For the first two weeks everything was going our way. We had incredibly beautiful weather, and the long arctic days only brought us sunshine and deep blue skies. The climbers broke into two teams, with one team resting while the other made progress on the wall. Bobby and myself would accompany the climbers on the wall, and shoot them climbing their individual rope lengths, or "pitches". We were working our way toward a feature about half way up the wall that we named the "Dark Heart", because of it's obvious heart shape. Steve and myself, being huge Apocalypse Now fans, wanted to name it the Heart of Darkness (the book by Joseph Conrad that the movie is based on) but were outvoted. Eventually we made it to the Dark Heart, and there we set up our first wall camp, employing the portaledges we brought along. Portaledges are basically tents that are bolted to the rock face that give us a comfortable place to sleep in a vertical world. We also started hauling loads of food, water and gear to the camp so we could eventually stay up there for days at a time and not run out of supplies. Things were looking good, we were ahead of schedule and about halfway up the imposing tower with the summit looming overhead. We were beginning to feel invincible, like nothing could stop us now. And then the rains came.

It started slowly at first, with an occasional shower here and there. Eventually it became constant, keeping us tentbound for what would be the next 12 days. Before it closed in for good, I accompanied Jeff to Nanortalik for a few days. He was leaving for his hunting guide job in Alaska, and I went along to get cultural footage of the Inuit in and around Nanortalik. We waited along the bank of the fjord for a day and a half, before we saw a lone fisherman and hitched a ride. The only thing he understood was "Nanortalik", and he smiled and nodded his head up and down. He was a master at negotiating his way through the pack ice, but as we bumped against the frozen blocks we started to wonder if we had picked the right day to hitchhike. While Jeff knelt on the floor of the boat as if praying to the Norse Gods, I put my cameras in a dry bag thinking for sure we were going to end up in the water amongst the fractured plates of the frozen sea. We eventually made it to Nanortalik and happily paid him the equivalent of $50 for the ride. I dubbed him "Johnny Speedboat", and Jeff said if he had been piloting the Titanic the iceberg that sank her wouldn't have stood a chance! A few days later Jeff hitched a ride on a helicopter and I started looking for a ride back to the climb. The pack ice had moved in overnight, trapping me in Nanortalik for the next three days. During that time I interviewed a seal hunter, who made me eat a piece of raw seal liver before he would talk to me. I also visited an elder home, Greenland's version of a retirement home, and had to sit around and drink bad coffee for 2 days before anyone would talk to me. The coffee tasted of hellbroth, and the raw seal liver tasted as you might imagine but the interviews I got were worth it. I learned something in Nanortalik, getting interviews for a documentary is not without personal sacrifice!

I finally caught a ride on a boat back to the wall and came walking into camp totally drenched, to the rest of the team who had been trapped in their tents since the day after I left. In the week that I was gone they had been on the wall, now a 3500 foot waterfall, once. For the next 6 days we were stuck in camp, venturing out of our tents only in the few respites from the rains that would always return. We read, we ate, and we slept, awaiting for that moment when we would awaken to the clear blue skies that were but a mere memory now. At 6:00 am on the morning of August 3rd I awoke to the sound of firecrackers and whooping and hollering. The Gods were smiling down upon us, the skies had cleared and we could see the entire wall for the first time in almost 2 weeks. We had four days to finish the climb, strip our gear from the wall and haul it all down to the fjord to load on the boat that we hoped would return to pick us up. We went onto the wall for good, and got a lot of climbing and shooting done that day. We moved our wall camp up about a thousand feet to what we called the Triangle Camp, because of the triangular shaped ledge we could actually stand and cook on. When we awoke the next morning, we were greeted by more clouds and rain. We spent the day laying in the portaledges, and all the while I could feel myself starting to get sick. It wasn't until after I had eaten my meal of freeze dried Peach Chicken that it hit me, and I knew that I didn't want to be stuck with the flu in a portaledge 2800 feet off the ground. That's not the ideal place to be hit with a drastic bout of diarrhea and vomiting. I decided to rappel off, and began my long slow slide down the ropes into the misty void to the ground somewhere below.

The skies broke the next morning, and although I was in a fetal position in my tent at base camp, the show went on. Bobby Model stepped in and shot both video and stills that day, as I could only watch through the spotting scope in between my dozens of trips to the latrine. Thanks to Bobby, some wonderful footage was captured that day. The next day I went back up on the wall, feeling better but extremely drained from the day before, and vowing never to eat Peach Chicken ever again. We shot the remaining pitches and before we knew it we could go no higher. We were finally standing on the summit of Ulamertorssuaq. In the distance we could see the inner ice cap, in the other direction the Bafin Bay, and all around the peaks of mountains, some climbed but the majority unclimbed as far as the eye could see. In a frenzy we started the long rappel off, stripping our ropes as we went. The next day, after many arduous trips to the fjord, we were on a boat making our way home.

There was only one more task, naming the new route that we had forged. Oden is the Norse God of War and Poetry, and we could not think of a more apt name for the climb. As Mike said, "We came to Greenland, fought a little war and saw a lot of Poetry". Despite the hardships, I think of our trip to Greenland fondly, spending the summer climbing under the Arctic Sun.