In the first week of June I ran my dogs 35 km to Kap Hodgson and back for our last run of the season. It was a beautiful day as we edged two glaciers and I took time to stop and reflect on the past year.

The first season of building a dog team is always very difficult but by the end of my initial year in Greenland I had a team to be proud of. It was a grand feeling to know all that effort will pay off for next season. I had worked or thought of little else but my dogs. I suppose Hendrix was the same about his guitars.

Half a metre of melt water lay on the sea ice 200 metres away from my house and down the bank the river was beginning to run under freshwater ice. On 10th June I brought my dogs up off river where they’d been staked out for most of the winter and settled them outside and around my house.

Despite the hard winter I kept running, sometimes wearing my Tubbs snowshoes, always wearing Sorbothane innersoles. We have no roads here, just tracks. These are good enough to keep fit on. Once snow-filled these tracks are exceptional for keeping extremely fit. I also have a good weight set-up in my house to keep upper-body strength up.

A friend, who happens to be a nurse, came around for a chat. She yelped seeing Hot Dog chomping on a seal flipper. The nurse thought it was a human hand. She wanted me to take her out with my dogs to observe wildlife. I said no need and lifted the lid to my freezer. It was chock full of walrus.

I heard about an elderly couple flown to Denmark for medical treatment. It was their first time of leaving Greenland. Both had free time before their flight home. During which the woman was troubled by what she called “monsters”. Throughout her entire life she’d only ever seen one single breed of dog, the Greenland Dog. In Denmark the “monsters” were simply other dog breeds she’d never ever seen before. The elderly man was caught shooting park geese and ducks. To him it didn’t matter that the general public were walking around. To this old hunter the birds were simply easy hunting.

On 18th June the ice finally broke on the river below my house. I was on the wrong side of the river at the time, visiting friends. The bridge was submerged so I just waded across.

Since returning from the Ella Island journey I’d been melting snow to water me and my dogs. By end of June this chore ceased because overland pipes were laid and dissected the community like arteries. The pipes led to drinking water standpipes making life a little easier.