Seventy-two hours, no phone, and no solid roof above your head. That’s how long it takes before the soul-soothing effects of being out in nature kick in. “After a day, people don’t really relax yet,” said Anika Krogh, the Greenlandic founder of Nomad Greenland, as she poured coffee from a thermos. “After two, maybe a little bit. But on day three, something magical happens. People start to really be here. Studies have shown that stress hormones in your body will decrease by up to forty percent.”
Krogh and I had spent the morning zooming across a fjord in a rubber dinghy, and had stopped for a picnic on the grassy shore of Tartunaq Bay near the small fishing village of Saqqaq on Greenland’s west coast. A few ice floes drifted across the placid water out front; behind us, dark basalt cliffs rose like fortress walls. I had come here to spend a few nights at Nomad Greenland’s Saqqaq Camp, which Krogh and her Danish husband, Jon, pitch up a few bays over every summer from June to September. There had been talks of building permanent cabins, but Krogh soon dismissed the idea. “[In tents] you can feel the wind, hear the rain on the canvas,” she said. “You’re reminded who’s really in charge out here.”
That point got proven fast. Even before I reached Saqqaq, which required an hour-long airplane hop from Greenland’s pint-sized capital, Nuuk, Mother Nature had already made her terms clear. A choppy sea had turned the two-hour boat transfer from the airport into a half-day ordeal, and we didn’t pull into camp until 2 a.m., the midnight sun still low on the horizon. The next morning, we followed caribou trails into the mountains, scrambling over precariously steep ledges on all fours. In Saqqaq’s small harbor, I got an unvarnished glimpse of daily life in this harsh and remote corner of the Arctic: whale guts lay strewn across the rocky beach, and the limp body of a seal leaking blood on a boat’s bow. Unsettling, maybe—but for city slickers like me, a much-needed reminder of life at its most elemental. “In most of the world, mankind is constantly molding nature,” Krogh said. “But here, it’s Mother Nature who molds us.”
And while a similar closeness to the elements shaped Saqqaq Camp, I was far from roughing it. Its six tents are pitched up on wooden platforms along the bay, each one furnished with sealskin pillows, electric blankets, and hot showers in plywood en-suites. Just up the hill, there’s a teepee-shaped dining tent, where meals fuse local staples like caribou steaks and arctic char with fresh produce ferried in from more hospitable climes. The fjord out front was choked with icebergs, some as tall as cruise ships, others barely larger than a Volkswagen Beetle.
It didn’t take long before I could feel my cortisol starting to evaporate. My thoughts felt clearer, and the noise in my noggin dulled. I stopped constantly reaching for my phone, whose spotty connection hadn’t been of much use anyway. The rhythm of the camp took over instead: coffee by the waterfront, long walks across lichen-slicked rocks and mossy tundra, and evenings spent listening to the restless ice grumbling and groaning. We’d fish for cod with nothing but a line strung with hooks, and, at a friend’s place in Saqqaq, tried greasy mattak whale blubber dipped in soy sauce and Aromat. I was further away from big-city lights than I’d ever been, yet felt blissfully at ease.
As the world’s largest island, Greenland has a lot of wilderness to get grounded in, and new flight connections have made this erstwhile wild frontier increasingly accessible. Air Greenland now flies travelers directly from Copenhagen, while United has been connecting to Newark Airport twice a week since June. And you don’t even have to travel far out of town for a stress-busting nature fix: humpbacks and their calves often glide past the harbor, and from the city’s edge you can step onto a boat and, within minutes, be swallowed by the fjords.
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I spent another few days at Nomad Greenland’s second outpost, Camp Kiattua, pitched along a narrow finger of the Nuuk Fjord, about two hours by boat from the city’s watery edge. The teepee-style tents are just as plush, with electric heaters, stand-alone bathrooms, and bits of Arctic flotsam—caribou antlers, feathers—for decor. Days here flowed at a similarly syrup-slow pace, with cold plunges in the icy fjord, and catnaps in beds from wild herbs and moss. I traced the waterfall that ran behind the camp’s cliff-steep backdrop, wading through waist-deep dwarf willow until the view around me resembled a sea of mountaintops—with nary a human intervention in sight.
When it was time to return, Jon came to collect me. As we drove toward the airport, he told me about his guests’ most common parting words: “I’m finally going back to reality.” The line had stuck with him. “It had me thinking,” he said, “The lives we rush back to—are they even real?” It’s here, he argued, surrounded by mountains so old our lifetimes are a mere blink, where you feel what reality really is. “It’s here,” he said, nodding at the fjord zipping by the window, “where people start thinking about what their priorities are, and what’s real.”