows a variety of heaths and shrubs, flowers, sedges, grasses, lichens, moss, fungi, and the rhododendron, Lapponica. The tiny purple trusses of this northern most rhododendron are just beginning to open, some in full display, a bright, transparent purple flower smaller than the thumb.
All around in the air, birds chirped, flies buzzed, wind tickled the senses. Beside us, leaned the glacier's exposed, decaying, fragmented edge. Lacerated shards of blue so deep and clear and dull and scrathced and broken, yet sharp; threatening, beckoning.
From underneath roared water. It came from hollowed caves. It poured out from crevasses over quartz veined gneiss.It tumbled gray with silt, turquoise with light. We all stood waiting for a piece of the glacier to release itself to time aided by gravity, undermined by these waters, but none were ready to fall.
We hiked along the edge over barren rock towards a lake as silent and calm as a secret.
Steve and I had brought along our bikes. WE left the group of glaciologists and hydrologists that Sparky had brought out for the day, and headed back the 30 km to town. We passed a place in the road that seemed otherworldly. Rock and glacier, storm building sky, and an earth reveling in the glories of spring. Dust stirred through the air. No noise but the wind, creaking ice. Cairns built long ago, rumored burial grounds, lakes resistive to breezes, reflecting stone and cloud and blue and flashes of the sun.
Along the way we met a pair of travelers also out on bikes. A man an women. She from Denmark, he from Kurdistan. He had been rented the most pitiful bike I had ever seen go so far away from any help. The rim had been split, the rubber on the tire was lacerated and cut and broken down by UV rays. The tube had been punctured and they had no repair kit.
Luckily we had our bike tools and tube patches. We also had a first aid kit. The man with the flat had some string. I used 2 steri strips to hold the tape inside the rim together to keep the spoke screw heads from poking the tube. Steve patched the tire. WE cut strips from a felt cloth to line the inside of the tire, further protecting the tube, then I lashed string around the worst of the tire to give it new tread. I had taken 2 bike pumps for some readon this day, so we could afford to lend them one.
Later that night, back in Kangerlussuaq, they returned the pump to us. They had been able to ride out the whole way!