Ilulissat, Greenland, September 2016

My first visit to Ilulissat was as a stop-off point along the Greenland coast on the way into the Northwest Passage.   My recollection was of being somewhat underwhelmed by the Ilulissat weather - which could most charitably be described as dreich.  It’s taken me a few years to sort a visit back to the west coast of Greenland to see what the weather can be like!  This time I spent a week in and around Ilulissat - with near-cloudless blue skies every day, and the one brief shower of rain was snow!

Sunny afternoon on the Ilulissat waterfront

Ilulissat is the tourist centre of Greenland - the business and administrative centre is Nuuk a few hundred miles to the south, but the tourist magnet is Ilulissat and particularly the Icefjord on the southern edge of the town.  The Icefjord was designated as a UNESCO World Heritage Site in 2004, and has been key to many tourist activities developed in the town to complement the traditional hunting and fishing industries.

The vast majority of the town’s tourists arrive on cruise ships throughout the summer - almost all are little expedition cruise ships, but occasionally larger ships are now adding Ilulissat to their itineraries. The arrival of even a small ship transforms the town, filling the streets with yellow- or red-clad visitors depending on the boat visiting.  Having been a red-clad visitor in 2013, this time I was in town as an independent ground-based tourist.  

There are a limited number of routes to Greenland.  In 2013 I flew into Kangerlussuaq on a charter flight from Ottawa, this time I flew in from Copenhagen on Air Greenland’s only big red plane.  From there I caught one of their little red planes into the little airport just outside Ilulissat town.

Changing from the big red plane to a little red plane

The recent surge in ground-based tourism does rather seem to have out-paced the development of hotel rooms.  I struggled to find somewhere to stay for week in July or August, so I wound up booking a little apartment in the town centre in September.

September is definitely the end of the Summer season - the temperatures are significantly lower (mostly around freezing), but the real plus is that the falling temperatures see off the mosquitoes and black flies which can make wandering in the Arctic unpleasant in summer

With one or two minor exceptions you can walk pretty much anywhere you want in hills and valleys around Ilulissat, but the local hiking clubs have defined a series of way-marked routes going from the town to various points along the northern edge of the Icefjord.

The Ilulissat Icefjord

Iceberg Tourism

The Icefjord is a deep inlet from Disko Bay reaching right up to the edge of Greenland Icecap about 70 kms inland.  This channel is the most ‘productive’ single route for Greenland ice to get to the sea accounting for 7% all the ice output (this equates to an implausibly large number of tons of ice flowing out to sea each day).  Traditional anecdote suggests that it was an Ilulissat iceberg that met with the Titanic in 1912.  

The settlement at Ilulissat has been around for about 275 years, but people have lived near the Icefjord for thousands of years - the bay at Sermermuit just beside the Icefjord has evidence of houses almost 4000 years old.

Sermermuit

The glacier front has been moving inland quite dramatically over the last few years, but the appearance of the icefjord has been pretty much unchanged. For most of its length the fjord is well over 1000m deep, allowing even huge icebergs to calve from the front of the glacier.  Having calved the icebergs are then free to float towards the sea.  Or at least they would be were there not a seabed ridge at the mouth of the fjord. This ridge blocks the big bergs from reaching the sea and in turn leads to fantastically dramatic iceberg traffic jam backing up the entire 70 km length of the fjord.

Iceberg front at Disko Bay

From one of the viewpoints outside the town you can see the front of the queue, which at times is a 10km line of icebergs across the entire width of the fjord.  At a glance (or two) everything looks pretty static but if you return day after day you will notice that new icebergs have broken free and are now making their way out into Disko Bay (no doubt aspiring to make their mark as in 1912).

Occasionally as you sit watching the ice you might just hear a crash of ice somewhere in the distance, and if you get really lucky you might just see one of the bergs at the front of the queue disintegrating as the pressure from behind finally gets too much. 

Crumbling Ice

The crash of ice isn't the only thing you’re likely to hear around Ilulissat.  

If you sit quietly you might also both see and hear one of the many humpback whales around the bay coming up for air. The seabed around the fjord mouth is constantly being churned up by the icebergs crawling their way across the ridge - this make the waters around the fjord incredibly fertile - which means lots of food for marine life right up the food chain, including both whales and the local fishermen.  So if you can’t hear a whale blowing you’re probably going to be able to hear an boat motor somewhere on the water.

Humpback whale - Disko Bay

Fishing

The other sound that characterises Ilulissat (and most other Greenlandic towns) is of the dogs.  Ilulissat has a resident population of about 5000 people and about 6000 dogs.  During the winter the dogs eat well and work hard pulling sledges - but in summer they don’t get so much to eat (they wouldn’t work it off!) and they are chained up on the edge of town.  This makes the dogs a little bit cranky, and once one starts howling its very likely that the other 5999 are going to follow the lead.  

The one except to the chained-up rule are the young puppies.  The puppies get one summer where they can wander at will around the town causing the mischief that you would expect from a couple of hundred puppies!

Pups on the Loose

The other bonus of visiting places like Ilulissat in the autumn is that it gets dark!  In summer you get 24 hours of daylight, but in September you get both sunrises and sunsets.  And if you get really lucky you’ll get a display of the Northern Lights too.

Disko Bay Sunset

Most people who visit Greenland do so as cruise ship passengers - this undoubtedly makes the visit logistically easy (although not cheap) and means that although you get to see lots of places you only get a glimpse of each.  Visiting Greenland as a ground-based tourist is easy to do and means that you get the chance to spend longer in places - and also to see them without the crowds of other tourists. I’ll certainly be back in Greenland at some point again.

Six Years On, Shetland August 2016

Another Bank Holiday weekend, and another chance to spend time wandering the cliffs and headlands at the south end of Shetland. This, however, wasn't just any old Bank Holiday, it marked the end of our first six years in the Shetland house.

We moved in over the August Bank Holiday (English calendar!) in 2010 - and have got to know the south end pretty well over that time - and on this trip I spent time at some of the regular locations (Scat Ness, Sumburgh Head and Garths Ness), and even made time to visit a bit of coast that I've only been to once or twice before.

Sumburgh Head

Scat Ness got the opportunity to let us know that it was still summer, but that the autumn storms might not be too far away.

Scat Ness - still summer

Scat Ness - almost autumn

Looking from Garths Ness - Siggar Ness and Fitful with cloud caps

Passing the time at Sumburgh Head - looking across Quendale Bay to Scat Ness and Fitful Head

Looking across Grutness Voe to Compass Head

Sea Arch on the east side

And of course I don't spend all my time wandering on Shetland.  Some of the time I just sit and watch from the house as skies and water change across Quendale Bay.  Over six years I've seen big storms and flat seas, clear skies and thick fog - even over a few days there's plenty of variety - five pictures from five days.

Backing Up Is Hard To Do

Actually it isn’t, but it is challenging to figure a reliable way to back up computer files that isn’t so messy that you don’t actually get round to doing it.

I’ve been working with computers for close to 40 years and throughout that time I’ve been through more backup regimes than I care to remember.  The aim of all this backing up was to try and protect my digital stuff against both personal (and colleagues) incompetence and the inevitable hardware failures.  I’ve backed up files onto tapes, cassettes, floppy discs, ZIP drives, CD-Rs, DVD-Rs, USB sticks, memory cards, external hard drives, disk arrays and clouds – and all of these have at some point let me down.  In some cases files have got corrupted, in others (ZIP, I’m looking at you) the entire device has died and I’ve had cloud storage services go bust.  I can also recall a lengthy exercise when I was involved with copying scientific data files from one obsolete disc storage system, to another disc storage system which rapidly became obsolete quite quickly too.

And the incompetence thing, yes I have accidentally deleted an entire directory of stuff. Damn the power of the UNIX command line.

Old DVDs

This moment of reflection has been triggered by my unearthing a huge pile of recordable CDs and DVDs that were for a long time my default storage system for my collection of photographs.  This was an entirely reasonable approach at time when cameras generated 4 or 8 MB files and you could fit an entire trip onto a couple of 4GB DVDs.  But the camera files, especially the RAW ones got bigger and someone invented digital video so it’s quite possible to generate 100s of GB for files on a single project.  I don’t think I’ve had a terabyte project yet, but it’ll happen one day.  This turns into an awful big pile of DVDs. And then there’s DVD rot too.  All in all I think it’s safe to say that the day of DVDs as my storage device of choice has passed.  I have (with some relief, and not inconsiderable guilt) consigned my collection of discs to land-fill.

So what next.  At this point I can only see two credible ways of the storing the multi-terabyte collection of files I’ve got to worry about.  Hard discs or clouds. Trouble is that I don’t really trust either.  Hard discs do die.  If you’re lucky you get a little bit of warning and you can frantically copy the latest versions of files onto something else.  If you’re unlucky it all just stops working!  Clouds (yes, I know it’s really just someone else’s disc storage) can be fickle too.  The cloud providers can go bust or suffer major system failures – and at that point all you can do is hope that things get recovered.  The other challenge with clouds is the level of connectively to the remote systems – my external hard discs are connected by USB 3 (or similar or faster) but the clouds are connected via wifi and internet connections – and even on the best wifi connection a 100GB fileset is going to take a while to move around.

My current solution, is to use a mix of discs and cloud.   I’ve got two work-flows, one for photographic work and another for everything else.

For photographs and videos (where everything gets saved on increasingly small memory cards) I copy these off onto as hard disc as soon as possible (usually at the end of each day).  At the time of a trip or assignment these files get copied onto another hard disc and (if it’s been a particular good trip) onto another hard disc which get stored somewhere else other than the room where I do most of my photo processing.  Having multiple workplaces (or even multiple houses) is a good way to do this – I’ve often kept a spare set of discs in the back of the car.  It’s probably not the safest single storage place, but you’d have to be seriously unlucky to have your car stolen and your house burnt down at the same time.  These backup include pretty much all the files I’ve shot (even the rubbish ones). 

Once I’ve started processing the files and pick out the better images - it's amazing that the 200GB of files from a trip can get reduced to 15 keepers!  At this stage I’ll make use of cloud storage for the images, and the keepers will wind up being stored both on various hard discs, and probably on various cloud services too, mostly in iCloud and Dropbox.

No sign of clouds - but these cables lead there eventually.

For non-photographic files (word docs and powerpoint decks) my usual working practice is to work directly (at least when I’m connected) on files synchronised with Dropbox or iCloud so that I’ve got (synchronisation permitting) a copy both locally in the cloud.  But even with this approach I do still tend to make a periodic extra copies of my working files onto another hard disc somewhere – this is probably as much to do with my (demonstrated) capacity to delete the entire contents of a file (just before saving) as it is with with my mistrust of things in the cloud.   

And if I’m getting really twitchy about a particular file, I’ll probably email it to myself too! 

And sometimes I’ll print a copy too – paper lasts a long time, right? 

On the Beaches, Shetland July 2016

My latest trip was a bit like the one at the start of May  - but travel was rather smoother!

Quendale Beach

I decided not to risk Megabus again - this time deciding that it was marginally safer grappling with British Airways, Loganair and the holidaying masses at Heathrow so that I could make the most of yet another Bank Holiday(Scottish calendar) weekend on the beaches of southern Shetland.

My travel plans were not (significantly) disrupted by the crowds and by lunchtime I was on Shetland - total travel time about six hours, marginally better than the 40 hours that the last journey North required (it did cost a but more, but had the bonus of a British Airways cooked breakfast to sustain me en route).

And although it wasn't part of any master plan, when I look back through the pictures for this weekend and for my May weekend I find that I've done pretty much the same things.

I spent time wandering on Scat Ness (always a good way to get back in touch with Shetland), time wandering along West Voe and up to Sumburgh Head (getting reacquainted with the puffins) and time walking out along Quendale Beach and out onto Garths Ness.

Scat Ness

Looking rather calmer than on other visits.  There are sometimes a few puffins on Scat Ness, but not this weekend - plenty of fat and fluffy fulmar chicks (no sign of them fledging) plus some slightly sinister-looking shags.

Brei Geo, Scat Ness

Horse Island, Scat Ness

Young Fulmar, waiting for another meal

Shags in silhouette

West Voe & Sumburgh Head

In late July, this is a splendid place to see black guillemots (the other guillemots and razorbills have already abandoned the nest sites and headed out to sea for the winter)

Black Guillemots (locally called tysties) on West Voe of Sumburgh

Puffins, Sumbugh Head

Quendale & Garths Ness

The beaches at the south end of Shetland are always changing shape as the winds and tides pick up and redeposit sand.  And the lambs have certainly changed since I saw them wobbling around at the start of May.

Quendale Beach

Siggar Ness from Garths Ness

Bigger - but still curious

Garths Ness, LORAN station

Crossing Cultures?

On visits to Arctic Canada and to Greenland I remember seeing lots of inuksuks - don't remember seeing one on Shetland before.

Shetland inuksuk? West Voe Beach

What did I miss?

The only downside to my weekend at the south end - the orca that had been performing (apparently on request) at the south end just before I arrived had clearly caught up with all the easy-to-catch seals and had headed off up to the north end of Shetland to see if the pickings were better there. May be they'll be back down south later in the month, when I'm back again!

Looking North

In times of stress (and the last couple of weeks certainly qualify) my instinct is to go and stand on a remote cliff and look towards the horizon and just imagine what I would see as I look out to sea if only the curve of the earth didn't get in the way.

Being based in Oxfordshire at the moment this needed to be a thought experiment, so I’ve been picturing the most northerly cliffs in the (currently still) United Kingdom - at Hermaness at the northern end of Unst, the northern-most of the Shetland Islands.

If I look due north, there’s nothing to see until the sea ice covers the water - and beyond that over the North Pole the first bit of land you’ll stumble upon is Wrangel Island (a little bit north of most eastern bit of Russia).

If you look a little bit east or west from your windswept vantage point at the northern end of Shetland (probably good to imagine it windswept, it usually is) there are lots more places to see.

Lets sweep our eyes round to the west to start - and count our way round toward the east.

1. 65 degrees west of north we get a glimpse of the pretty Faroe Islands capital Torshavn, with almost certainly the only grass-roofed parliament building in the world, overlooking its busy little harbour.

2. Round to 44 degrees west of north is the north-eastern edge of Iceland and the village of Torshofn.

3. Next stop on our brief spin (33 degree west of north), Scoresbysund, one of few populated places on the east coast of Greenland, although we’d better give it its proper name Ittoqqortoormiit - otherwise we’ll probably annoy most of the 400 people who live there.

4. Round a little bit more to 21 degrees from north.  We’re looking into pretty bleak north eastern Greenland.  Daneborg is an isolated station deep in the NE Greenland National Park.  Probably quite a few people there in the summer, but in winter maybe only a dozen people left.

5. Next stop round is 14 degrees from north, Jan Mayen Island.  Again only a few people there most of the time, sheltering in a remote weather station just below the most northern active volcano, the 7500ft high Beerenberg. 

6. We’ve passing the midway point now, and our next stop is 14 degree east of north - and the collection of islands that make up Svalbard.  Compared with most of the stops on the tour so far - this is highly populated territory, over 3000 people (and the same number of polar bears) plus the conveniences of a few normal hotels and an airport with ordinary commercial flights.

7. A little bit further round, 20 degrees from north, is Bear Island (Bjørnøya) - roughly half way between Svalbard and the Norwegian mainland.  As with Jan Mayen Island, the only people who live there are running the weather station and occasionally entertaining passing expedition boats.

8. We’re now getting into standard European civilisation (albeit with an Scandi-twist), next stop is the Lofoten Islands (34 degree east of north).  This chain of islands is well inside the Arctic Circle but with all the conveniences you might want, including cheap public transport and very expensive beer.

9. Final stop on the ‘125 degree’ tour, we’re now looking 60 degrees east of north - and getting a glimpse of the city of Alesund (no where else on the tour has required that label), with a population of 45,000 and the most fantastic Art Nouveau architecture!

And how many of these places have I been to - about half of them, although since I started thinking about this post, I’ve signed up to visit both Jan Mayen Island (for the first time) and Svalbard (again).  

Maybe I’ll get to all 10 places eventually.  

Ten you ask, Wrangel Island has been on my bucket list for a long time. One day I’ll get there.

30 Days Wild, June 2016

Another June, another 30 Days Wild. 

As last year, picture locations in my search for Wild ranged from the north of Scotland to the south of England - last year facing the challenges of record temperatures, this year facing the challenges of record rainfall.

The daily communications from the Wildlife Trusts to do something Wild encouraged me to get outside every day, even if it was to just look more closely at what was around in the garden or en route between meetings - which was probably exactly what was intended.

Am already looking forward to next year - with the sincere hope that next time the event won't be punctuated by bereavements or by catastrophic referenda. 

1000 mile weekend: Inverness June 2016

Last year my Lairig Ghru walk project resulted in quite a few thousand-mile weekends when I drove up and down to the Cairngorms over three days - this year there haven’t been so many.

On the first weekend in June I had the need and excuse to run up and down the country, and I only very fleetingly contemplated doing so by public transport - see last month.

The excuse was getting to the John Muir Trust Annual Gathering and AGM in Inverness.  

I’ve been a member of the trust for a few years, and supported some of their excellent work in rewilding and habitat restoration in Scotland.  It was really good to get the chance to talk with staff, trustees and other members of the Trust.  I'm really excited that, in addition to the developing Scottish projects, we might finally see some substantial Trust activity south of the border too, in the not too distant future.

Around the Gathering there was the chance to visit places around Inverness - I opted for a guided tour of the RSPB reserve at Culbin Sands - a fascinating place to visit (make sure you take both wellies and a tide table!).  

The Trust had also managed to sign up Pete Cairns to give the after-dinner talk.  Pete is a fantastic photographer and organiser of other photographers - his latest big project is Scotland: The Big Picture - it’s definitely worth finding out more about.  One of his big thought provoking questions is “What should Scotland look like?”.  

My take on that is that simple ‘conservation’ (preserving what we have now) just isn’t going to cut it any more (if it ever did), and that we’re at the stage where we need to be investing in ‘restoration’.  We need to be finding ways to repair ecosystems before we can step back and allow the natural processes to kick back in.

Pete made his points with some fantastic imagery capturing the essence of Scotland as it is now, and also his latest pictures of some of the charismatic Scottish animals - pine marten, osprey, golden eagle, wildcat and beaver.

On the way north I timed my travel so that I had a few hours to wander in Rothiemurchus Forest - doing a little bit of the walk I did so many times last year. I’ve missed doing the regular walk!

On the way south, I stopped off at the Highland Wildlife Park in Kingussie.  This is part of the Royal Zoological Society of Scotland - and one the few places where you can see the animals that could (and perhaps one day will) be wild in this part of Scotland.  I’m not contemplating releasing polar bears, amur tigers or snow leopards into the Cairngorms, but it would be good to think that one day there might be habitats suitable for wolves and lynx somewhere in Scotland, alongside a restored (and reinvigorated) population of wildcats.  

On this visit both the wolves and lynx enclosures were closed off to allow youngsters to arrive without disturbance, but there was a delightful two week old wildcat around.  I could probably have spent all day watching the wild-kitten just being a wild-kitten, but unfortunately the A9 was calling me south. 

In Search of Strudel around the Tiernsee, May 2016

Before you reach for your atlases, the Tiernsee doesn’t really exist.  

It was invented by Elinor Brent-Dyer at some point in the 1920s, and was one of the settings used in a series of books published over many years in the middle of the 20th Century.  The “Chalet School” books were partly set around the shores of a fictional lake, the Tiernsee, in the Austrian Tyrol. EBD (as, I gather, she is referred to by fans) didn’t rely entirely on her imagination to conjure up the Tiernsee, she based her stories around memories of a long visit she paid to the Achensee (which really is in the Tyrol) in 1925.

I’ve never read the Chalet School books although my other half has done so repeatedly - but when the opportunity to visit the Tiernsee/Achensee arose I wasn’t going to turn down the invitation to spend a few days wandering up Tyrollean mountains. And besides, I was promised Apfelstrudel.

The Achensee is in a valley above the Inn Valley in western Austria.  Pretty much everyone who wants to visit the Achensee will wind up coming through the little town of Jenbach in the Inn Valley.  Our route across Europe by train had involved going through St Pancras in London plus Brussels, Frankfurt and Salzburg before we pitched up in Jenbach.  We could have completed the journey to Pertisau on the lakeside using the a funicular railway and the same engine and carriages that EBD (and numerous fictional school-girls) had used and one of the rather more modern lake steamers - but our hotel sent a minibus to collect us.

In addition to the lakeside, the valleys and mountains around Pertisau provide lots walks of all sorts. Ranging from flat-and-surfaced stroll through to fairly extreme climbs - we stuck mostly to the softer end of the scale.  

One of hazards of walking in the Alps is the profusion of guest huts strategically placed around the valleys and tops. In the UK mountain walking inevitably seems to involve stops huddling behind dry-stone walls hoping that the wind will drop for long enough for you to peel the clingfilm from a battered sandwich.  In the Alps the challenge is deciding if you want beer with the schnitzel-of-the-day or coffee with the strudel-of-the-day.  While the strudel-fest is certainly welcome it does rather defeat the feeling of braving the elements, and one of the huts we stopped at even had a vintage bus service if the post-strudel stroll back down the valley looked too challenging.

If the valleys and the tops seem too much, there is a lovely walk along the lake edge that goes right around the lake, and better yet you don’t need to do it all at once.  The regular little steamers chug up and down the lake all day, picking up and dropping off at regular points around the lake.  There’s usually somewhere to buy coffee at each pier - and there’s certainly beer, coffee (and strudel) on offer on the boat too.

Which brings me back to subject of strudel.  I was lured onto the trip by the promise of Apfelstrudel and I can certainly bear witness to the quality of the local strudel. If you’re taking notes, the Gramai Alpe guest-house had the best Apfelstrudel.

However, I did discover that there is something better than Apfelstrudel on most menus - Topfenstrudel just like Apfelstrudel but filled with curd cheese and raisins.  If you're offered it, you should try it.

We spent a very pleasant week staying on the edge of the Achensee - and we certainly hadn’t run out of walks to do.  Next time I’ll want to go back for a bit longer, and it would be fun to go back in winter and to do some of the walks on cross-country skis.  

And I’m sure there are a few strudel-stops I missed on this visit. 

If you want to visit the Achensee (knowledge of the Chalet School is optional) - try InnTravel.