Late on the fourth day hiking the 102-mile Arctic Circle Trail in western Greenland, there was smoke rising from the ground. White tendrils, sometimes columns, rose in all directions from charred soil and wisped out from an 800-foot-tall hummocky, granitic hillside to my left.
To the right was the 14-mile-long, string-bean-shaped Lake Amitsorsuaq, the biggest of the dozens of lakes you hike past along the trail. The smoldering ground extended to the lake’s shore and made the supersaturated blues of the water pop even more. This was one of the wildfires above the Arctic Circle that made international news.
The Arctic Circle Trail starts near the western edge of the ice cap and continues across one of the island’s largest snow-and-ice-free expanses to Sisimiut and the Davis Strait, which separates the Labrador Sea and Baffin Bay.
When hiking you find rolling, domed mountains; open, craggy valleys; and Caribbean-blue lakes ringed with blooms of purplish willowherb, the national flower of Greenland. It was a mash-up of landscapes from “Game of Thrones” and “Lord of the Rings,” only without the anthropomorphic Ents — or any trees, really, since Greenland is so far north.
Like many long-distance treks, the trail has markers along its entire length. These are often at the top of a pile of rocks, called cairns, formed by hikers to be visible from a distance. The trail’s red half-moon markers are a nod to Greenland’s flag.
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I am Jeff Clark, founder of Internet Brothers, producer of this blog, and passionate about hiking. I live in Western NC near the Blue Ridge and Great Smoky Mountains. Pisgah and Nantahala National Forests are just out my door, so the content will focus on these areas, but let me know what you would like to see on the site. 
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