DAY 5: Another lucky day with the weather today: sunny and no wind, no major complaints.
Total distance traveled: 12 kilometers. (I prefer to measure in kilometers. It sounds more impressive than miles.) We left camp and headed up the frozen fjord, passing towering, 30-foot-tall icebergs that had broken off the glacier and lay stuck in the sea ice. We could clearly see that the glaciers around us were receding. Before we left Qaanaaq, the Inuits told us that this phenomenon has increased over the past five years.

Once we reached the end of the fjord, the fun begun as we started climbing
up the slow incline of the Tugto Glacier. We made our way up through a small canyon made in the glacier where melting water forms a river in the summer. The surrounding landscape seems alien to me: mountains made of ice and rock, no vegetation. The only animals we saw were two ravens. They came out of nowhere and followed us for two hours and made for great company. Alain noticed that the winter snow is nearly all gone already, is about a month earlier than usual. This put him in a bad mood for a while.

The great thing at this time of the year is that the sun is out 24 hours a day and sits about one-third of the way up off the horizon line. It feels like it’s 9 AM all day long. This relieves any pressure we might have felt to find a good camp spot before darkness falls, so we can keep going until we find the best spot. Good thing, because Alain is very picky!

We reached the first plateau at an elevation of 185 meters (600 feet) where we stopped to set up our second camp. Over the course of the day, we trekked for about 8 hours and stopped three times for 15 minutes each -- quite a luxury. If the weather had been colder, we wouldn’t have been able to stop for more than 5 minutes or so before moving on. In that scenario, we’d need to restart our internal furnace quickly before the outside temperature began to invade our bodies.

The nurse's report for tonight remains very light, with only a blister to report. 

 [Editor's note: Over the course of two weeks, Larry Lunt, a member of NRDC's Global Leadership Council, and Alain Hubert, a Belgian explorer and founder of the International Polar Foundation, will trek some 200 miles from the town of Qaanaaq across Greenland's Humbolt Glacier, the Northern Hemisphere's largest and fastest moving river of ice. Along the way, as special contributors to OnEarth's Greenlight blog, Lunt and Hubert will post dispatches from the ice: stories of a culture and wilderness in flux and lessons for what our own future may hold.  Follow the journey at our Destination: Greenland page.]