"In early 1993, the Icelandic photographer Ragnar Axelsson arrived at the most remote settlement in Greenland, a lonely town in the east that is tucked away in the world's largest fjord system, which is usually locked in by ice. The temperature was minus forty degrees, in both Fahrenheit and Celsius-right where the scales converge. Sled dogs howled through the night, a warning against polar bears. The dogs smelled the bears. The bears smelled the children."
"The only other humans who had settled on that side of Greenland were five hundred miles to the south, separated by impassable mountains and glaciers. To the north was nine hundred miles of frozen wilderness, inhabited only by animals and a dozen or so Danish soldiers who were doing two-year shifts on the world's most arduous patrol. To the west was the Greenlandic ice sheet-up to two miles thick and filled with perilous crevasses."
"Growing up in Reykjavík, Axelsson had always wondered what it would be like to experience genuine Arctic extremity. Now, at thirty-five, he flew to a small gravel airfield, built by an oil-prospecting company, about forty kilometres northwest of Ittoqqortoormiit. From there, he boarded a helicopter and flew over the fjord and the mountains to a small heliport above the town-its only access point in or out for most of the year."
In early 1993, Ragnar Axelsson traveled to Ittoqqortoormiit, the most remote settlement in eastern Greenland, where temperatures plunged to minus forty and sled dogs warned of polar bears. The town lies within a vast fjord system usually locked by ice and is isolated by impassable mountains, glaciers, and hundreds of miles of frozen wilderness. The Greenland ice sheet rises to the west, and supply ships from Denmark visit only twice yearly before the pack ice returns. Ittoqqortoormiit means 'place of the large houses.' Axelsson reached the town via a gravel airfield and helicopter and prepared to accompany Inuit hunter Hjelmer Hammeken onto the sea ice.
Read at The New Yorker
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