There are moments when travelling when a landscape on the other side of the world suddenly feels strangely familiar. Our first paddle near Maniitsoq in West Greenland was one of those moments. We had come to Greenland expecting huge fjords, glaciers, icebergs and unmistakably Arctic landscapes. Instead, as we paddled beneath steep rocky mountains rising from the sea, I kept thinking that I had seen this place before. It looked like Torridon.
Not exactly, of course. We were still on the west coast of Greenland, but there was something about the combination of bare mountains, rocky shorelines, sheltered sea lochs and scattered buildings that could easily have belonged on the west coast of the Scottish Highlands. Maniitsoq lies amongst an extraordinary maze of islands, mountains and fjords, and its Greenlandic name means something like “the uneven place”. From a kayak that description makes perfect sense. There is remarkably little flat ground and the mountains seem to tumble directly into the sea.
Our first paddle took us through relatively sheltered coastal waters, with rocky mountains forming the backdrop throughout. Dotted along the shore were small lodges, some with solar panels providing their power. There is plenty of summer daylight in Greenland, so solar power makes perfect sense, particularly for buildings sitting beyond the normal infrastructure of the town. Yet visually, I kept coming back to Scotland. Take away a few of the more obviously Greenlandic clues and this could have been Loch Torridon, Loch Shieldaig or another of those great sea lochs of Wester Ross. Dark mountains rose steeply from the water, rocky headlands divided the coastline and little buildings sat amongst an otherwise enormous landscape.
Then a white-tailed eagle appeared, which didn’t exactly help with identifying which side of the North Atlantic we were on. White-tailed eagles have made a spectacular return to the west coast of Scotland and seeing one here simply strengthened the connection. For a few moments I could almost convince myself we were paddling somewhere in the Highlands.
There is something rather wonderful about discovering those similarities. Scotland and Greenland are separated by hundreds of miles of North Atlantic, yet both have landscapes profoundly shaped by ice. Glaciers carved the Scottish Highlands during repeated Ice Ages, leaving behind the great U-shaped valleys and sea lochs that characterise places such as Torridon. In Greenland, of course, that process hasn’t finished. Our second paddle, at Sermillinguaq Fjord, demonstrated that rather dramatically.
If our Maniitsoq paddle reminded me of Scotland, Sermillinguaq Fjord reminded me very clearly that we were in Greenland. The conditions could hardly have been better. The water was calm, the sky was clear and the sun was shining. Mountains surrounded the fjord and, ahead of us, a glacier descended from the landscape towards the water. This was exactly the sort of Greenland sea kayaking I had hoped for.
A sea kayak changes your perspective on a fjord. From the deck of an expedition ship you see the enormous landscape: mountains, valleys, glaciers and ice. Drop down into a kayak and suddenly your eyes are barely a metre above the water. Everything becomes bigger, but you also start noticing the smaller details that are easily missed from a larger vessel.
As we paddled farther into Sermillinguaq Fjord, little blocks of glacial ice began appearing in the water. They weren’t the enormous icebergs that dominate photographs of places such as Ilulissat. These were much smaller fragments, drifting quietly around the kayaks. We could weave between them, looking at their different shapes and watching the sunlight passing through some of the clearer pieces. Some were brilliant white and filled with compressed air bubbles, while others contained beautiful sections of blue ice.
Somewhere ahead was where they had come from. The glacier.
We gradually worked our way farther up the fjord towards the retreating glacier. There is always something slightly humbling about approaching a glacier from a kayak. Even a five-metre sea kayak feels like an insignificant object in this landscape. Mountains rise hundreds of metres above you while the glacier occupies an entire valley, and from water level the scale of everything around you becomes much more obvious.
But this wasn’t simply spectacular scenery. The glacier was retreating. Standing or paddling in front of a retreating glacier makes the idea of a changing climate much more tangible than looking at a graph or reading statistics. You are looking at a landscape created by ice while, at the same time, watching that ice withdraw from it.
There was another interesting connection with Scotland here. The mountains of Torridon and much of the Scottish Highlands were once surrounded and shaped by glaciers. Today those glaciers have completely disappeared, leaving behind the landscape we now recognise as the Highlands. In Greenland we can still see some of those same geological processes taking place. Rock exposed by retreating ice is the beginning of a new landscape, eventually to be colonised by plants as soils slowly develop and rivers alter their courses.
From our kayaks, however, there was an even more immediate sign of the melting ice. Water. Lots of it.
One of the highlights of the whole paddle came where glacial meltwater was pouring into the fjord. The outflow created its own little river entering the sea and naturally we had to go and investigate. Suddenly we weren’t simply paddling on the calm water of the fjord. We could feel the moving freshwater pushing against the kayaks.
It became a wonderful place to play. We could paddle towards the flow, feel the kayaks respond to the current and then allow the water to push us back out again. After the gentle journey up the fjord it added a completely different element to the paddle and was probably my favourite part of the day.
It was great fun, but it also demonstrated just how dynamic a glacial landscape is. A glacier may appear almost stationary when you look at it from a distance, but it is part of a constantly moving system. Snow falls on the mountains and ice sheet, ice slowly flows downhill, summer warmth produces meltwater and streams combine into rivers before eventually pouring into the sea. That water can carry enormous quantities of fine sediment ground from the rocks beneath the glacier. Sitting in our kayaks at the glacial outflow, we were effectively paddling at the end of that enormous system.
What I particularly enjoyed about these two paddles was how different they were. Around Maniitsoq, Greenland had felt unexpectedly Scottish. There were rocky mountains, sheltered coastal water, scattered lodges and a white-tailed eagle overhead. I could easily imagine paddling through a similar landscape around Torridon or Wester Ross.
At Sermillinguaq, Greenland revealed its much more obviously Arctic character. Small blocks of ice floated around our boats, a retreating glacier filled the valley ahead and meltwater poured into the fjord, creating a current for us to play in with the kayaks.
Yet the two landscapes are connected. The glaciers we see shaping Greenland today are a reminder of the forces that helped create the Scottish landscape thousands of years ago. Perhaps that was why the Maniitsoq paddle had seemed so familiar. We were looking at different stages of the same geological story.
For a sea kayaker, it was also another reminder of why travelling by kayak is such a wonderful way of exploring Greenland. We weren’t simply looking at the landscape from a distance. We were moving through it. We could paddle close to rocky shorelines, watch a white-tailed eagle overhead, weave between pieces of glacial ice and then feel meltwater from a retreating glacier pushing against the bows of our kayaks.
Two paddles and two very different experiences. One felt remarkably like the west coast of Scotland. The other could only have been Greenland. Together they made one of my favourite days of paddling on the trip.
Why not take the opportunity to read our other blogs about Greenland;
- Nuuk: A Capital City at the Edge of the Wilderness
- Top 5 Things to Do in Nuuk in Summer
- Sisimiut: Where Modern Greenland Meets the Mountains
- Top 5 Things to Do in Sisimiut in Summer
- Ilulissat: Where Greenland’s Ice Sheet Meets the Sea
- Top 5 Things to Do in Ilulissat in Summer
- Greenland’s Qajaq: The Arctic Hunting Craft That Shaped Sea Kayaking Worldwide
- Kangerlussuaq Fjord: Sea Kayaking Among the Icebergs of West Greenland