Granite walls more than a kilometre high line seventy kilometres of Tasermiut Fjord, in the far south of Greenland, and nothing built by anyone appears in the view. Ketil reaches 2,010 metres with a sheer face of over a thousand. You can walk to the foot of Ulamertorsuaq and look straight up a thousand metres of pale, near-flawless granite, and Nalumasortoq is split like an open book, each half about nine hundred. Climbers call it Arctic Patagonia and spend days on portaledges here each summer. A team on the face gives it away: the specks halfway up turn out to be people. There is no road: you come in by chartered boat from Nanortalik, and only after the drift ice off Cape Farewell lets go, which in practice means June to August.
The rock goes straight into dark water, and your camp goes up on the tundra beside it. Arctic foxes forage these slopes in daylight and pay you no attention; their brown summer coats vanish against the boulders until something moves. This is below the Arctic Circle, so there is no midnight sun, but through June and July the night never fully darkens; by September the returning dark brings the aurora over the walls. Near the head of the fjord, low stone foundations lie in a side valley called Klosterdalen, Monastery Valley, after a 1932 survey tied them to medieval Norse monks, though nobody has proved it. Nanortalik itself means the place with polar bears, and the bears are not residents: they ride in on the storis, the multiyear pack ice that rounds Cape Farewell and can hold this shore shut into June. At the inner end of the fjord is the thing nobody expects. Qinngua valley carries downy birch and grey-leaf willow seven or eight metres tall, the only natural forest in Greenland. What makes it possible is not warmth but shelter: mountains rising some 1,500 metres on either side block the cold wind pouring off the inland ice. After weeks of bare tundra, the sound of leaves overhead is the strange part.