East Greenland

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Read the behind the scenes story – audio transcribed:

So, Greenland is somewhere I have always dreamed of going. And in 2019, we’d got a trip booked and unfortunately the weather turned over Ilulissat and our flight was cancelled and I was devastated because I’d got the deal of a lifetime that I know would never, ever happen again because it was advertised incorrectly at about 25% of the normal price. And, I’d emailed to book, and they had come back to say that there was an error in the advert, but because I had seen that they were happy to honour it and book my trip, so we couldn’t believe how we felt we’d lucked out in getting this trip booked at an absolute deal and then Mother Nature decided that it wasn’t to be.

So we ended up on that trip because we had to, you have to fly to either Iceland or Denmark to fly to Greenland and connect through those countries. And so we ended up looking at the map. The weather looked amazing in the north of Iceland, and so we had four days of sunshine and clear skies up there, which was incredible, and like, that was the first day some of the waterfalls that opened after winter. Because it was April, we were going and we were actually due to fly to Greenland on my birthday.

And so instead we’d driven north and after a really beautiful day where we hiked to a couple of waterfalls and then randomly one of the park rangers there had picked us up and driven us into a canyon in his Superjeep, which we would have been the first people to go up there in winter. And he said, because you’ve got all the gear, he said, I can drop you up there, I’m just starting to make the tracks today, but you’ve got to then hike back, it’s about 3km. So we’d already hiked about 16km that day, ended up going to a spa, and just as we were nestling into these really beautiful baths at Myvatn, and a group of schoolkids came in and the school teacher was like, kids, if you want the hot spot, it’s here. And I was like, that sounds so like my geography teacher from school. And I said to Mark, he’s like, no way. We’re like eight hours from Reykjavík here, there’s no way there’s like, that’s that’s true. So I called his name out, and he’s like oh, me again. I’m famous again, am I? And got chatting. Sure enough, it was my geography teacher from school and I was sort of like, I can’t believe you’re here because I feel like I’m now completing geography.

Because I did geography at university, purely because I loved it so much because of how he taught it. And then geography has connected people and place and planet for me. And all of those stories between, you know, nature and the science and the social side and the meaning and the purpose and the psychology and the why, it absolutely fascinates me.

And so as a geographer, I feel that photography is almost like an extension of that, that way of seeing as a geographer and interpreting the world and I just get to kind of document and distil that with photography. So I said to him, yeah, like you’re the reason I’m here. Like, and so, I said, you got a lot to answer for, and we just had a lovely chat. And so it was really magical. I feel like I literally completed geography, by meeting, bumping into my old geography teacher in Iceland, which is, you know, one of the most like, kind of geography heartlands of, in the world with the, the fact that you can see nature in its most raw form in action.

So it wasn’t to be for Greenland on that trip, but what happened was quite special and this is such a story of a detour because later in 2019, we were going to Canada and our flight got delayed, by about two hours, which was quite frustrating because we were landing really quite late. And then we had a four hour drive the other end, and it was going to be snowing as well. So, it was one of those kind of, urgh, kind of journeys unfolding.

However, as we, so I always book a window seat, as we were flying north, I mean, we were like over Scotland. I could see then the Outer Hebrides, and then we tracked along, like the south coast of Iceland. But where we were flying at 38,000ft, you could always see, like across the whole of Iceland. You could make out all of the ice caps on the glaciers, you could see the rivers going in, like Thingvellir National Park and making out the lakes. And then the shapes of all of the peninsulas around Reykjavik, Snaefellsnes.

It was absolutely incredible and so I’ve got some lush pictures there, and it was all in this pink red light because it was hitting, last light. But of course, we’re travelling west, as is the light. So we stayed with that light for hours, and I was so excited by what I shot with Iceland, I actually got my laptop out and I was like, looking at all the pictures because I love Iceland so much and was just I hadn’t ever seen it like that. Almost like looking like a kind of Google satellite view of the whole country.

And then I looked out the window because suddenly I could see everyone down the plane had kind of gone bright red and loads of people on our side of the plane, and we were right above Greenland on the East Coast, and we were hitting an icefield on the edge of Greenland. And this picture, I just can’t believe that we got to see Greenland like this when, you know, we were meant to have been in Greenland earlier that year.

But this picture to me, I feel it’s one of those I can’t really put into words how much I love this image and just how special it is in terms of how brutal the Arctic can be, how varied it can be, how variable, sorry, it can be. And, you know, sometimes, like we had experienced those best laid plans, are ones that are completely taken away from you because Mother Nature is deciding, our, kind of, our fate.

And so to have had that experience flying there, and we flew across the whole of the Greenland ice sheet to the West coast, and then you got to the West Fjords, where you can start to see all of the glacier tongue going into, down into like sea fjords. It was just mind bending to have flown across Greenland in that way.

And that is one of the images from that incredible moment. One day I hope I’ll get there.