Beyond the Edge

Chasing Greenland’s untouched terrain

Words and photos Samuel McMahon

It’s our first time out on the ice, crossing the frozen fjord on the edge of town to reach rideable terrain. After a few days in town, we’ve been itching to get our boots on and see how the snow feels.

I’ve traveled the world snowboarding, but the reality is that most of the time we go to the same place again and again: a resort town covered in snow, each location – at least on the surface – indistinguishable from the last. This trip is different. Everything so far has been tinged with this dream-like quality, and in the same way that I find myself missing the familiarity of home, I also miss the familiarity of terrain.

So far, it’s not exactly worked; traversing the ice is very different to pulling up to a resort car park or putting skins on at a trailhead. First of all, there is the head fuck of literally walking on the sea, and even though we’ve seen locals driving out on the ice – the local school even runs their PE classes on it – it’s incredibly disconcerting. Near the shore, you can feel the slightest shifts in water and pressure under your feet. You can hear it too, ricochet-like pings peeling away underneath, no clue as to whether you’re causing or simply experiencing them.

Then there’s the scale. When we set out, the five kilometers to the bay where we planned to start climbing didn’t seem daunting. But for those of us used to operating in the mountains, the flat terrain is driving us insane. And when I say flat, I mean flat. A mile can feel like an hour, the scenery not budging an inch, but when you suddenly come up on a feature, the same distance somehow only takes a minute. Then we’re almost on terra firma, ready to gain some altitude, maybe things will start to feel more normal soon.

We come across a pair of fishermen chipping into the ice before casting their lines. Though guarded, they’re happy to chat to us, answering questions on how thick the ice is and what kind of fish they’re after. You know, fishing stuff. It’s pleasant enough until one of them takes a closer look at what we’re doing. “You don’t have a rifle?” he asks. “No,” we respond. And whilst he stared at us, he said, “What are you going to do if a polar bear comes? Just scream?”

It’s not just the ice – this place is different. This is not your typical snowboard trip. This is Greenland.

Aged ten, Mathieu Crepel was a bonafide child-prodigy snowboarder, already signing international brand deals with the likes of Quiksilver probably in exchange for Haribos and Hot Wheels. One of his first trips was to Greenland with his childhood heroes Serge Vitelli and Bertrand Denervaud for a month of unlicensed heliboarding – the 90s were truly snowboarding’s golden age.

Since then, he’s had one of the most distinguished careers of all time: FIS World Champion in 2005, first-ever TTR world champion in 2006, first person to put down a switch 1260 in competition, winner of the Legendary Baker Banked Slalom regular and switch races, multiple acclaimed video parts, two Olympics and even a wave at Jaws. But after 30 years crisscrossing the globe, there was only one place that he felt still pulling him back: Tasiilaq, Greenland. For years now, Mat has waxed lyrical to me about the place and his hopes to one day return, so when the opportunity for me to accompany him as part of a film crew came up, I jumped on it. 

Even though I familiarized myself with the key facts before setting off (it’s about the same land mass as Mexico, but with a population of only 55,000, about 0.6% of Mexico City), I was not fully prepared for the otherworldliness of Greenland. Everything is vast, and everywhere you go can make you suddenly aware of just how minuscule you are in the grand scheme of the landscape, the Total Perspective Vortex.

The plan was to try and retrace some of Mathieu’s steps from 1995, eschewing the heli for splitboards. Over ten days, we would circumnavigate the island of Ammassalik on the eastern coast of Greenland, camping out in some of the most remote wilderness you can imagine. 

Among the many risks are the bears. Though we were caught off guard by the ice fishermen, our Arctic guide – Ronan – was fully prepared. He’d done his research with the townsfolk and had been convinced that bears were extremely unlikely to be found in the zone where we first ventured to. Although when the other guides, Clement and Steven, arrived a few days later, they brought guns with them… And for the whole expedition, we had to be fully cognizant of being within sight of one of the armed guides at all times.

For Mathieu, Pierre (the DOP) and myself – all used to total freedom on shoots – this was a headfuck, to say the least. Polar bears could potentially be hidden behind every crest or rock, so scoping lines suddenly involved a whole new mindset. Before the trip started, Mat had warned me about the night watch – the need to take shifts at night to guard the camp and warn of approaching beasts. To my complete surprise, this turned out to be one of the most special experiences of the trip. It’s tough to get to sleep in the -20ºC temps, but the constant crunch of footsteps from the patrollers is one of the most reassuring sounds I’ve ever heard – an audio cue that your brothers are looking out for you at all times. And when it was my turn to take guard, the weight of responsibility was equaled by the experience of being so magnificently alone under the aurora borealis. 

Before setting off into the unknown, the final piece of the puzzle was how to take all the gear with us. The solution: pulkas. Think sturdy versions of plastic supermarket sleds, normally attached to the wearer with a harness, but instead (maliciously, I think) for me and Pierre tied to our camera bags. The size of our backpacks has forever been remarked on whilst on snowboard shoots, but tethered to a pulka containing tent, food, splitboard, tripod, bog roll etc, it looks like a practical joke. I couldn’t help myself from weighing the load before we left: bag plus pulka comes in at a hysterical 59kg.

Surprisingly, across the horizontal plane of the sea ice, the load almost felt like nothing, the sled glided frictionless over the kilometers. In fact, once the group would get into a good rhythm, we discovered that if you’re subtle about it, it’s possible to clip your sled to someone else’s, let them wonder for a while why they’re suddenly finding the going harder, before cruising past for the comedy reveal.

Over rolling terrain it’s a different story. Uphill, already out of my element on cross-country skis, the pulka became a dead weight. Then on the descent, it was a mafia-style concrete breeze block, determined to take me to the bottom as fast as possible. And even in the slightest transitions between these states, it was unpredictable, alternating between suddenly stopping you dead in your tracks, or slide-tackling you if you don’t clock an imperceptible decline in the terrain. Bluntly, the thing is a fucker…

But, I would do it all again, with double the weight and with my stupid cross-country boots tied together if necessary, just to experience those views again. The valleys, hills and mountains we crossed have a way of hitting you with unimaged, incomprehensible vistas just as your energy is depleted and you least expect it. The first time we looked out over the Sermilik Fjord I was moved to tears. It’s an area so vast, but without any indication of scale – every iceberg frozen into the twenty-or-so kilometers between Ammassalik and the mainland looks so close you could pluck it out with your fingertips. Slowly moving through the Imiilaa Fjord at sea level between thousand-meter peaks must be the closest to the feeling of walking on another planet. And I will never forget seeing a glimpse of the mainland’s ice sheet for the first time, inconceivably vast and barren but replete with the same siren’s call that undoubtedly lured the likes of Fridtjof Nansen across over a hundred years ago. 

Four days into the trek, we entered and began navigating the Sermilik Fjord, an iceberg-strewn waterway to the west of Ammassalik. Though we had the best part of the long arctic day to reach Tiniteqilaaq, a small hunting village just to the north of the island, progress was interrupted as Clement pointed out to what looked to be a mini-Alp trapped in the iceflow. With a few lines already under his belt, Mathieu couldn’t resist, despite the “rideable” face’s extreme angle and the daunting crevasse leading straight into the sea at the bottom. On closer inspection, this wasn’t even a board-width across, so the worst case would have meant getting some damp feet. 

Still, watching him scale the iceberg was daunting, to say the least. I couldn’t imagine what it was like for him. Complete with ice axes and crampons, seeing him pick his way up the side of this trapped beast hammered home just how far from help we were if anything went wrong. But Mat’s natural skill means that once he’s strapped in and riding, he somehow turns even a sheer ice wall into a space to flow through effortlessly, linking turn after turn. The whole crew hollered as he ollied back to the flat in total control. As we ran over to greet him, he revealed that in the time it had taken him to mount and descend, the iceberg had drifted slightly within its freezing moorings, presenting him with a man-sized gap at the bottom. If anything had gone wrong he might have slipped straight down and through to the below-zero water. 

Distracted by the iceberg, our time on the ice took longer than expected. Worried that we might end up in the dark on what is essentially a highway/supermarket freezer section for polar bears, Steven set us an accelerated pace towards Tiniteqilaaq over the remaining ten kilometres. Stretched out in single file and dragging the pulkas, we could detect the nervousness of our normally unflappable polar guides, almost mushing us into keeping up a fast rhythm as the day turned from twilight, then into dusk. Just as we caught sight of the village lights, the sky exploded into the most vivid aurora I’ve ever seen, charged cosmic energy shimmering and arcing across the atmosphere. Elated and exhausted, we dragged our sleds up off the ice and through the village before finding our cabin and collapsing into bed.

Looking back, our entire time in Greenland felt dreamlike, but nothing compared to the wonderfully surreal days we spent in Tiniteqilaaq. A tiny hunting village at the end of the earth, only about eighty people live there, all with the same insane view across the Sermilik Fjord, miles and miles of flat ice before the mainland’s ice sheet roars up and over the horizon.

The main occupation for them is seal hunting, and after a day or so, we made the adjustment to encountering blood, guts and blubbery carcasses everywhere we went. I now can hold the dual narratives in my head where seals are both cute ocean puppies and also delicious, defenseless meat footballs lying on the ice waiting for passing humans/polar bears. 

In amongst the death, there was so much life. Huskies birthing newborn pups right outside our cabin, gangs of adolescent dogs roaming town looking for playthings. And though by then we had become used to the reticence of the adult Greenladers, every time we returned to the village from scoping lines or icebergs to ride, what must have been every child in the village was waiting for us in the harbor, demanding to play with us and our splitboard gear. Kids really are the same everywhere, and whilst the crew thirty years before us had a ten-year-old Mat to forge a connection with the people they met, there was our crew’s bond that meant we would be leaving a part of ourselves behind when we returned home.

To get home, there was first the simple matter of a two-day, thirty-kilometer trek with the cursed pulkas. One final night on the ice. One final time to watch over, and in turn be guarded by our friends. One more opportunity to meander through the stillest environment imaginable, to feel its profound peace. 

Mathieu Crepel went there in 1995 and spent the next three decades dreaming of returning. I joined him in 2024, and cannot imagine waiting that long to return.

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Qviktok, directed by Walid Berrissoul, will be available online in late 2024.