DAY 6: As usual, we start our morning ritual with a long, warm bubble bath followed by breakfast on the terrace with Belle Hill Farm eggs, Canadian bacon, and Cumberland sausages served on chinaware. While we eat, we look forward to the end of the day when we will get our 2-hour oil massages...

Wishful thinking.


Today we decided to give our skis a break so we loaded them onto Moby Dick, our trusty sled (see above). Our feet were our chosen mode of transportation as the terrain is a steady incline on an unbelievably chaotic glacier. It looks like a rough ocean with 6-foot-tall whitecaps, frozen solid.

We zigzag through this terrain pulling our sled, which is much less disciplined than we are. Melting water rushes around us -- it is the kind of landscape that you normally find at the end of the summer. Alain curses a few times as he struggles to find a way through, bactracking several times to find a passage. The defining phrase of the day was Alain’s, when he said that he would have never come this way had he known how much ice melt had already taken place.

We pass by two moulins, or glacier mills, which are only beginning to be well understood (see photo at right). In the summer, when the melting ice forms a stream and then a river, the water either flows down on top of the glacier or it falls into a hole or a crevasse in the glacier, which acts like a big vacuum. The rushing water disappears into the hole and runs all the way to the bedrock where it forms lakes. These lakes decrease the friction between the glacier and the bedrock and increase the rate at which the glacier flows.

Finally, we make it through. After a huge, 10-hour effort, we reach the end of our day at the ice cap, at an elevation of 2,500 feet. This ice covers the whole of Greenland: 2,000 kilometers long by 600 kilometers wide. It is a much smoother terrain, and we will be on it for the next 100 kilometers -- a great reward after today. I’m beat!

[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.