Another Pair Of Eyes

Boots

April 15, 2009 on 10:27 pm | In Happenings, Photography, Travel | 6 Comments

The first concern of anyone doing anything adventurous ever should be boots. I know it isn’t, people are all wrapped up in tents and hand warmers and rehydration and food and shells/gloves/breathabe eva-fabric windstopper membrane-layer magic fleeces/base layers/cameras/bags/flights and whatever. But people should think about boots more, because ultimately that’s what you’ll spend nearly all day, every day, wearing. And if they aren’t comfy you’ll go through hell until they are. Boots are important.

“But enough about boots!”, I hear you cry, “and show me lots of holiday photos and regale me with all sorts of stories which at first will have a point but will just continue easily into the realms of ‘you had to be there’ before fading into absolute obscurity, much like this sentence!”

It turns out, of course, that this story starts with a pair of boots. New, shiny, black, semi-rigid cross-country skiing boots, in fact. I wore them to the exclusion of all other footwear for six days marching across frozen lakes, up icy slopes, down deep powder drifts and even in the chopper to the airport in Kusuluk, and for the first three days of wearing them they made my life hell. Rule number 1 – break the boots in. I had so much compeed on my feet I was basically wearing a second pair of socks. I was putting compeed on top of other pieces of compeed. It was a mess (although not a patch on the feet of my father – images of that are not for the faint-hearted). The latter three days were improved, but not perfect. Lesson re-learnt.

Anyway, nobody wants to hear the blow-by-blow account of the boots and how they wore in, or the travel (two days just to get to Anamagsalik, the island we were circumnavigating) or indeed the blow-by-blow account of very much at all, so I’ll give you a few of the highlights with some photos and few words, thereby saving everyone’s time. Of course, I suppose if you didn’t want to know what was going on in the icy wastes you’d not be reading this blog, so I can waffle a little bit…

This is Kusuluk International Airport. The hub of transport for the southeast coast of Greenland, and proud winner of the prestigious ‘Most Pointless Window 2009 Award’.

At some point our guide, an absolutely lovely inuit guy with a happy smile 24 hours a day and a dog sled spotted, white-on-white, a polar bear print about ten metres from where he was driving the sled. He stops the sled immediately, circles the prints, whips out a pair of binoculars and starts scanning the landscape. Pointing excitedly (he spoke almost no english) he jumps back on the sled, lets out ropes behind for us to cling to and then starts yelling enthusiastically at the dogs which leapt immediately to the fore. We ended up racing headlong for two polar bears, a mother and cub, being dragged behind a sled. I managed to take this shot (and I am mightly proud of this) with a 40-year-old telephoto manual focus lens, one-handed with the other clinging to a rope being dragged along by ten dogs over not-so-flat ice.

We visited an ice cave, on a kind of odd day trip – we all boarded the sled, leaving the bags and skis behind, and went off on a dog sledding morning before starting the day. It was beautiful, and at the back the floor was this glassy, smooth ice reflecting the polished waves of the ceiling. Ice is the most glorious blue.

Speaking of dogs, there were a great many of them. They slept outside on the snow, and dug themselves small hollows in which they would sit. The ten dogs in our guides team were not large, and yet they could pull (when chasing the bears) about half a ton of people and baggage. Forcefully. This was one of the fluffier and more excitable ones I came across.

Finally we come full circle (and this circle is not for the squeamish). As I said at the start, boots are important, and broken-in boots are even more important. I know you think blisters aren’t so bad, but there are blisters and there are blisters. I give you the worst feet of the trip, thankfully not my own.

Both feet. Both sides.