Jasmin Caton and Kate Rutherford on Greenland's Tasermuit Fjord during a rare spell of good weather.
She and her friend Kate Rutherford headed to the Tasermiut Fjord in southern Greenland for a month-long trip last July. "I had never been to Greenland before, but my husband did an expedition to the same area and it was his photos that inspired me to eventually go there myself," explains Caton.
Getting there was a challenge in and of itself, she says. The journey started with a flight from Seattle to Iceland via New York. The ladies then got on board a smaller plane and flew to Narsarsuaq, a village in southern Greenland, before taking a passenger helicopter to their final destination of Nanortalik, an island near the mouth of the Tasermiut Fjord. The next day they took a boat to the fiord and were dropped off at base camp.
Their surroundings were beautiful, according to Caton.
"We were dropped off on a fishing boat on a white sand beach on a fiord, kind of like the Howe Sound," she says.
"Above that is sort of like rolling, heathery, kind of shrubby hillsides that kind of lead up to the granite spires. So there are no trees but there are wild flowers and small shrubs and lots of boulders."
There were a few rabbits, seagulls and ocean life, but not too many large mammals, she adds.
Caton and her partner arrived during a stretch of good weather, but the forecast told them that that wouldn't last long. That meant a change of plans for the two climbers, who had originally wanted to put up a new route on an unclimbed spire.
They decided instead to climb up Mount Nalumasortoq on a route that had been done before, but never by a female team.
"We had a fantastic time; it was an amazing route. When we finished that climb, sure enough, the bad weather came," says Caton.
"It was typical drizzly coastal weather. The rock was wet and you couldn't climb it, but you're not in the middle of a crazy snowstorm and it's not windy or anything."
The rain continued for the next two weeks, thwarting the duo's attempts to climb.
"We kept going up to the base of something and it would start to get kind of nice out then it would rain again. It was just this eternal cycle of the rock never really drying," says Caton.
With less than a week to go and weather conditions improving slightly, the ladies decided to climb Ulamatorsuaq, a 1,000-metre granite wall -- considerably taller than The Stawamus Chief in Squamish.
It took them two full days of climbing, including four or five hours of broken sleep on a tiny ledge, to reach the top. What followed was an all-nighter of rappelling -- not a good time.
"Rappelling down was really cold and windy and wet and maybe a little bit scary just because we were rappelling in the dark and there was a lot of water flowing down the base," says Caton.
"It's the time during the climb where one tiny little error can lead to drastic consequences."
When they finally reached the ground, they spent the rest of the day recovering and the next day hiking to retrieve their equipment. Then it was time to head home.
"Both of us felt like if we could've changed things we would've stayed for longer on the off chance that maybe we would've had some good weather because the climbing was that good," says Caton, who admits that her trip illustrates some of the reasons that alpine climbing isn't super popular, especially amongst women.
"There's a certain amount of suffering, but the quality of climbing that we did was absolutely amazing, . . . the scenery was unbelievable, the adventure was great. It's definitely it's one of those things that I would do again in a second even though it was a struggle."
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→Climbing Greenland's great granite walls.
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→https://national-grid-news.blogspot.com/2011/02/climbing-greenland-great-granite-walls.html
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