Scoresby Sund

Scoresby Sund is the kind of place that resists the photographs you take of it, which is the highest compliment I know how to pay a landscape. It is the largest fjord system in the world, a branching network of channels that reaches some 350 kilometres inland from Greenland’s east coast, and it is so remote that the only human settlement on its shores, Ittoqqortoormiit, has a few hundred residents and a name that I practised for a week and still cannot say cleanly. We came in on a small expedition ship after a flight to a gravel airstrip and a helicopter transfer, the sort of multi-leg journey that turns getting there into half the story.

A scale that refuses to compute

The icebergs here are not the icebergs of postcards. Because the glaciers that feed the fjord calve enormous tabular slabs, and because the inner channels are sheltered enough for them to ground and sit for years, you end up drifting among floating islands of ice the size of city blocks, some of them flat-topped and as tall as apartment buildings, sculpted underneath into colours of blue I had no vocabulary for. Our captain cut the engine one afternoon in a side channel and we simply drifted, and the only sounds were the occasional crack and groan of ice settling and, once, the deep concussive boom of a distant calving that we felt in our chests before we heard it.

Lia, who is not given to grand pronouncements, stood at the rail and said quietly that she felt like a rounding error. That is exactly it. The geology compounds the effect — the fjord walls are basalt, banded in horizontal layers of black and rust, rising sheer from the water to flat summits dusted with snow even in August. There is no scale reference anywhere, no trees, no buildings, nothing of human size, so your eye keeps misjudging distances by a factor of ten.

Ittoqqortoormiit, the last settlement

The town itself is a cluster of brightly painted wooden houses on a brown hillside, the most isolated inhabited place in the Arctic by some measures — the nearest town of any size is hundreds of kilometres away and reachable only by air or, for a narrow window each year, by sea. The buildings are painted in reds and blues and yellows partly, I was told, so that they can be found in the white-out of winter. We walked the few streets in a cold wind, watched sled dogs chained in groups eyeing us with professional disinterest, and bought nothing because there was almost nothing to buy.

A hunter we spoke to through our guide described a life still organised around seals, narwhal, and polar bears, the bears being a genuine daily concern rather than a tourist’s fantasy — you do not wander beyond the town alone, and people carry rifles the way I carry a phone. It was a useful corrective to my comfortable visitor’s awe. This is not wilderness as scenery. It is wilderness as the actual circumstance of the people who live in it.

Scoresby Sund is realistically only accessible in the brief late-summer window, roughly August into early September, when the sea ice clears enough for ships to enter. Almost everyone arrives on a small expedition cruise; independent travel is possible but genuinely difficult, weather-dependent, and not to be improvised.