Greenland · Day 4
Four in the morning
at the icefall.
The alarm is at 03:30 and nobody needs it. You hear the stoves first — the guide tent lights two of them at 03:15, because melting snow for twelve people takes forty minutes and we leave at four whether the water is ready or not. It is always ready. That's the kind of thing you learn to trust, out here, where the margins are made of time and nothing else.
The icefall is the only place on this crossing where the ice is doing something. Everywhere else it is a floor, white and gently curved, going on for five hundred kilometres. Here it is a staircase someone kicked over. The glacier drops two hundred metres in a kilometre and the surface breaks into seracs the size of houses, leaning on each other at angles that look negotiable in the afternoon and are not. In the afternoon the sun has been on them for ten hours. At four in the morning they have been frozen for eight. We go at four.
We move at four because the ice is asleep. By nine it has started to think.
Field notebook, day 4The fixed lines went in two days ago, on the recce. Three hundred metres of static rope, eleven ice screws, four snow stakes, and one anchor that Haldorsen built around a serac so solid I'd hang a car off it. We clip in at the bottom and we stay clipped in until the top, and nobody unclips to take a photograph. That rule has never once been tested. I say it every morning anyway.
What it sounds like
People ask what the icefall sounds like and the honest answer is: like nothing, until it doesn't. For an hour you hear crampons, breathing, the rope running through the carabiner. Then the sun hits the top of the eastern wall and the whole structure starts to tick. Little sounds. Settling sounds. The glacier clearing its throat. That is the signal to be out of it, and by then we always are.
Above the fall the angle goes to nothing and the crossing becomes what it mostly is: a line, a rhythm, a pulk that is lighter by one day of food. The team stops at the top anchor and does the thing teams do, which is not say very much. Ortiz hands round a flask. Haldorsen checks every harness again, which is unnecessary and which I love him for.
Rock under the skis again by day twelve. Nobody says summit.
Ingrid Søvik, lead guideThen we put the skis back on. Twenty-two days to the east coast. The wind is forecast from the south-west, which means kites by Thursday, which means the plateau will go by faster than it has any right to. I'll write again when there's something to say. On the icecap, that might be a while.
— I.S., Icefall camp, 1,420 m
