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…

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…

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…

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…

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…

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…

Thanks to recently reconnecting 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 me in the summer of 1986 at J-Site – about 13 miles north of Thule. You can’t tell from the image, but the cliff I’m standing on…

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…

Each visitor to Erik’s cabin was offered the privilege of signing his one-of-a-kind guestbook. As you can probably gather from what you see here, I was one of the few Americans ever to visit this place. Unfortunately I didn’t take a picture of the page that I wrote in his guestbook, so I can’t share…

Just when I thought things couldn’t possibly get any cooler, two of Erik’s Eskimo friends dropped by for a visit. Erik expected them to show up at around noon, but instead arrived by dogsled somewhere around midnight. Evidently, Eskimos have little need for clocks – especially in the long night of winter. I don’t know…

Finally we’re inside Erik’s cabin! The fisheye lens makes the place look much larger than it really is – a mere 8 feet by 16 feet. The cabin was just tall enough in the middle for me to stand up. I shot this shortly after we arrived and fired up the stove – the top…

You know, it’s a good thing that the site is really intended primarily for me. I’m probably the only one who can make any sense of it. I was looking at it again tonight and I realize that my recent entries are all all over the map – no pun intended. The main reason for…

I rarely saw the native population during my 17 months in Greenland. Fortunately, the air base sponsored a (70 mile!) dog sled race with a grand prize of a rifle. This was enough to attract Inuit families from many miles around. There was one other much more personal interaction with the natives of Thule –…