A journey to Greenland - the story of MHW athletes sailing a sailboat on an Arctic skiing expedition

We're gonna have to push it with the dinghy. Greenland has always captured my heart. I'm Jessica Baker. I'm a professional mountain guide and skier and I've really been focusing recently on arctic exploration and even in more recent years exploring Greenland. So my goals for this trip are twofold. One is I'd really like to revisit some of the areas I was in in 2019 to see what's been happening with the glaciers and I want to see if we can travel on a renewable energy boat that runs without any fossil fuels. Jess and I have worked on a bunch of different kind of film projects. In 2018 she actually invited me on one of her larger expeditions to Svalbard. The catch was that she was going to sail from Europe north up to Svalbard and she wanted me to be on that team. A lot of the water out here is quite literally uncharted which is kind of exciting. So yeah the adventure starts I suppose the second we push off. I also got to meet Captain Ben and immediately just blown away by that man you know. When I first met Captain Ben I was like oh wow it was finding like my soul brother or something. Ben's like a renaissance man. Artist, master sailor, mechanic, philosopher. Being a sailor means you have to be able to fix everything. Yeah it's more being a handyman. I'm a janitor. After that 2018 trip I was like I'm done. I'm good. I'm never getting on that sailboat again you know and she called me like a couple months later and she's like so how about sailing in Greenland and I was like you got it. I'm in. We had three weeks essentially to explore and started working our way through some of the fjord systems literally like uncharted waters and just exploring the zone. When we got back from our trip all disconnected from everything we started reading that it was becoming the hottest year on record on the Greenland ice cap. They recorded for the first time ever two consecutive days above freezing at 10,000 feet during the time that we were in the zone. In 2019 we have the warmest year of since forever. I'm 30 years old already now we can we can say back then when we were kids we used to have a lot of sea ice. Back then when we were kids this glacier was that big and it's a bit scary that we could already say those things even though we're not that old. We're back but this time the boat that we're on the canoe has been modified and it's now a green boat it's running off of solar power and wind power. Two years ago we threw out the old diesel engine and went electric. Tiny for a 11 ton expedition boat. I dream in amps. I live in amps. I wake up in amps. I'm on I'm all amped now. I'm amped up. This is our first season first trip in the arctic with this setup. I got here not knowing if the arctic sun was going to charge actually. We launched off the canoe last night and we are kind of waking up in our first anchor spot. We can't motor all the time that's the big difference and that's also part of our philosophy. How do I adjust my whole like time plan or like hazard plan around that? You know some of this is split out but I can tell the crown kind of ends up there. This is a really special cool hour man. This is cool. Maybe we'll just charge nothing and have to just sit in the same anchorage and Jess is going to go crazy. We'll see. We'll do a little dance party up here. Flossing at the top of the run. Except it's kind of funny we are too old to actually know how to do this. Oh we know. Bit of a breeze and then splice to us sailing against the wind. Still out of my comfort zone. Everyone needs to puke if you've got here. Fucking puke because it's ******* filled with gas over here. It's so ******* gnarly man. Fuck. I think people have an idea of sailing is just you know like cocktail in one hand and like warm breeze in your face. When you sail you need wind. What else does wind do to the ocean? Creates waves right? The boat is in this like happy place in the waves in the wind which is the exact opposite of my happy place. Big wave daddy. That's the thing when you want to work with skiers, when you want to ski, you have to be in the arctic during a season which is not sailing season. I'm lending the boat in like two seconds and a half. Two seconds and a half? One of our jerry cans to fuel the the dinghy. It's brand new but it leaked. This one I never take it off. Ready to go skiing. We are vacuuming with a bilge pump that doesn't work very well at 3 30 in the morning. I think there's some dinged some dinged humans. There's some damaged humans. They're gonna be okay but I think right now they feel like they might die. I think you might have had a hard time all right. A normal expedition boat the captain takes the helm and says we're going there there there there there. The canoe it's you take the helm but actually it's the boat that says no we're going there no no we're not going there we're going there. I feel like he decides because because he decides. That's a yeah and it's a cool way to travel. You like don't know where you're gonna end up or you try to try to make it but you have to be like really open. When you sail in these untouched beautiful fjords I mean even though it's harsh even though there's ice whatever you just feel free 24 hours a day. Greenland is an absolutely stunning place. It is ocean it is mountains big mountains like 7 000 vertical feet out of the sea huge glaciers dropping down to the ocean. I've been lucky enough to travel a lot for skiing in my career and this is the most breathtaking place I've ever skied. You know around the time that we ski there in the spring you have light almost 24 hours a day and one of the most dramatic and beautiful places I've ever been. We're skipping over the zigs and zags. Just going straight up this thing. I wonder if it's amping on the canoe trailer. It's still energy there it's trying. Let's go get that charge. Let's get all the lamps. Be nice if it broke loose. I think it's gonna happen. I think this thing is just gonna burn off and it's just I mean you won't be able to see but it's sort of soft. Turns out a motor is kind of important. We are not able to ski a lot of the things that we skied in 2019 because we couldn't get to them because we had to rely on mother nature right. It's snowing right now which we weren't entirely sure that was gonna happen. We knew it might be a little cloudy but like snow is now which covers our solar panel so it makes it harder to charge. But we need like a lot more sun to power ourselves out of this place especially if we go deeper in. Especially if there's no wind. And then if we don't have wind on our return like we literally could run out of power. So my point I think we have to use that wind on the 15th to go from to go south. 15th is really early. We don't want to be in way too early. So we'll have to discuss potential logistics but maybe we have to move ourselves closer. Jess is great. She likes to boss me around. I don't like to get bossed around so it's interesting. It's a push-pull. It's a push-pull. What we need in the mountains is not always what we need for sailing and what we need for sailing is not always what we need for the mountains. There was a spot in 2019 that we called we called Kulwar Town and we wanted to go there really bad and we could see it but we had to sit down and weigh our options right? Yeah. But I mean Kulwar Town is really not reasonable unless we're really sure we have good winds to go back. Unfortunately so we need to maybe shift. Shift the objective. We're low on power right and the wind is not in our favor at all and if we head out there there's a chance that we have to sit and we won't make it back and so Jess as a guide has to make a decision on something that's really unknown right? I think that was really frustrating for Jess. Okay Brett makes it a little bit better. The irony in today is we have sun which is great and we have wind. Problem is it's too windy to get shore to ski but we're waiting for the wind to die so that we can't go ski but then once the wind dies that we can't sail. So travel with the wind or do we wait and ski after the wind? Kind Nearly every year we have a record of the highest temperature around Greenland. When an elderly tells stories it's nearly not recognizable for us because it's changing so much. There's a lot of snow coverage that we didn't have last time however it's very very obvious that the glaciers have changed a lot since we were last here. We come in fjords that have glaciers on the charts. You sail on the glacier because the charts are not old they're like 30 years old. 30 years ago the glacier was probably up to here. The glacier looks dramatically different than it was in 2019. Something like this is so special and so precious you need to take care of it. If you want to yeah in a way if you want to do something for this glacier you just better leave it alone and stay home. There's no doubt that there is irony here we have taken really big flights airplane flights to get to Greenland. We travel from America all the way over to Denmark and then all the way back to Greenland to even get in place to catch our renewable energy boat so it's a it's a huge carbon footprint. One of the reasons I feel worried about an interview right is because of the hypocrisy in it right but absolutely no one no one is perfect and I shouldn't fear hypocrisy to like try and do something or try and show how beautiful it is and it's worth saving. You and your boat are pretty special like you have already taken a huge step to like shift that direction like not having your diesel motor anymore is pretty impressive the fact that we're like charging right now off this even just like partial sun that's the coolest. I mean uh I think we have to move to the next step which is not talking uh the next step is really action. Action is not staying home action is finding ways to keep on living our passion to keep on breathing this beauty. Can I take only two planes instead of three? Can I turn off this engine a while and row a bit? Little things like that. Yeah we need action we just we know now Completely converting your mode of transportation it's not easy to do that I mean Ben's an inspiration he's trying to live his life without a reliance on fossil fuels and have a substantially smaller carbon footprint. I'm not doing it just for myself I'd want people to search new ways to You know I mean it definitely makes me want to work harder way harder you know not being able to get exactly where you want to go on the day that you want to get there is that you are forced to be creative with what you have and ski something we had never skied because we had an extra day Get off the boat you actually scan for a few miles and then you see it it's this massive line that moves above you and it almost seems unrealistic then it was time to boot and cramp on up and then we did that for hours hours up it's like the Greenland scale you're like how far up there is it you look at the map you're like I think it says it's almost 5,000 vertical feet to get up to the top of that as a skier that is like a dream line it is you know something you you can only wish that you can get the right conditions and the right team and the right set of circumstances the right light the right weather to make something like that actually come together encapsulates Greenland so much none of us are perfect and no one has this style like no one really has the answer and yet we are all part of the solution potentially you know we can make daily decisions that do have impact I feel like a monk when he prays for me this is like religious the arctic the glaciers the ice this synergy just like feeds my soul in 2019 we made all the decisions with our diesel engine and in 2022 nature made the decision and look at how incredible some of these lines were I mean that's the thing we're like traveling around on this renewable energy boat and still crushing these massive lines in Greenland hopefully it'll inspire some more people when they're like well that crazy guy's doing it you