OFF THE GRID
“PUR, JACKIE, PUR!” shouts Inuit Mika to his
husky, named after the film star Jackie Chan. The
dog knows exactly what to do: pur is a modified
form of pull and the thin rope goes taut as his
paws sink deep into the snow. By mid-April the
sun is already warm, causing small puddles to
appear. It seems hardly possible that 12 dogs
can pull the sledges, laden with dog handlers,
two guests and substantial equipment over the
next hill, but they do. Impressively, they pull a
corresponding body weight to their own, about
25 kilograms, for several hours at a time. The
sledge glides almost silently through the still
frozen fjord into the ice and snow covered
mountains, where a few brown spots of bare
earth are already visible. “The dogs are the true
heroes of the Arctic,” says Sven Gust of Northern
Explorers. The German, who settled north of
Trondheim in Norway, has organised diving and
adventure expeditions to these arctic waters
for many years. “Huskies have been the most
important production animals in Greenland for
many centuries. In winter, using dogs was the only
method of moving around, bringing the Inuit to
the ice edge or outlying fjords to hunt.”
These days, the dogs are being increasingly
replaced by gas-fuelled snowmobiles which
require no attention during the summer, while
dogs of course need to be fed and attended to
through the whole year. “Most Inuit are very
poor and cannot afford much. A snowmobile
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stands in the corner and costs no money in
summer,” explains Gust. But, happily, there are still
enough huskies and dog handlers that rely on this
traditional mode of transport in Tasiilaq, the capital
of East Greenland, with about 2,000 inhabitants.
When the ice gets thin, the sledges definitely
have an advantage over t he heavier snowmobiles
and though this is a remote region, tourists do
come here and the dog sledges are a popular
option for experiencing traditional Greenland.