We left Kangerlussuaq early on a Monday morning. Two hours by bus to Point 660, where the road ends and the ice begins. Two more to carry every sled down to the edge, load them again, and clip into crampons for the first steps onto the ice.
Day two took us up through the Glacier Labyrinth, the broken lower ice where you read the route a few metres at a time. We swapped crampons for skis and found a good line. It is hard work out here, harder still when you are pulling two sleds.
The first three hundred kilometres are all uphill, onto the plateau. Some days the snow was soft and we broke through with every step. Some days it fought us harder going downhill than it ever had going up.
Then, on day twenty-three, the surface froze solid overnight. For the first time in weeks we stopped breaking through. Thirty-two kilometres in beautiful weather, almost effortless, the kind of day that pays back all the others. Sixty-five kilometres from the coast.
A few days later, after almost a month on the move, the first dark peak pushed up out of the white ahead of us. The east coast. After weeks of nothing but snow, something else to look at. I still could not quite believe it was there.