Field Trip: Summit Station, Greenland

Story and Photo by August Allen

The existence of this image is a testament to not taking no for an answer. The string of events that culminated with me landing a contract tech job working four long, dark winter months at Summit Station, Greenland, is frankly too protracted and absurd to relate here fully. But, highlights include chasing a girl eight thousand miles to the bottom of the world and back again, fixing a printer for exactly the right guy at precisely the right time, and winning a bet with an engineer about the surface properties of electrical tape.

Summit Station is a tiny outpost located at an elevation of 10,551 feet on the apex of the immense Greenland Ice Sheet, a body of ice so thick that anyone standing atop it feels the effects of high al titude. The building in the photo is called the Big House, partially because the inte rior contains a comfy living room, a fully stocked kitchen, and the only hot shower for 200 miles, and partly because visitors (particularly in the winter) likely don’t have much choice about staying a while. The research station consists of a runway, some heavy equipment, and a handful of buildings surrounded by perfectly flat, featureless terrain for hundreds of miles in all directions. No mountains, no liquid water, virtually no wildlife, no noth ing. Outside of the task of maintaining science instruments and concern about my three colleagues’ steadily decreasing mental state, I focused my interest on the sky.

And as you can see, the sky was resplendent.