Лилии не прядут
When ‘golden hour’ lasts 5 hours and stretches from 10pm to 4am, your world slips into another reality that becomes clearly distinguishable from the one you used to know. Jeans, kale and chai tea seem like an idea I once thought I couldn’t live without, now I reflect upon a vastly different reality with a similar sense of dependency. When you step outside to greet a purple sky dancing upon a stretch of icebergs among the frozen sea ice with snow covered mountains perceivable in the distant horizon, you understand why people need this place. Despite Qaanaaq being the northern most inhabited place on the planet and more remote than most places, there is a peace throughout the land. Rather it is a magic that gently creeps inside when you’re busy trudging through the snow, a beauty unsurpassed that words fall short when attempting to capture something so indefinable. Although the terrain lends itself to beautiful panoramic images, it doesn’t come without a level of harshness. When making our way across the sea ice to stand below the looming ice bergs, we trek across patches of ice with no snow to soften our footsteps. Slipping, sliding and narrowly escaping crashing down with our heavy packs loaded with camera’s, lenses and tripods, we are awakened to the present moment with a quickness. We keep walking, and just when I think I can relax, I remember the cracks in the ice which are barely visible below the freshly fallen snow. The cracks are simply repercussions of the moving tides below the frozen sea ice and although they don’t open to the water below, I cant help but hesitate as I leap over them. Once at our destination and our pace has slowed, the cold begins to set in. Less than one hour of shooting and our toes have gone completely numb, eyelashes fight the icy cold to keep separate but they freeze together anyways. Pulling our hands out of our mittens to change camera settings or assemble the time lapse rail becomes the biggest physical and mental challenge. There reaches a point when your fingers are so cold that the idea of cold hardly has any meaning anymore. Its more the notion of freezing that comes to mind. The trek homeward begins to pump our blood again and when we finally crawl into our sleeping bags at 3:30am, the sunshine filled night is nothing short of one amazing adventure after the next.
10:40 pm early April and the sun sits well above the horizon. Teasing its inhabitants on land with the thought of night fall, midnight sun is now upon northern Greenland. No matter how many times I glance at the clock, the minutes tick steady on as sunshine continues to pour through the glass windows. Qaanaaq, also known as Thule, is a small town of 600 inhabitants at the top of the world. In Latin, Thule means ‘last place’. The Inuit prefer a more descriptive meaning, noting Thule as the ‘northern most inhabited place in the world’. Qaanaaq now holds that title. It is said that Thule has had many different destinations throughout history. The Inuit migrated to Greenland from 2500 BC to 1000 AD, and as settlements moved further north, Thule continued to follow the northern most established town. Where it currently resides is a place of beauty that consumes and silences those who take their first steps here and those who take their last. The sea is frozen a meter thick and ice sheets stretch far beyond the eyes perception. Rising up everywhere across the vast desert of frozen sea are icebergs glistening blue in the beating midnight sun.
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