I’ve always been drawn to symmetry in my images, but when you view a few of them in a group, the effect can be ridonculous! Or maybe not. What do you think?

This is the barracks I lived in from September, 1985 until March, 1987. It must be summer, because my pals are firing up the grill. Funny. I think I have more pictures of the exterior of my barracks in Thule than I do of the building I live in now…

For a month or so in the spring and fall the sun’s trajectory became very shallow – barely rising above the horizon and before setting again. The cool thing about this process is that it took a long time, so moments like this lasted for hours.

I didn’t notice all of the antennas when I lived there. Wonder what they were all for. We had no Internet (Times were tough in the mid-eighties!) and just one TV station — the always thrilling AFRTS.

The distinctive Mt. Dundas was a popular destination during the brief summer in Thule. Carved from the landscape by ancient glaciers, the thousand foot high pile of rocks offers a spectacular view of the confluence of three huge glaciers. I’d love to see the place now, although it might be depressing to see how far the ice has receded.

In Thule, everything was built above ground. Buildings rested directly on the ground — held in place by heavy concrete slabs. Utilities which would be buried underground or carried on telephone poles in warmer climates were exposed to the elements. I can’t remember if this is due to the hardness of the permafrost or to prevent it from melting. I suspect the latter.

In the distance, Mount Dundas is clearly visible.

Every few months one of us discovers a cache of negatives in some far corner of our storage space. This always propels me into a scanning frenzy. However, the scanning and retouching process is so time-consuming that I’m pretty picky about what I scan. This image didn’t make the first cut or the second. The negative didn’t look like much, and I had no recollection of even taking the shot. I had some time to waste last night, so I did a quick preview scan of the image and I was blown away.

As soon as I saw the image appear on my 30″ display, I was transported back to the moment I shot it back in 1985. Now I can’t stop looking at it.

I took this picture thinking my friends and family might be interested in seeing Thule, Greenland at high noon on a typical winter’s day. I can still taste the cold calm.

Current weather conditions in Thule, Greenland.

It turns out that Facebook is actually good for something — finding old friends. Normally, I don’t even want to connect with any more old friends, but when I found Pete, it motivated me to fire up the old scanner and send this shot to him.

Pete was my next-door neighbor during my stay in Thule, Greenland. We took a bunch of once-in-a-lifetime shots, including this fisheye view of him lounging with a cool beer on the Greenland ice cap. Right after this shot was taken, Pete returned the favor.

I was looking at my server logs the other day, and noticed that the top search phrases that led people to my site are “Greenland” and “Diego Garcia”. As far as I can tell, this is because images from this site come in near the top of the list when doing a Google Image Search for these terms. There’s even an image of (a somewhat younger) thedude himself near the top spot. Ha!

Google image search for “Greenland”, “Diego Garcia”.

By the way, for some inexplicable reason, the number three search phrase is “chuckie”.

My circle of old friends is getting wider. Yesterday I received a long e-mail from Troels Nørlem – another old pal from Greenland. What a thrill it is to hear from Troels – the official Thule Air Base Photographer! Sounds like he’s is doing well with his wife and two kids in what he refers to as, “the outskirts of the civilized world (Djursland, Denmark)”. These days he’s working as a photojournalist and sells photographic flash equipment on the side. That’s him on the left.

Way back in 1987, Troels and his friend Jesper flew to Germany in a 1953 Danish military aircraft to visit yours truly. The trip turned out to be a test of their endurance and bravery. The two of them managed a top speed of about 70 miles an hour in the old plane with fabric-covered wings and a back seat made of bare sheet metal. I remember Troels telling me how frustrating it was seeing cars on the Autobahn below speeding away from them. Not only that, but the plane had a very short cruising range meaning they had to land every two hours to refuel. I think it took them 8 hours to make the trip from Copenhagen to Pirmasens, Germany – a distance of about 500 miles.

I got a chance to fly the old plane – but only for a few seconds. I “took control” and immediately realized that if the pilot was to release his tight grip on the stick, (it took both hands to control) the plane would go straight into a nose-dive. Yikes! All I can say is that it was a very good thing that Jesper was able to take back control of the plane, as we’d certainly have crashed with me on the stick.

There have been more than a few occasions in my life when I felt that I was witnessing something that few people will ever see. You could say that everything that each of us experiences is by definition, a once-in-a-lifetime event. The thing is that in this case, I was smart lucky enough to have had my trusty Pentax ME Super and a fresh roll of Kodachrome in hand.

This image was shot in Thule, Greenland in 1985 or ‘86. As far as I know, it’s the only barracks fire ever to have occurred there. The devastating fire started very early in the morning, during Julemand – an annual fund-raising event occurring every Christmastime in Thule. (I have several fun photos from this fun event, and maybe I will get around to posting some one day.) Anyway, at around 3:00 AM, while photographing the marathon event at the Thule Air Base TV station, someone yelled, “Fire!”

The fast-moving fire completely consumed the living spaces of several Danish friends in about an hour. Nothing survived. All who lived in Barracks 204 lost everything.

The next morning, Erik discovered that his collection of walrus tusks – arranged neatly by size – looked as if it had somehow survived the inferno. But, although their shape had not changed, their composition had. The tusks had been baked into pure, almost weightless ash.

Not all of my Danish friends in Greenland were this crazy – but Erik and Randi got this idea…

When you live in a place where the average temperature in February and March is -30 degrees Centigrade, it’s only a matter of time before someone will ask to have their picture taken in an unheated room wearing nothing but their underwear. It’s totally predictable, right? What else would you do after five months of darkness?

In case you’re wondering – yes, it was VERY cold in this unused section of some building on the air base. Don’t worry – the photographers dressed a bit more sensibly.

Many of you know of my never-ending scanning project. Well, the scope of the task expanded this afternoon. Through the miracle of the Internets, my old friend Erik Larsen found a photo I shot of a cabin he built near Thule Greenland. You can view this image both on the Panaramio web site and on Google Earth. I was inspired to post it because it was at the time one of the northernmost images on the planet. When I uploaded the shot, I hoped Erik and others who have been to this remarkable place would see it, but I rather doubted that they would. Well, amazingly enough, Erik found the image and e-mailed me. Now I’ve been chatting with Erik from his home in Copenhagen all afternoon.

This upshot is that I now have to sift through and scan a pile of slides and negatives taken during my 17 months in Thule. Luckily, there aren’t as many of these as there are shots from my youth in Wisconsin, but now that I have located one friend from my tour in Thule, it probably won’t be long before I reconnect with others.

This Internet thing is pretty cool. You know – I think it may catch on!

Anyway, today’s shot was taken at one of the Danish barracks – maybe number 204, which later burned to the ground. (Yes, I have pictures of that too.) I was lucky to have been befriended by this group of wild and crazy dudes. Although I don’t remember all of their names, I do remember faces and what some of them did while in Thule. Erik (lower right) ran the base woodworking shop. Access to lumber is part of what enabled him to build his amazing cabin. Looks like this shot was made at a gathering of a little organization we called “Tyyynde Skiver”. Loosely translated, this means “thinly sliced”, which was a highly complimentary way of describing items of high quality – especially if they were related in some way to the female anatomy – a topic hot on the minds of the men on base, who outnumbered women by at least 20 to 1. (It wasn’t all bad though, there were a few fine Danish and American girls on base.)

Hey Dude,

Have a look – it looks super cool! – it’s dye-sub printed directly on a sound-absorbent panel.
Thanks for allowing us to use the pic!!

Best regards from Copenhagen -

Sten Jauer,
Art Director

LAND DESIGNLAB APS | VESTERGADE 12A 3 | DK-1456 COPENHAGEN | DENMARK

Thanks, Sten! I think it looks great too. :)