Preparing for The Arctic Circle Trail

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Preparing for The Arctic Circle Trail

It is drawing closer to the time when I will need to pack my trusted rucksack for another adventure. The spare room is amass with equipment all to be packed in a bag I'll carry on my back for nearly three weeks. The vast majority of the cluttered kit pile consists of packet after packet of dehydrated food.
<table class="tr-caption-container" style="float: right; text-align: right;" cellspacing="0" cellpadding="0"><tbody><tr><td style="text-align: center;"></td></tr><tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;">One of a handful of tiny camping huts on the ACT</td></tr></tbody></table>
This time, I'm not backpacking from one town or village to another able to feed myself from a plethora of roadside steamed, boiled or roasted delicacies. Nor will I be able to rest my head in a range of hostels or guest houses. For this trip, I will need to carry every bit of food I need with me. I will need to carry it and cook it myself. My choice of food will range from one dehydrated meal to another dehydrated meal with some porridge for my breakfasts in between.

The food needs to be light, easy to pack and quick to prepare for eating. I will rest my weary head and legs wherever I decide to pitch my compact one-person tent. There will be no fences between me and the wildlife and there won't be a decent toilet or a shower for miles around. Temperatures could be as low as minus 4 degrees Celsius or as high as 19 degrees Celsius. It could rain every day all day, it could blow up a gale from the North pole just a few miles north. It could be very pleasant, or I could spend every waking moment swatting midges and scratching insect bites. This is the joy and the uncertainty of 'doing' Greenland's Arctic Circle Trail.


The only guidebook to the Arctic Circle Trail (ACT) that I could find was the one published by Cicerone which starts with the ominous warning:

walking across the remote Arctic tundra can be a dangerous activity carrying the risk of personal injury or death"

That's a good start then.

Greenland is a vast country with an area measuring approximately 2,175,600 square kilometres. That really is enormous. So big, in fact, that it is the largest island on earth which is not classed as a continent in its own right. And yet, it's one of the most sparsely populated places on earth with a population just under 57,000 and approximately 85%!o(MISSING)f its landmass permanently covered in glacial ice. I say 'approximately' and 'permanently' but, of course, the sad truth is that the glacier is getting smaller.

Being mostly above the latitude of 66° 33' 39"otherwise known as the Arctic circle, this is also the 'Land of the Midnight Sun'. To be more accurate it is only known as this in the summer when the sun hardly drops below the horizon. In winter, it's the opposite with the sun hardly showing its face.

<table class="tr-caption-container" style="float: right; text-align: right;" cellspacing="0" cellpadding="0"><tbody><tr><td style="text-align: center;"></td></tr><tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;">A beach along one of the many lakes. </td></tr></tbody></table>
Whilst geographically speaking, Greenland is part of the North American continent, politically speaking it has been more closely associated with Denmark which maintained sovereignty until granting home rule in 2009.

Archaeological evidence suggests that the Inuit were the first to arrive in Greenland about four to five thousand years ago. Their presence built up over several waves of migration from North American and Canada. The Norse settled in Greenland at the time of Erik the Red in the late 900s AD and appears to have coincided with the last influx of Inuit settlers. However, and for as yet unknown reasons, the Norse settlers disappeared in about 1500 AD. Despite a number of expeditions to Greenland from England and Norway in the 16th and 17th centuries, the only other contact with outsiders was with a handful of European whalers during the 17th and 18th centuries. Today, the culture and appearance of native Greenlanders is most definitely Inuit and I here that their welcome is both genuine and warm.

The journey to Greenland from the UK is far from being straight forward and, if one is working to a tight budget, the flight tickets appear to be relatively expensive. So, to arrive and be welcomed by smiling Inuit faces will be a bonus. The Easy Jet flight to Copenhagen leaves me with thirteen hours to kill before my Air Greenland flight leaves for the small town of Kangerlussuaq where the ACT begins. The flight from Copenhagen to Kangerlussuaq takes just over four hours so sleep and food will already be in short supply when I arrive. I don't sleep well on planes.




• Easy Jet return flight from LGW to Copenhagen - £117.98 return with addition weight allowance.
• Air Greenland open jaw flight from Copenhagen to Kangerlussuaq and return from Sisimiut - £448.00.


The town of Kangerlussuaq is situated about 37 km from the glacier (known as Russell's Glacier). As you walk out of the arrivals area of the airport, you can turn left and start the walk immediately albeit cheating a little bit. Or you can turn right an go and start the walk from the very foot of the glacier, the official chilly start line. Assuming you decided not to cheat, the walk from the icy start point is a mere 165 km from the finishing line in the picturesque coastal settlement of Sisimiut.


<table class="tr-caption-container" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto; text-align: center;" cellspacing="0" cellpadding="0" align="center"><tbody><tr><td style="text-align: center;"></td></tr><tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;">Map showing the route of the ACT</td></tr></tbody></table>
A hundred and sixty five kilometres may not sound that far to some people and it's not that far in the grand scheme of things, but this is entirely through the stark and wind-battered wilderness of the Arctic tundra. Once out of Kangerlussuaq there are no opportunities to resupply, there is no mobile phone signal and no road access. If you lose some of your rations, you go hungry; if you injure yourself, you have a long wait for help to arrive.

Due to its remoteness and isolation, very few people actually attempt the ACT which is regarded as one of the world's classic long distance wilderness walks. In a good year, only about 300 people will attempt the walk and most of these will come from North America or Canada. It is highly possible that any trek along the trail could see myself as my only company.

The challenge of the ACT is not the mileage or the terrain, although it is physically challenging in its own right. The main challenge, for me at least, is the psychological one. How will I deal with the complete sense of openness, remoteness and isolation?

Part of me is fearful of spending so much time in my own company and yet part of me is raring to go and experience it. Perhaps it will enable me to understand myself and others better. Maybe it will help me make sense of the world or at least the space within it that I occupy. Maybe, I'll have a greater understanding of the meaning of life. Or maybe, I'll just have a damn good walk, take some nice photographs and develop a unhealthy collection of blisters and midge bites.

This sort of challenge can be viewed as being made of of three distinct psychological phases. The planning phase, the participation phase and readjusting back to normality phase. Each phase has it's own distinct characteristics.

The planning phase can be a bit of a roller coaster ride of feeling confident that you have thought of everything and then panicking about why you forgot to add that vital item of kit to your ever-growing list. The planning phase can be great for organising not only your kit, but also your state of mind.

Psychologically, you are already leaving work, friends and family and getting ready to take your first steps on the trail. This phase comes to end once you have passed the point of no return (at least not until the trek is complete). This is the point when you have closed your front door behind you, kissed your loved ones goodbye, and are so far from home that to go back for a forgotten item would mean that a missed flight would be a dead cert. Essentially, if you haven't packed it, it ain't going. You are now in the participation phase.

The participation phase kicks in. You realise that this is it, you are now on your own. If you mess up, you mess up, there is nothing you can do about it. You are in complete control of how you perform. You make all the important decisions about how you live your life on the trail. Like a turtle, you become comfortable living out of a home that you carry on your back.

During this phase you have to adapt to whatever the environment throws at you. You have to be disciplined to make sure you eat the right foods in the right amounts to maintain your energy levels, you have to maintain your hydration by drinking enough and you have be disciplined with your personal hygiene to ensure you don't go down with Ds and Vs (diarrhoea and vomiting) sixty kilometres from the nearest proper toilet or medical help.

You enter a zone of inevitability where you face up to the fact that there is no turning back. You become centred in the place and the task and you just have to get on with it. You don't miss home too much, you just focus on the task in hand which is putting one foot in front of the other for several hours a day.

For me, this phase only stops once I am on the last leg of the homeward journey. The point at which I can relax, the point at which I will yearn with almost physical pain to see my beautiful wife again, the point at which I begin to drift into the readjustment phase.
<table class="tr-caption-container" style="float: right; text-align: right;" cellspacing="0" cellpadding="0"><tbody><tr><td style="text-align: center;"></td></tr><tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;">One of the few marker stones showing the route. </td></tr></tbody></table>
The readjustment phase is characterised by a realisation that you are going back to your normal life, the people you love, and the happy, comfortable mundaneness associated with everyday routine tasks that you usually take for granted.

This is similar to what is experienced by troops returning home from war zones. You sort out, wash and dry your kit. You enter into conversations about buying milk from the corner shop or the holiday that some relative has just booked. You'll try hard to behave as if you were never away, but deep inside you your muscles and sinews are aching for just one more day of foot pounding and your skin feels almost unnatural without the engrained grime and dirt of the trail.

Every now and then you might get caught staring into the distance reliving, in your mind, a particularly fine day of adventure. You'll be asked "are you ok?" You'll be tempted for just a moment to respond with "you wouldn't know, you weren't there man" like some dope-head of a GI from a Vietnam War film. Instead, you respond with a simple "yes dear, I was just thinking". If pressed, you can elaborate by saying that you were just thinking about how much more room there is in the spare room now you've eaten you way through the large box of dehydrated expedition food. Secretly, you're thinking about the next adventure.

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