Articles > Dog-sledding in Greenland

Dogs outnumber humans by almost five to one in Uummannaq, a robust Inuit community 590 kilometres north of the Arctic Circle. Until May, when the frozen sea relinquishes its grip on Greenland's northwest coast, the only way to get here is by helicopter from Ilulissat, site of the most magnificent and effusive iceberg factory in the northern hemisphere.

Thundering north, the chopper runs low across a forbidding wilderness of iceberg-strewn fjords, shaggy glaciers and leviathan mountains that in the spring thaws turn patchy as a Fresian cow. Out of this humbling void comes a clutch of brightly painted houses set on stilts, huddled together on an snow-bound island guarded by a heart-shaped mountain. As you drop from the skies to land, an almighty howling erupts from 6,000 dogs staked out on the surrounding ice.

Welcome to Dog City, and an authentic, no compromise Arctic experience. While the rest of Greenland is riding out the traumas of Danish post-colonialism and the closing of US military bases, in Uummannaq the only concerns are hunting, fishing and who's going to win Sled Driver of the Year. This is a town unravaged by the nunakkoorut (“thing that goes on wheels on land”), where the sign for the dentist's is a walrus' tooth, where fluorescent shell-suits hang on washing lines next to strips of dog-skin, worn on the thighs as part of the Greenlandic national costume.

The port is jammed with ice, upon which fur-wrapped hunters stand in bloodstained snow selling fresh seal meat from sledges. Housewives arrive, clutching carrier bags advertising tax-free shopping at Copenhagen airport, ready to buy supper for a family that will probably have names like Eider Duck, Wave and Twinkling Star, and live in a warm, spacious wooden house with a picture window view of the iceberg ballet in the fjord below. Here local entertainment is provided by a beat-the-winter-blues coffee drinking ritual known as kaffemik, and legendary midsummer parties where the beer never stops and the sun never sets.

Uummannaq is no place to arrive with pre-set views of environmental correctness: in this spare world they survive by using all that the Lord provides. A small museum shows how tough things used to be, and pays homage to native ingenuity, which ought to be called Inuition. Back in the not-so-distant days of DIY without wood, Greenlanders glazed the windows of their turf-roofed stone houses with seal stomachs stretched to translucency, made children's rattles from puffins' beaks, and sat around the blubber-oil lamp on whalebone furniture telling stories of how the sun and moon are incestuous lovers forever chasing but never meeting.

The taste of this past lingers. In the town's only hotel, adventurously called Hotel Uummannaq, I diligently worked through a 15-dish buffet lunch of typical Greenlandic fare. Besides salmon, halibut, musk ox, reindeer and Greenland lamb, the menu included dried whale (imagine cavity wall filling dipped in red wine), seal blubber (which resembles the superfluities resulting from circumcision), and polar bear, which looks like burnt steak but tastes of fish.

After such fortification, you inevitably go to the dogs. On the eve of our sledging trip, Aleqa, our guide, thoughtfully issued a crib sheet listing hunter-friendly phrases in Greenlandic, like Qimmeq kusanag (That's a nice dog) and Isingaalerpunga (I have cold feet). I also recommend mega-factor sun-block (many drivers have faces dark and wrinkled as raisins), and a clothes peg. This is for the bit they never put in the brochures. Unlike Scandinavian dog-teams, which run in pairs, in treeless Greenland sledges are pulled by a fan of dogs spread out like a canine chariot. As a result the initiate's first thought is why on earth he or she paid a fortune to sit on a lump of wood in the freezing cold staring at eleven bobbing posteriors pumping out clouds of malodorously fishy downwind.

Fear not. As the team establishes its running order and the dogs responds to their driver's shrill commands, you can sit back for the thrill of your life. A well-trained team really belts along, and the dogs’ love of running means an experienced driver rarely needs to crack his long sealskin whip. Greenlandic sled dogs are a breed apart from the better-known Canadian husky. Forget tail-wagging Rovers to pat on the nose; think growling, snarling, look-no-dentures quasi-wolves bred and trained to work hard in a cruel world. For much of the year they lead a dog's life, chained, penned and redundant - but come the sledging season they're in ecstasy. For visitors, this means from March to mid-May: before then it is too dark and cold, afterwards the ice gets precariously thin.

A sledging trip in Uummannaq is no soft jaunt. In two days our convoy of eight sledges travelled 140 kilometres across a frozen fjord half the size of Denmark, camping overnight in toe-numbing temperatures. Yet neither is it an Action Man adventure - sledging is a supine progress where the traveller reclines on reindeer skins as lusty dogs jog rhythmically across a mesmerisingly white world. You attune with nature rather than conquer it, and inevitably drift into empathising dreams about how our primitive ancestors migrated across the snowy wastes of Canada and Siberia.

The Arctic landscape here is pure, its pleasures simple. Every couple of hours we stopped to rest the dogs and stretch our feet. Drinks were found by snapping icicles off stranded icebergs, lunch won from the sea by drilling a hole through the two-metre thick ice and letting down a hundred-hook baited fishing line. On our return leg we collected a haul of halibut, which was poached on a primus and served on a bed of snow.

Beds are made by pushing two sledges together and mounting a tent on top, not that you want to sleep. This far north the sun never sets between mid-May and the end of July - just bows toward the horizon as if God was tweaking his heavenly dimmer switch. Instead we sat on a rock in a frozen sea, chewing barbecued seal meat and frightened the hunters of Uummannaq with horror stories about the traffic-clogged cities we'd briefly escaped from. Beside them their dogs lay curled up in the snow, exhausted and content - and so quiet you could almost stroke them.

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