Kangerlussuaq to Sisimiut: 4,200 Years of Hunting

Aasivissuit-Nipisat: what the corridor holds

The property was inscribed in 2018 under the title Aasivissuit-Nipisat: Inuit Hunting Ground between Ice and Sea, and it reaches from roughly forty kilometres inside the Greenland Ice Sheet near Kangerlussuaq out to the islands just south of Sisimiut. It contains the remains of 4,200 years of human history in seven localities, running from Nipisat at the coastal end to Aasivissuit close to the ice cap. What is being protected is the hunting route itself, the seasonal movement from the coast up through the fjords toward the inland ice and back, along with the knowledge of climate, navigation and medicine that came with it.

Remains from the Saqqaq, Dorset and Thule cultures sit inside the property alongside later Inuit and colonial-era sites, which is unusual: this is one landscape used continuously by successive peoples rather than a sequence of separate abandoned ones. On the ground the traces are modest and everywhere at once, graves, fox traps, meat caches, shooting blinds and cairns scattered across ground that still looks like terrain rather than a site. Sarfannguit, reached by boat from Sisimiut, is the inhabited settlement inside the property, which makes it the one place where the landscape's present and its past occupy the same view.

Point 660 and the edge of the ice sheet

Kangerlussuaq has something almost nowhere else in Greenland has: a road to the ice. Around twenty-five kilometres of gravel track, originally built so that Volkswagen could test cars in cold conditions, runs inland from the settlement to Point 660, where the Greenland Ice Sheet simply begins at your feet. Nearby Russell Glacier gives the same encounter in motion, with ice calving off the front and crashing into the river below on a scale that is audible before it is visible.

The country between settlement and ice edge is also the most reliable wildlife ground in Greenland reachable without a boat. Muskox, reindeer, Arctic fox and snow hare range freely across the tundra here, and the muskox in particular are common enough that a half-day trip out toward the ice frequently turns into a wildlife drive as well.

Aurora over Kangerlussuaq

Kangerlussuaq's inland position, well back from the coastal cloud that shrouds most Greenlandic towns, makes it one of the better places in the Arctic to watch the northern lights. It lies on the auroral oval and records more than three hundred nights of clear skies in a year, which is the practical difference between a destination where aurora is possible and one where it is likely. The viewing season runs through the dark half of the year, roughly October to April.

The Arctic Circle Trail

The same corridor carries Greenland's best-known long-distance walk. The Arctic Circle Trail runs about 165 kilometres from near Kangerlussuaq to Sisimiut on the coast, entirely north of the Arctic Circle, through tundra, lakes, low mountains and broad glacial valleys. There are no roads, no villages and no resupply along the way, which is the trail's character rather than an oversight: it is a genuinely self-sufficient multi-day route, walked in the summer months, and it asks for real backcountry competence rather than enthusiasm. In a landscape where the weather turns fast, that includes carrying extra warm and waterproof layers even on a day that starts fine.