Inuit Ascending: A Climbing History

Good morning from Greenland! I recently had the privilege to team up with two other Inuit climbers here in Greenland to write an article about our people’s impressive and relatively unrecorded track record in Arctic climbing and mountaineering, as well as who contemporary Inuit climbers are today. Check out the excerpts below and follow the link at the bottom for the full article.

Inuit Ascending: personal historical context and a glimpse into the contemporary Inuit climbing community

By Victoria Qutuuq Buschman, Inunnguaq Rosenørn Løvstrøm, and Lasse Kyed

In Rock Pirates Magazine

“Welcome to the Arctic, home to 170,000 of us Inuit living in the far reaches of Alaska, Canada, Greenland, and Russia. You’ve never heard of us, but we are indisputably some of the original adventurers, climbers, and mountaineers of the far north. Our homelands are often considered a stark and barren part of the world, but for those of us born to this mecca of rock, ice, and tundra, we are comfortably at home. We’ve been pushing the boundaries of human achievement for thousands of years, long before climbing and mountaineering were ever conceived of as sports. For us, these have always been a means of survival…

“Since as long as can be remembered, Inuit have accomplished and perfected two athletic feats – the soloing of immense sea cliffs and the traversing of some of the harshest mountain ranges in the world. Since time immemorial, Inuit have rappelled off and climbed up thousand-foot sea cliffs all across our homelands, sometimes without ropes, in order to collect eggs from seabird colonies. Inuit still do this in many places including Bird Island in eastern Russia, near Point Hope in Alaska, at Cape Graham Moore near Baffin Island in Canada, and at the sea cliffs near Qaanaaq in north Greenland. To this day, it continues to be an activity requiring immense courage and skill.”

Please find the full article here, starting on page 35.