Northeast Greenland National Park

Northeast Greenland National Park tickets and tours: which one to book

The Northeast Greenland National Park is the largest national park in the world, and by a wide margin: it covers the whole north-eastern quarter of Greenland, an area greater than that of France and Spain combined, larger than all but about thirty of the world's countries, and it has no permanent inhabitants, no roads, no airport with scheduled flights, no lodging and no visitor facilities of any kind. It is not possible simply to go there. All access requires a permit from the government of Greenland, which is granted to scientific expeditions, to a very small number of sporting expeditions that can demonstrate experience, insurance and search and rescue cover, and to the operators of expedition cruise ships, and it is on one of these ships that virtually all the few hundred tourists who see the park each year arrive.

The voyages, of ten days to three weeks, in small ice-strengthened vessels carrying between fifty and two hundred passengers, run in August and September, when the pack ice off the coast has loosened enough to allow a ship through, and start either from Longyearbyen in Spitsbergen, crossing the Greenland Sea, or from Iceland, usually from Akureyri or Reykjavik, in the latter case often beginning with a charter flight to the airstrip of Constable Point, near the village of Ittoqqortoormiit, the nearest settlement, just south of the park's boundary in Scoresby Sound. They enter the great fjords of the southern part of the park, Kaiser Franz Joseph Fjord and Kong Oscar Fjord, land passengers by inflatable boat for walks on the tundra, to old trappers' huts and to the remains of ancient Inuit camps, and cruise among icebergs beneath cliffs of banded rock, with armed guides posted against polar bears. Itineraries are wholly at the mercy of the ice, and no landing is ever promised. A handful of specialist companies also run ski, sledge and kayak expeditions.

Visiting Northeast Greenland National Park: what you will see

The national park was established in 1974 and enlarged in 1988 to 972,000 square kilometres, and it is the only national park in Greenland; it has been a UNESCO biosphere reserve since 1977. About four fifths of it lies beneath the Greenland ice sheet, the second largest body of ice on earth, up to three kilometres thick, which here reaches the sea in places through immense outlet glaciers. The remainder, an ice-free fringe up to three hundred kilometres wide, is one of the great wildernesses of the Arctic: a coast indented by some of the longest and deepest fjord systems in the world, walled by mountains of two thousand metres and more, whose rocks, folded in an ancient collision of continents and stripped bare of soil and vegetation, display their layers in bands of red, ochre, purple and grey on a gigantic scale; broad valleys of tundra, brilliant with dwarf willow and birch in their autumn colours in late August; and, in the far north, Peary Land, a polar desert which receives less precipitation than the Sahara and lies only some seven hundred kilometres from the pole. It is the home of perhaps forty per cent of the world's musk oxen, between five and fifteen thousand animals, which are seen on almost every landing, of polar bears, which hunt seals along the ice edge and wander the coast, of walruses, which haul out at a few traditional beaches, of arctic wolves, white and unafraid, arctic foxes, arctic hares, stoats and collared lemmings, on whose cycles of abundance the predators depend;

of narwhals, beluga and bowhead whales offshore; and of birds that come north to breed in the brief summer, barnacle and pink-footed geese, king eiders, gyrfalcons, snowy owls, ivory gulls, Sabine's gulls and sanderlings. People lived here long before Europeans came. The ruins of winter houses, tent rings, meat caches and fox traps of the Independence, Dorset and Thule cultures, the oldest of them some 4,500 years old, lie scattered along the shores, and the last of these Inuit, a group of twelve, were met in 1823 by a British naval officer on Clavering Island and were never seen again. In the first half of the twentieth century Danish and Norwegian trappers wintered in tiny huts along the coast, taking foxes and bears, and the two nations disputed the sovereignty of the region, a quarrel settled in Denmark's favour by the international court at The Hague in 1933. During the Second World War a secret struggle was fought here over weather stations, whose reports were vital to the campaigns in Europe, between German parties landed by submarine and a sledge patrol of Danish and Greenlandic hunters. Its successor, the Sirius patrol, a unit of the Danish navy, still enforces sovereignty by dog sledge, two men and a dozen dogs travelling for months through the winter darkness. The only people now present are the dozen members of that patrol at Daneborg, and the staff of a few weather and research stations and of the military base of Station Nord, some thirty to forty in all.

Northeast Greenland National Park: best time to go, seasons and hours

For practical purposes the park can be visited only from about late July to mid-September, when the belt of drifting pack ice carried down the coast by the East Greenland current has thinned sufficiently for ships to reach the fjords, and even then, in a heavy ice year, vessels may be unable to get in at all. August has continuous or nearly continuous daylight and temperatures of two to ten degrees;

by the end of the month and in early September the tundra turns red and gold, the first snow falls on the mountains, the nights darken, and the northern lights appear, which many regard as the best moment. From October to May the sea is frozen, the sun does not rise for months in the north, and the temperature falls to minus thirty and below. Voyages must be booked a year or more ahead. Bring windproof and waterproof outer clothing, several warm layers, rubber boots for wet landings, gloves, hat and binoculars, and be prepared for changes of plan. Allow two weeks.