I Camped at the ‘Edge of the World’ in Greenland—Here’s What It Was Like

My eyes played tricks on me in the dark. It was 2 a.m. on the edge of a bay in Greenland, and our tented camp appeared like a black-and-white photograph in the light of my headlamp. I watched as an iceberg glided by on the water. The mountains were wreathed in a spectral fog in the moonlight. Polar bears are a very real threat in this part of the world; I would jump every time I heard the sound of a humpback whale spouting in the bay or a tent flap snapping in the wind. 

My six fellow campers and I took rotating solo shifts of bear-watching throughout the night, armed with flares and a whistle, should we need to alert our guides. I walked around the camp’s perimeter, weaving between our four fluorescent-orange tents, all my senses tuned in. The Inuit have a word for this feeling, ilira, which roughly translates to “awe accompanied by a creeping fear.”

I was on a new land-based expedition with Hinoki Travels, an ecotourism company. Our weeklong August journey had begun in Kulusuk, a Tunumiit (or East Greenlandic Inuit) village of about 225 people. Kulusuk is on an island of the same name, just below the Arctic Circle. Of the 140,000 travelers who go to Greenland annually, the majority explore only its western and southern reaches by cruise ship. Less than 5,000 visitors land in Kulusuk every year by plane. But with a new airport in Nuuk, the capital, and twice-weekly United flights from Newark Liberty International launching this summer comes serious concern about the impact of tourism on the environment.

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Greenland is considered ground zero for climate change: the Arctic is warming nearly four times faster than the rest of the world, and meltwater from the ice sheets and glaciers is the largest contributor to rising sea levels globally. To explore this fragile ecosystem responsibly, Hinoki set us up to travel by kayak and on foot, with only a small motorboat meeting us at remote campsites with heavier gear and our supply of freeze-dried food. Hinoki founder Bethany Betzler also collaborates with a conservation biologist, Jesse Lewis, to develop a sustainability strategy for each destination where the company operates. To pull off our trip, Betzler partnered with Pirhuk, a local mountaineering company founded by Matt Spenceley, a Brit who arrived in Kulusuk 24 years ago to climb and backcountry-ski and later moved to the island. 

The bright blue house he shares with his wife, Helen, serves as a lodge, and our group spent two nights there before setting out into the backcountry. I woke to Kulusuk’s sled dogs howling in the dawn. Outside my window, houses appeared to glow in the violet light. Except for a smudge of an airport, a small general store, and a school, there’s nothing in Kulusuk but wilderness stretching in every direction. Pack ice drifting down the coastline from the Arctic Ocean makes it difficult for ships to approach and has left the island isolated. The community relies on fishing, foraging, and hunting seals and whales, with a few supply shipments arriving by boat in the summer. “There’s a flow of ice, animals, and water that’s always in flux,” Spenceley told me when I arrived. He said living there can be tough, especially during winter, when the land is obliterated by snow and there are only a few hours of light each day. 

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As the morning sun warmed the village’s rocky hillsides, our group geared up in dry suits. We were guided by Spenceley and a Tunumiit hunter, Jokum Heimer Mikaelsen, who also goes by Jukku. In kayaks, we paddled out into Tunu Sound toward the white tongue of Apusiaajik Glacier, six miles away. We skirted the aquamarine halo of an iceberg. “Kayaking was invented here!” bellowed Spenceley up ahead. For thousands of years, Arctic peoples have used a hunting boat called the qajaq, which is designed for speed and silence and is made of sealskin stretched over a whalebone or driftwood frame. 

“Let’s make our way over there,” Spenceley said, pointing his chin to our far left. “See if we can get some big whale action.” Our kayaks bobbed precariously. “I’d be good with some medium whale action,” said one of my fellow travelers, Jonathan Baude, and we exchanged a nervous laugh. Not far away, the elegant curve of a humpback broke through the surface. Our group “rafted up,” holding the sides of one another’s kayaks for stability. Another whale appeared, misting the air with its breath. 

That night, we camped on the water’s edge with a clear view of Apusiaajik, which was marbled in blue and white. Another guest, Paul Piong, lingered in the cold, painting a watercolor of the scene. I retreated to my tent, knowing I would be back up at 5 a.m. for my bear-watch shift. I emerged just as the first light was coaxing the world out of darkness. White boulders shape-shifted in the twilight, and the sound of a calving glacier ricocheted like a gunshot between the mountains. I retrieved the whistle from beneath the down jacket I was wearing (even in summer, temperatures can drop below freezing). The dawn light drew a silver veil over this land of unnerving beauty, reminding me of paintings by Caspar David Friedrich and William Blake. For the 19th-century Romantics, sublime referred not to something delightful—as it’s commonly used now— but to a sense of awe in nature inseparable from terror or danger. Ilira. 

Our journey that day continued on foot, taking us up over the glacier along a dogsled route that dates back to the Thule, the Inuit’s predecessors, who settled in Greenland around 800 years ago. We walked single file in silence, with the squeak and rasp of ice underfoot, finally arriving at the edge of a moulin, a hole in a glacier that funnels meltwater from its surface to its bed.

Spenceley looked around distractedly, wide-eyed. “I’m a bit shaken,” he said, explaining that the glacier had lost more than six feet of ice since the previous summer. As temperatures warm, moulins have become more common, and the resulting flow of subglacial meltwater is accelerating the movement of ice toward the ocean. 

This moulin marked the entrance to an ice cave. “A cave collapsed on a group of tourists in Iceland a few days ago,” Spenceley told us. He explained that it’s important to have a guide who can read the ice and the weather, and that we would move through the first, tight section of the cave as quickly as possible. Being slightly claustrophobic, I was happy to walk-crawl under the low, frozen roof, swiftly reaching above with bare hands to feel the cave’s glistening surface under my fingertips. Once we were standing upright, it seemed like we had stepped inside a dazzling jewel. 

Later that day, using crampons, we trekked up a slick slope and down through the field of the glacial moraine. We found no trails, no sheltering trees. The only trace of humanity was a discarded bullet casing on the ground. I looked down to see the fuchsia stars of niviarsiaq, the national flower, pushing up through the ground as we jumped from rock to rock across small streams. We walked across the spongy tundra and traced a lake, where we saw red-breasted mergansers, a species of duck, flying in perfect V formation.

One night, we savored a dinner of pan-fried fresh-caught cod. “I have a surprise,” said Jukku, who had remained a quiet yet encouraging presence throughout the trip. He stepped behind a nearby boulder and reemerged wearing polar-bear-fur pants and sealskin boots and carrying a traditional Inuit drum made from a polar-bear stomach stretched over a wooden frame. To the sonorous beat of the drum, he sang a wistful Tunumiit song about a star-crossed raven and goose. That night, the northern lights rippled like green fire across the sky.

Until this point, we had lucked out with sunny days, but the fickle weather Greenland is known for finally arrived on our last day of hiking. We took shelter from the rain and lashing wind in a mountain hut Spenceley had built with friends and toasted the end of our trip with thimblefuls of whiskey. It was cheerful and warm inside. But the cold of the Arctic waters, of the ancient blue ice, stayed with me for weeks. 

Seven-night Interdependence: East Greenland itinerary with Hinoki Travels from $6,750 per person.

A version of this story first appeared in the April 2025 issue of Travel + Leisure under the headline “Top of the World.”