Vikings: Gardar and Brattahlid

The next two days in Greenland were more simple than the previous days, yet at the end of the day we were still exhausted!

We were greeted in the breakfast cafeteria by Jacky, our go-to-guy who runs the Narsarsuaq Museum, boat tours, camps around the fjord, and other properties in the surrounding towns. A stockier guy from the French Alps, Jacky meant business, and I really got the feeling that a group of geologists were not at the top of his list. He always seemed rushed and very frank. Nice guy, though. So Jacky came into the cafeteria and asked why we weren't ready yet. He was chartered to boat us across the fjord to the town of Qassiarsuk and then pick us up later in the day. He was very hurried, however, to get to the town of Igaliku where all of the Greenlandic Government Ministers were having a planning retreat. Sometime during the night, the heaters in the Ministers' cabins broke and they were left in the cold. We were planning the next day to go to Igaliku, so we asked Jacky if it would be better if we did our Igaliku day first and the Qassiarsuk day second. Clearly is was alright by him and he hurried us to get our stuff.

The boat ride across the fjord did not take very long as Jacky was determined to get there as soon as possible. He dropped us off at a little dock and then drove off to put his boat in deeper water. The weather was chilly, but not terribly cold and we started off on our 3km trek across an isthmus between two fjords. The countryside here was beautiful and drastically different than other places we'd hiked so far in that you could tell farming was the main operation - sheep farming, to be specific - and while it was at times smelly, the hike was not difficult.

Our transportation unit for the next few days

Just an iceberg. No biggie

Climbing up from the boat to the dock

Probably the biggest sheep farm in the area

Igaliku

Igaliku is more famously known as Gardar, a Viking establishment settled in AD 985. Gardar is where the first Epicopal Bishop set up shop in Greenland in AD 1124. The town is literally built up around and built using the Gardar ruins, which include barns for cows (which seems to be a must-have for the Vikings), a cathedral, the Bishop's residence, storage warehouses, and the legal and ceremonial courts. The Vikings settled this area during the time of the Medieval Warm Period, a time when the climate in these reaches of the Arctic were warmer than they currently are. This allowed the Vikings to use the land for crop-farming. However, the Norse left the region in AD 1450 as the climate began cooling during the "Little Ice Age." When the Vikings left, Inuit Greenlanders settled the area and used it as home-base for fishing and sea-mammal hunting. The Norse took over the area again in the late 1700s and crop-farming was relocated to other areas in Greenland and sheep-breeding and farming became the predominant trade...which is why our walk was a little smelly....

Sheep and cemetery on the way to Igaliku

Igaliku

Viking ruins at Gardar

The Bishop's Tomb at Gardar

Footprint ruins of the Cathedral at Gardar

Paul, Dylan, and Jeremy at the Gardar ruins

Gardar

Igaliku

Eating lunch on the ruins at Gardar

After a brief lunch on the ruins, shared with the sheep who seem to have free reign of the town, we started a short hike around the end of the fjord to collect some sediment from a stream emptying into it. Sheep were kind of everywhere. If polar bears were wise, they'd not even worry about hunting seals through sea ice and come here. We found a series of old beach deposits that were at one time right at sea level but are now well above sea level. This happens naturally as the ice sheet recedes and the land kind rebounds from being pressured down from the weight of the ice.

We were on a deadline to get back to the hotel's cafeteria by 7:45, after which they closed. We got sidetracked a bit taking samples, during which time the weather kicked up and we experienced our second Greenlandic snowstorm. This one did not let up, and an hour later our gloves were soaked and we realized we were going to be late for our rendezvous back at the boat docks. Jacky was not going to be happy. So with backpacks full of bags of sediment and rocks, we started hoofing it back the 3km to the boat docks. It was absolutely the most tired I felt the entire time we were in Greenland, but as luck would have it, Jacky and two women and a dog came driving down the road from Igaliku and offered us a ride back to the boat. Again, he didn't really seem very happy to help us, but his women-friends were very nice and chatted with us as we bumped our way back down the road. We made it back to the cafeteria with few minutes to spare, and luckily, the kitchen was still open! We all showered and went to bed exhausted.

Our sampling stream

The fjord with some buildings from the town in the lower right

More sheep

Snow storms over the fjord

Snow over Igaliku

Igaliku before the snows

Igaliku during the storm

We took our time the next morning, knowing that we really did not have much left to do. Jacky was nowhere to be found, but we had arranged to meet him around mid-day. So in the morning our group split up to get two more samples from the immediate Narsarsuaq vicinity. Jeremy and Paul hiked up to the glacier to get some sand while Dylan and I climbed a little ridge to get some rock. Dylan and I were finished first, so we went back into town to arrange our boat ride to Quassiarsuk with Jacky. He still was not around, but we left a message with a Danish backpacker who was also waiting on Jacky. We figured we would then go to the grocery store to find some boxes we could use to ship all of our samples back. The funny thing about buildings (and I assume people, too) in the Arctic is that they look so unassuming from the outside because they are weathered and worn but when you go inside, it is like you never left the modernized world! The grocery store had your typical Greenlandic fare, but also had kiwi fruit, green peppers, zucchini, and apples and oranges - not to mention the DJ Hero video game system and wine from all over the world!

Ruins of an old US Army base in Narsarsuaq. It was rumored that during the Korean War, injured soldiers were brought here to recuperate rather than in the US to keep negative sentiment toward the war low.

The outside of the Narsarsuaq grocery store.

The inside of the grocery store. Not too unusual.

We finally found Jacky and threw our bags in the back of his van and braced ourselves for the short, but death-defying, drive down to his boats at the harbor. Imagine going 60 mph in a 20 zone and taking sharp corners! The boat ride was quick and we made plans for Jacky to pick us up further down the fjord later in the day. Jacky was excited when he saw us because he had a story. Just a few hours earlier that day in Igaliku, the town we were in the day before, people came across a polar bear sleeping down on a rock sticking out into the fjord. It was suspected that the bear was living in the area, feeding off of sheep...sheep in the farms we were walking through to get our samples. The bear, though docile when it was found, endangered the local people and their livestock, and so it was shot and killed since it could not be relocated. I asked Jacky if this happened often and what they do with the animal. He said it was extremely rare in Igaliku but not unheard of and that a professional butcher was already en route to Igaliku to cut up the animal and parts of it were shipped to all of the smaller coastal town nearby. So even though we didn't get to see the polar bear, had we kept to our original plan and sampled in Igaliku the day after Qassiarsuk, we would have seen it! Instead, I like to think that while we were collecting the samples, the bear was hunting us through the snow storm!

Qassiarsuk is a very small town whose main source of business is sheep farming...so it smelled terrible! Other than sheep farming, Qassiarsuk is also famous for being the site of Erik the Red's original settlement, Brattahlid. Right in town there is an extensive Viking ruins complex as well as the site of the first church built in North America.

Monument to Erik the Red in Qassiarsuk

Statue of Erik the Red watching over Qassiarsuk

Walking around the ruins at Brattahlid

A modern art exhibit attached to the rocks at Brattahlid representing various Norse symbols and patterns of building foundations at the ruins.

Looking down over the Brattahlid ruins

Brattahlid

Just across the street from the Brattahlid ruins is a reconstruction of a traditional Greenlandic hut. We had lunch there and drank our near-beers (1/2% alcohol), using the rocks of the building as bottle openers! Also nearby is the site of Thjolhilde's Church, the first church built in North America. An archeological dig nearby found the remains of some of the first Christians. Nearby, there is a reconstruction of what the church would have looked like next to a reconstruction of Erik the Red's house.

The foundations of Tjoldhilde's Church in Qassiarsuk

A reconstruction of Tjoldhilde's church

Reconstruction of Erik the Red's house

The walk from Qassiarsuk down the fjord was beautiful and we made it to our destination in a few hours and Jacky came to pick us up. The tide was out and there were no docks so we used a little rock jetty that got us out into about two feet of water. Jacky was not pleased that he had to put his boat into such shallow water, but we made it and were soon back at the cafeteria in time for dinner.

As we got back to Narsarsuaq, we saw a C130 land and a bunch of NATO men exiting. As it turns out, their plane was destined for a different city in Greenland, but due to the eruption of the Grimsvold volcano in Iceland, the plane was rerouted. The eruption also affected our return plans to Kangerlussuaq and threatened to strand us for another few weeks.