Walking tour

Steve suggested that I write about our room or the kitchen the four of us share here. He has a good idea, but as I took my evening walk last night, along the river, in the rain, I thought that a walking tour of Kangerlussuaq might really go a long way, for this is such a strange place; difficult for most people to immagine.
First the lay of the land. To the east of us, some 10 miles up a sandy wash boarded jeep track, which tourists pay dearly to ride over in large tundra- tired 4x4s, stands the terminus of the Russle Glacier. One of thousands of outlet glaciers which extend into valleys and rivers and fjords from off of the inland ice cap, the Russle presents itself to us with a wall of calving ice. If you were to start here, at this most dramatic place, you would follow along the old glacial bed now filled by the Watson river. This river, frozen solid a month ago, is now a muddy boil of ice shards and silt. It is running fast, Id guess making at least 15 knots toward the fjord. It snakes through a sandy boulder strewn valley fenced in to the north and south by long intrusions of granitic rock coverde by a thin layer of earth matted by the thick roots of the tundra. You will pass through low areas of moist heath and willow and shrub birch where ponds or lakes lay now empty of ice. The grasses and sedges from last summer stand tawny and stiff, tuffs of matted cotton grass, like so many soggy rabbit tails, mark the edges of these small bodies of still water. You will rise and roll over hills where the tundra will become more dense. Then you will drop again untill finaly you arive at the end of the jeep track at the head of a runway looking directly west out the fjord. Though you will not see the sea, it is there, far away in the shimmering distance.
Turn right and you will walk only a quarter of a mile before you are in the heart of town. There is a post office, a small grocer, a hotel and the airport.
The airport, the largest in Greenland is also the Homeland Rule's largest buisiness. With a population just under 57 000, more than 200 000 people and tons and tons of cargo, move through this municipality of less than 500 citizens every year. The hotel is nothing fancy, though there is a gift shop, which sells ivory carvings, candy bars, post cards and seal skin pocket books. There is a cafe and a 5 star restaurant. The airport is a walk -in off- the street, no security kind of place, though it is dirty and small, (standing room only for an aerbus wait) it is not unusual to rub elbows with other people, mostly Danes, wearing fur jackets, polar bear teeth "aumuelts" or narwhal tusk rings. The counter is just 2 booths long as there is only one choice of carrier. The wood floor is scuffed. Cigarette smoke palls the air. You would check into the hotel from here by turning away from the check in counter and walking 50 feet past the kiosk. When you board the aerbus 330, to return to Europe, (or any of the dash 7 s to fly somewhere else around Greenland) you walk outside and enter the plane from the tail, up a set of portable stairs painted bright yellow.
Across the street which is a pot- holed, puddle -filled, almost two laned road, is the Pillersuisoq, the grocery store. Inside there are 4 aisles no longer than 40 feet long. You can buy sardines, crackers, digestive biscuits, canned beets, UHT milk products, salted licorice, dark rye bricks of bread (our favoite), Danish cheeses, rich butter, weird sandwich meats, seafood spreads (even weirder) , frozen vegatables, whole fishes, whale meat, and plastic children's toys. There is also an assortment of Adidas jogging suits, underwear for him and her, (one brand), sundries and elctronica. Behind the checkout counter, (two registers) you may ask for hard liquor, wine, cigarettes, matches, batteries or fresh baked bread. Remember, all the food, excpet for the fish and whale and baked bread, comes from Denmark, so one must select one's food very carefully by a dicey decyphering game combined of looking at the pictures on the lables and "reading" the ingredients (in Danish). One of our favoite discoveries is, "FRUGTPALAEG", med jordbaer. Ingen konserveringsstoffer. I think this means, " fruit strips, with dates and raisens. All natural fruit preserves". I havent looked it up in the dictionary yet however! These strips of fruit, without anything else added, come packaged like processed cheese slices, with the little pieces of parchement paper between each layer. They are wonderful on the hearty Sweedish WASA crackers along with a smear of Nutella or a hunk of very fine, very aged, Danish cheese. The package is the best part as it is emblazoned by a cartoon monkey hanging from a vine with his finger up his nose.
Above the grocery is the meteorologist's weather station. Facing down the road towards the west, standing in front of the "butikin" (store in Danish) with the airport on your left, you will see some red, one story buildings. This is the complex of Air Greenland's cargo shipping wharehouse and administrative offices. There is aslo a police station, a hostel and some housing. If you were to follow this road for 8 miles, you would come to the harbour. The harbour has no boats in it as it is still frozen. There is only one building here and three landing crafts hauled out on the sand. Once or twice a year a shallow draft freighter visits form Denmark bearing containers of merchandise, construction materials, new cars and trucks and snow machines. Up above from the harbour another few miles, is Kellyville, population 4. Kellyville, deserves its own story later, but is basicly a National Science Foundation mandated Incoherent Scatter Radar sigh. One of only nine in the world.
Let's go back to the end of the jeep track again, with the ice cap at your back and the airport runway in front of you. Take a left. You will now be walking along the fence of the eastern most end of the 9000 foot long runway and the steep sandy bank of the river, where it takes a sharp bend. Before you now lies the part of Kangerlussuaq where most of the people live and sleep and where the children play. This flat, sandy steppe bears the bulk of the hulking old concrete panel buildings and wooden and corrugated metal wharehouses left over by the American and Danish military days. There is a tennis court which probalby has'nt had any "love" since Nixon was president and a modern children's play ground, bright in contrast to the chain link fence and bleached net of the court.
Here on your right built up above the river is a row of buildings that were once barracks. These in order; the RDAF (Royal Danish Air Force) the, Hotel Tuu Tuu, meaning cariobu (pronounced doot doot) the KISS building, the jail, the NY 109Th Air Gaurd's building and The Polar Bear (a convience store/ bar that sells ice cream pops, crackers, cookies and weird sexual gag gifts). There are another three identical buildings (all are about 200 feet long by 50 feet wide and 2 stories tall) which serve as apartment housing for families that work here.
Now you are at the bottom of the street and standing on the bridge which is made of wood, that spans the Watson river. The river pours into the head of the fjord through a narrow gorge of scalloped basalt and empties itslef out into a wide flat plain of reflected cloud, sand bank and water. If you were to keep going from here, you would begin to climb imediately up a steep sandy road either having to turn left, back towards the east, or right out towards the west. Here is the large geological bulwark called Black Hills, ontop of which stands much aviation navigation aids, radars, and radio towers. Ravens are always soaring on the winds up here. It is a fine place to go for views and fresh air or to try and catch a glimpse of musk oxen browsing.
Turn back across the river and walk up the same road you just walked down, heading towards the airport. You will pass a few streets branching off to your right, west down the north bank of the fjord. These streets lead to some homes and more 2 story town- house style company housing projects. They also lead out to wharehouses both abandoned and in use, where the city works, aiport runway equipment, garbage trucks and storage facilites lay . You will pass the recreation center, the bowling alley and a small government building before returning to the tennis courts. Behind the playground, about five hundered feet, stand the two buildings we lease for our cargo/ gear storage. Above all this, on a bank along the south flank of the runway, are the hangers and airport ground crew facilities. Just past the hanger is a small, one story wooden building that has become the Kangerlussuaq museum. Closed for winter hours.
Tired from all of this walking, find the KISS building. Go in the front door, walk down a long carpeted hallway past many closed bright orange doors, up a flight of stairs to room #213. This is our room, a tidy second story 30x20 foot space with a window that looks at somebody else's window on the second story of the hotel tuu tuu. By standing close to the window, which does open, and bending my neck to the east, I can see the river and the hills and the ice cap. This view beckons, but now I must sleep.

Cargo

This morning I awoke to a soft cool rain blowing against our window. Standing out on the back door , facing the river, I could hear the distinct song of the arctic snow bunting, sweet in comparison to the croaking bark of the ravens. For the first time in over a week I have had time now to sit and enter some thoughts. The past days have been full of cargo planes coming and going, some leaving cargo to be further assimilated and sent elsewhere by commercial air, some needing additional pay loads from us, which we had already prepared, and finally the Piece De Resistance, a C5 Galaxy cargo carrier, one of the world's largest cargo planes landed Monday afternoon with close to 200 000 pounds of cargo.
Originally designed to transport close to a million pounds of cargo, the C5 has had to cut back on it's payload due to age and repairs now made prohibitive due to lack of replaceable parts, still, with both fore and aft cargo openings (the nose lifts open like the jaw of a shark) this six story high, football field long air plane is truly remarkable to behold. Working around it causes one to feel very very small like a mote of dust before a star.
We added a few pallets of cargo to the behemoth and this went off without a hitch, which was very pleasing to us, as there had been some very late nights reworking palletized cargo for other lifts on LC 130s. The cargo aboard the C5 was divided between the new tractors and gear needed for the inland traverse from Thule on the NW coast to Summit, and for NEEM, a Danish drilling project located halfway between the points just mentioned.
The goal of the traverse is to prove that it can be done. Already proven in the Antarctic by the South Pole Traverse team, traversing of fuel and supplies seems to be the answer to the rising cost of fuel while also helping to diminish the carbon foot print of operating LC 130s for all of our cargo needs. Already employed in places such as Summit and more often, at smaller field sites, are wind generators and solar panels, but neither of these are yet up to the capacity required to supply enough of the load demanded at places such as Summit.
The NEEM drilling project is hoping to drill to a depth well over 2500 meters over the next three years. The knowledge gained, if successful, from these ice cores will provide the first record of what the earth's climate was like during the last inter glacial period (known as the Eemian)almost 130 000 years BP. Although similar drilling projects have occurred at diffirent sites on the Greenland ice cap, none of these have been able to produce ungarbled Eemian ice. Garbled ice being sedimentary layers of a glacier marbled by bedrock, melt water from the residual core heat of the earth, and friction from the ice cap, etc etc..at any rate I am doing my best to research this one and will keep you abreast of my findings.
Basically, the knowledge from this core, which will be the first of its type will give very clean, very pure climate signals from the onset of the last interglacial period which will deeply enhance "our" abilities to create more accurate climate models predicting the extent of temperature elevations, sea level gain and ice cap and glacial melt.
It is really, very exciting, and the traverse team, known as GRIT (Greenland inland traverse) will be passing through NEEM's camp in mid June; a further boon for a more carbon friendly cargo re supply opportunity over the next few years. The NEEM site does have a ski way capable of landing LC 130s, similar to the one used at Summit, Raven and other places in the Arctic and Antarctic supplied by skied "birds".
Our time here is moving as fast as the cargo we ship and at times, is just as challenging to keep track of. The research being done here in Greenland is amazing and by the end of the day I sometimes find my head spinning with ideas both concerning my work as well as trying to conceptualize at least some, of what the people, whose cargo I am handling, so easily understand.
This work is both an education and juggling act. A logistical arena of comedies and concerns and wonders. The moments of stillness which are special and rare, find the landscape slowly turning towards spring. Brief chances of getting away into the hills are snatched like the treasures they are. We remind ourselves of where we are and what we are doing by pausing on a hill, far above the runway town, to stare at an antler dropped last year by a caribou laying upon a boulder. Moving water is suddenly heard. A narrow slip of melting snow cuts its way down to the river already widening, racing toward the fjord.

Logistic tree.

Were I to be really clever, a true geek, I would draw out a flow chart illustrating how funding comes from the NSF to CPS who then leases space in Kangerlussuaq from a subsidiary company owned and operated by The Greenland Home Rule allowing the four of us based here in Kangerlussuaq to do our work, scan it and post it as a large photo on my blog. However, wording must suffice. But first, a few acronyms should be defined:

The NSF is of course, the national science foundation.
CPS is much abbreviated. The "C" stands for CH2MHill. The "P" for Polar and the "S" for services.

Formerly known as VPR (which was short for VECO Polar resources) the polar resources branch of this banyan tree was recently bought out by CH2MHill.
I must go on; the polar resources part of VECO now the polar services shoot of CH2MHill, is still the same company.

Back around 2004 a group of friends that had been working for many years for the Antarctic program took an opportunity. The contract for the company that the NSF was then funding to do the logistical work on the Antarctic continent at Palmer, McMurdo Station and south pole was coming up for renewal. This group of very talented very dynamic people felt they could branch off and start there own company under the capital umbrella of VECO. They formed VPR and began offering science logistical support all over the top of the world.

If you select the link I have titled as "our company" you will be sent to VPR's site which has not yet been changed to CPS. This site offers links to all of the places in the Arctic where VPR (CPS) provides logistical support.

Gosh, I'm sorry, the first last thing I ever thought Id do was have a blog. The second last thing I ever thought Id do was blog about major corporations; especially corporations that I have only a basic understanding of! To add to this labyrinthine tale of acronymic dialouge, I should point out that we are not paid by any of the companies or corporations mentioned above, but by someone called RTX.

The main office for CPS is in Litttleton CO. There is only a handful of people who work there. All of them will at one point in time or another deploy to Greenland or Alaska or Russia or Svalbard to do field work either as project coordinators, camp managers or intelligently, just to investigate situations and or possibilities for a Principal Investigator. Sometimes a long trip is made just to speak with an actual person about a seemingly impossible air charter to a remote corner of the world.

The reasons for being based out of kangerluusuaq are simple, this is the largest runway in all of Greenland, capable of landing the largest of military cargo aircraft. Today, kangerlussuaq serves as the central hub for all of the country running 4 flights a week every week of the year between Copenhagen and kangerlussuaq, on an Aerobus 333-200 (averaging 249 seats). The annual number of people flying into or through kangerlussuaq is over 200.000. though most continue on aboard a 757 or a Dash 7 to other cities such as Nuuk (the capitol), sisimiut, and Ilullisat, now an UNESCO site or on to villages or settlements. In a country of less than 55.000 people, this is a remarkable statistic.

The massive installation of infrastructure built during WWII, created a plethora of hangers, warehouses, and dormitory style, two story flats. There is even a recreation center and an outdoor tennis court. When the Danes gave up their governance over Greenland, all of these buildings were rolled over into Home Rule ownership. Today everything about Kangerlussuaq is centered around its single lane run way: the airport, the hotel, the workers supporting both, a bit of tourism, one grocer, a pizzaria and us!

Because the NSF contracts the NY air national guard to fly so many missions to Greenland each summer season (late march- late august) and because we need warehouses to hold all of our equipment and supplies (this includes space in a 2000 square foot freezer for food) and because there must be beds and meals and showers and laundry and Internet connections for all of the hundreds of people that will pass through here, Kangerlussuaq, with all of its pre-existing previously vacated buildings and its long runway with plenty of apron space available was a perfect sight.

Gronland

Every morning we start out work by sifting through a fabulous amount of documents, calendars, emails and project allocations. The task lasted until noon today as we are coming upon another busy flight week and so many crinkles and bumps in our information technology needed addressing so we can all be on the same page about so many scientists and field camp workers, their logistics and inventory. It is a humbling call to be a part of a so small group of people who are largely responsible for making research in Greenland possible. It is too easy to get caught up in the dust of the warehouse or the whirring of the hard drive, the declaration of hazardous material's, the counting of sleeping bags and insulated boot liners to recall the true objective; help create an environment at such and such place that is conducive to data collection, food preparation, radio comms and warm safe sleep.
The work of these researchers astounds me. A research scientist must not only go routinely into the challenge of the deep field, but are at home, professors actively teaching and lecturing while raising families, planning expeditions and always, applying for grants, posting web sites, publishing papers. I could dedicate all of my free time, which isn't much here, to pouring over their works. Inspired by their noble struggles for a better global acknowledgement of the importance of there studies, mostly concerning all aspects of climate change, they work for at least some acceptance, if only a small rise in the level of public understanding of what we are all up against in our undoubtedly dramatic future of incredibly awesome, very frightening, definately life changing global cimate flux.
The draw back is that it is difficult to integrate oneself into this already tiny, non traditional, airport worker community. I could start to play indoor soccer with the women's team, but I would much rather hike or ride bikes with Steve. I think baby sitting for a mom with children between the ages of 4 and 12 would be a great way to learn Inuit and Danish, but that's a weird boundary to try and cross with total strangers. We are meeting Danes who work here, some have become lifers, and they are very kind and patient with my Danish, but, are naturally, insulated from the true Greenlandic culture
I read in a tourist magazine, which are always printed in three languages, Greenlandic, Danish and English, that there are 10 golden rules to being a visitor in Greenland:
1. show respect 2. Behave as you would at your own home town 3. Talk with rather than about the people you meet. Try it! 4. Respect peoples private lives (property boundaries) 5. Ask permission before taking a photo. Hesitation means NO! 6. Cairns are trail markers, road signs. Do not disturb 7. Do not litter 8.Only camp in towns proper where it is allowed 9. participate in community life 10. Don't approach dogs. They are working animals not pets.
So I am forging ahead with my attempts to make conversation, at least in Danish to begin with. I want to talk specifically with the women about there lives here in this funny modern town. What settlement did they come from? Do they miss it? Do they enjoy working security at the airport? I want to ask the teenagers about their cell phones and punk rock accessories, what kind of music do they like, do they like school? Are they interested in science, do they ever go skiing, dog sledding, hunting?
In the setting sun of this evening's after diner stroll I watch a small girl slide down the playground slide. She screams with effervescent joy. A boy plays with a soccer ball demonstrating talent. A group of children nearby pull at things that are still frozen somewhat into the ground but are becoming very loose, like wiggling a baby tooth that wants to give. They cannot see me for I am standing in the rays of the last slanted light. Their laughter and play talk is so familiar, almost a memory. They play unmonitored by any adults or teenage siblings. I do not need any translation, nor would one suffice, for the meaning of their happiness.