BY JACQUI L'ANGE

LPF's Arctic Patron introduces people to the  pure Arctic – and transforms them into ambassadors for our environment.

Greenlanders cannot help but live close to the sea. Their villages fringe the edges of the world's most sparsely populated country,  its interiors largely inaccessible to anything but ice.

This is where the iceberg that sank the Titanic was formed. It's where light goes to extremes – constant daylight at the height of summer, deep darkness enveloping winter, and the Northern Lights making a lurid sky show in between. Reindeer are the tallest creatures in this landscape – the only trees are tiny tundra mosses. Here people maintain close contact with nature, and rely on one other. Ancient Inuit stories are told alongside Viking lore.

This is the place Anika Krogh calls home.

Anika is proudly Greenlandic Inuit. We first met her when she skippered our boat during our 2021 Greenland Swim. She's been driving boats since she was a child, which accounts for her ease navigating amongst massive icebergs (Lewis insists he's never met a skipper with such natural skill) as well as her deep appreciation for Arctic wilderness.

“In these small, open boats you really get respect for nature. In Greenland, the weather can change really, really fast. So you can leave from Nuuk where the weather is nice, with a forecast for light wind, and then come into an area where the waves are enormous, and you get completely soaked, and you can hardly see because your eyes are full of salt water.”

“Out in the rest of the world man is cultivating nature, but in Greenland it’s the other way around.”

Greenland's coast is made up of rocky cliffs, with few places to shelter. “So you just have to carry on.” More than once her navigational screen died, and she had to rely on sight. “Luckily, I know the fjords well, so if I can recognise a little bit of cliff, that helps a lot.” Even so, she says, there have been a couple of times where the weather caught her out, alone. “I was thinking, maybe todaythere is a chance that I'm not going to make it. I really just had to focus and do my best to get home.”

“I didn't know any other female skippers when I started. But now there's quite a lot. And I think females are better pilots in many ways. They are better at risk analysis, and they show more compassion for their passengers. A lot of the men will say, I have to go from A to B as fast as possible. A lot of the female pilots will look around and, if people don't really feel comfortable, they'll slow down. The trip will take more time, but that's okay.”

LIVE IN THE MOMENT

Many people find living in the moment difficult. “But when you're in a boat, you can't really do anything other than just being right here, right now, in beautiful nature,” Anika says. “It's so key to health and sanity and longevity. I think you getting more healthy people when you have respect for nature.”

Which is why she and her husband Jon run a remote wilderness camp through their company Nomad Greenland, introducing people to her special corner of the Arctic.

Kiattua is their tented camp on a secluded shingle beach 80 kilometres deep into the world’s second largest fjord system. The camp takes glamping to the next level; Scandinavian chic meets traditional Inuit – and the teepees have hot showers. But it is the place, and the space, that is priceless. It's only accessible by boat (or a days' trek on foot from the nearest village) and limited to 10 guests at a time to protect its fragile infrastructure. The camp operates for four months of the year, after which it gets packed up without leaving a trace.

Kiattua was initially conceived as a one-off holiday camp for a wealthy friend of Elon Musk, but Anika, Jon and their business partner, Thure Baastrup, soon realised they'd created a unique offering for people looking for experiential travel.

“In a lot of ways we are selling wilderness experiences in Greenland. But the benefit is that people get a different understanding of nature by being here. After the experience, they become ambassadors to protect our environment.”

Anika and Jon quit their fulltime jobs to live their dream and run Nomad Greenland full time. The camp had just started to take off – National Geographic named it one of twenty trending destinations for 2020 – when Covid struck. “It was really, really awful,” she says. “We got all this amazing media attention, and before we could harvest it we were back to scratch.”

BACK TO BASICS

Survival is something Anika learned young. When she was three years old, her family moved to the tiny village of Alluitsoq in South Greenland. “There were only 21 people living there. There were no cars, no shops. We had to either sail or walk for three hours to get to the nearest village. Living in a place like that you just really get connected to nature.”

Anika managed it when she was 11.

Addressing the climate crisis calls for a radical behavioural shift. But behavioural change doesn't come easy. “Raising awareness alone doesn't create action,” says Richard. “You need powerful storytelling that gets people emotionally engaged.”

“That you can go into the wild with nothing and still feed yourself is a vital survival skill, and one that kept Greenlanders alive through the different seasons,” Anika says. It is considered a right of passage in Greenland to kill your first big animal. “It was the hardest thing of my life! It was so heavy, and I was crying on the way back, and my dad was like, It's okay, you have proven your worth, let me carry the meat. And I said, No! Then I will never be able to tell the story and say I did it!”

These days Anika is mostly vegetarian, out of respect for the climate. “But I don't mind eating meat as long as I killed it myself. It's a climate-friendly way to get food for the winter – and you know the animals had a good life out there in the wilderness.” During her childhood, she says, “most of what we ate was what we provided for ourselves during summer.”

Anika was determined that her children – Maliina (11) Vilas (12) and Tristan (18) – would grow up in Greenland in touch with the both the land and their culture. All three are as comfortable as she is navigating icebergs through high waves. Vilas is an expert in catching Arctic char with his bare hands – “It's a special technique where you tickle the char, then you can grab it from underneath. It takes some practice.” – and Maliina hopes to hunt her first reindeer this year. “I have pretty cool kids.”

No doubt they echo the sentiment.

BUILDING THE DREAM

Anika and Jon dreamed about creating a lodge, “so that we could work together and the kids could be a part of it.” When they got a request for a high-end getaway in the wilderness, they teamed up with their friend Thure and set out to design their fantasy camp. They combined their outdoor excursion experience and researched developments in tents and materials. Then they calculated what it would cost to set up. “It was crazy high. We said, this customer will never say yes to this.”

But the client loved the plan – and gave them just two months to build it, “We were thinking, who on earth suggested that we should have a hot tub out in the wilderness?”

They worked around the clock, ordering in equipment and materials from Denmark. There was just one problem: they didn't know where to put their camp.

The site would have to be relatively flat to pitch the teepees  – and there are not a lot of flat places in craggy Greenland. “We looked in a lot of different places,” Anika says, “and we just couldn't find it.” Then her mother suggested a place where she used to go hunting with her own father as a child. “It was just the perfect spot.”

Their spot was still there when Covid restrictions eased and the camp is now operational again. But change is the world's greatest constant. Just when Covid started to feel like a bad dream, the war in Ukraine brought refugees to Denmark's borders. Anika and Jon were among the first to organise buses to bring them to safety, raising funds through a Facebook campaign to help transport, accommodate and settle more than 200 people. “It's just the right thing to do. Its so hard to see what war is doing to people.”

TRANSFORMATIONS

It's hard to witness the effects of climate change on her beloved icefjords too. Rising temperatures affect the Polar Regions more dramatically than anywhere else on Earth. “We're seeing change in the Arctic more and more.”

Which is why the transformational effect on visitors to Kiattua is so inspiring. Anika saw it in that very first client. “When he arrived he was so stressed and his mind was always somewhere else. He couldn't really enjoy the moment.” Anika left camp for a few days, and returned to find a completely different person. “I asked Jon what had happened. He said he convinced the client to leave his phone behind for a day and go out hiking. When he got back there was something new in his eyes.”

Over the next days the transformation deepened. “It was so inspiring. He started to play; he was completely changed. His wife said he was the person she first fell in love with again, and his kids even joked, Dad, what's going on? Have you been smoking weed?”  It was a drug-free high: being in non-stop nature brought him back to his senses, and to his centre.

Another client was only in the camp for two days. On his return to ‘civilization’ he changed all his company's cars to electric vehicles. “Now they have a fleet of 3000 electric cars. That's a lot of CO2 saving.”

We've all seen the research that shows how being in nature reduces stress. But this nature does something even more profound. “It's difficult to explain, but it makes you humble in some ways. It's just so vast that you can't control it. Out in the rest of the world, people are cultivating nature, but in Greenland it's the other way around.”

It feels like the perfect balance.

FIND OUT MORE ABOUT KIATTUA HERE.