Greenland is a beautiful nightmare

Having been to Greenland recently, I found his description of it similarly flawed.

In what way/ways?

I’ve never been to Greenland or (to my knowledge) met anyone who has. What is/was your experience like?

> The first thing you notice when you land in Greenland is there are no trees or grass. There is snow and then there is exposed rock.

This is only true of the area around the airport. Even his pictures further into the article show how misleading this description is. I was actually very surprised how little snow/ice there was. Now when I think of Greenland, I think of something similar to [1].

Of course, in the winter, it's a completely different story (I was there in July). But he was there during the warm period as well (as is obvious from his photos).

> The city itself sits in a landscape so dramatically inhospitable it makes the surface of Mars look cozy.

If you look at a map, you will notice that Nuuk is at the same latitude as Reykjavik. There's a common meme about Iceland being green and Greenland being icy, and that's definitely true if you compare inland or northern Greenland with Iceland during summer (during winter, both are icy and dark), but hiking around Nuuk is a very "green" experience. Yes, there's a ton of mosquitoes, but nature itself is very inviting. I did not get any of the "inhospitable" vibes he mentions.

> But again even riding the bus around it is impossible to escape the feeling that this is a fundamentally hostile to human life place. The sun is bright and during the summer its pretty hot, with my skin feeling like it was starting the burn pretty much the second it was exposed to the light. It's hard to even dress for, with layers of sunscreen, bug spray and then something warm on top if you suddenly got cold.

This whole section is just overblown BS.

All in all, I enjoyed it a lot. Compared to Iceland, it's definitely a lot less "user friendly" and you need to prepare better, but I have never been to a place that is less affected by humans, and in our age, that is something worth experiencing.

[1] https://truewindhealingtravel.com/wp-content/uploads/2022/08...

I tried explaining in the other comment here. In summary, it's beautiful, raw nature, that's different from anything else I've seen. It takes some preparation, but I haven't experience any of these "sun will kill you and ice will kill you too" vibes that the article suggests. It felt like one of the last places on Earth not affected by humans (at least directly through resource exploitation, as it definitely is affected by the warming - but that's another discussion).

>> The first thing you notice when you land in Greenland is there are no trees or grass. There is snow and then there is exposed rock.

> This is only true of the area around the airport. Even his pictures further into the article show how misleading this description is.

At least as far as trees go, Greenland is reasonably famously lacking in trees (if you are the kind of person who cares about such things). All chopped down by the Vikings and only now are a few sections of forest being regrown. Iceland is basically the same.

A few links:

- https://www.globalforestwatch.org/dashboards/country/GRL/. "In 2020, Greenland had 0.00 ha of natural forest"

- https://www.reddit.com/r/geography/comments/14notoe/the_prog...

- https://greenlandtrees.org/

Agreed, I failed to mention this detail, thank you for adding. But hopefully you agree that his description paints a completely ridiculous picture.