thedude.com

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. :)

This image was shot about 12 miles from Thule at J-Site - home to a part of the Ballistic Missile Early Warning System, or BMEWS. These antennas were about the size of a football field and emitted enough EMF to cause my Walkman Pro to slow dramatically as we drove by on the bus. Scary stuff.

If you look VERY closely, (and squint a bit) you might just make out Radio Mast Thule - one of the world’s tallest structures.

Shot on the same hike as seen a few entries ago, the picture on the left shows thedude holding a piece of ice. Why? I guess because ice was so hard to come by in Greenland.

On the right, thedude and friends walked out onto the Greenlandic ice cap and decided to walk “just out to there”. The funny thing was that the ice rose up so slowly that the horizon never changed. No matter how far we walked, we could never actually get “there”. The Greenland icecap eventually reaches a thickness of more than two miles.

After seeing this shot, I always fantasized about shooting a bikini-clad girl on a beach chair with an umbrella out here on the ice cap, but I could never find a beach chair. :-(

Both of these were taken on the day of the big Thule Open Golf Tournament atop Mount Dundas. Along the way on the hike to the mountain, we encountered this cemetery. I wish I knew a little of the history of it. The helicopter was shot from the top of the 900 foot “mountain” as a friend scrambled to set up his view camera. I had one of the most exciting rides on my life in that helicopter - flying full speed 100 feet above canyons of blue ice on the way to the northernmost place I’ve ever visited. I’m hoping to find those slides for a later post.

Thanks to recently re-connecting with a couple friends from my Greenland adventure, I’m once again motivated to hunt through my archives for cool arctic images. (Pun intended.)

That’s thedude on the left in the summer of 1986 at J-Site - about 13 miles north of Thule. You can’t tell from the image, but the cliff he’s standing on drops off straight down for a good 500 feet. On the right is a friend cooling off after a long hike - proof that the human body can easily adjust to extremely cold climates. It was no more than 45 degrees in either of these shots.

I sure am glad that I have these pictures. I’m not likely to have an opportunity to see sites quite like these again!

UPDATE: I just located Thule on the incredibly cool Google Earth. (Sorry - Windows only.) If you have Google Earth installed, (it’s free!) you can fly there now by clicking here.

This week I received e-mails from two people I have not seen in nearly twenty years. The first came from my ex-girlfriend Cheryl. That’s her on the left with a somewhat younger and slightly thinner dude. Evidently, she stumbled onto my site while Googling Thule Air Base in Greenland. She sent a link to my blog to another Greenland buddy - Jed (aka Greg Hopkins). That’s him on the right. In 1986, we hosted the “Jim and Jed Show” on the “World’s Most Northerly Stereo FM Station” - Radio 5-OZ-20 in Thule, Greenland. (There actually was an FM station farther north, in Canada I think, but it was not broadcast in stereo.)

Hearing from Cheryl and Jed in the same week has inspired me to drag out my old Greenland photo album and crank up the scanner. Looking though these grainy old black and white images is so incredibly nostalgic! It’s totally cool to have friends from way back then with whom I can share these priceless memories.

One the most distinctive features of the Thule area is Mount Dundas. Once a year all of the residents of Thule climb the 900 foot mountain to participate in a golf game. The object of the game - to get a ball somewhere near the “holes” - marked with a red flag. Lucky golfers were able to get one of their quota of 3 ball within ten feet of the flag - the area marked off in yellow paint. Most players watched as their balls bounced off the top of the mountain never to be seen again.