I’ve gone to Greenland again.

This time, it started with 10 days of cancelled flights: each morning marked by trying to depart the stormy north coast of Iceland for a location even more cursed with its weather.

Eventually the go-ahead came, just as I was ready to call Akureyri my new home, and we crammed into a metal can to brave the North Atlantic crossing. My palms sweat while I watched the de-icing attempt to do its job on the wings each time we flew through a cloud. Then the seas below transitioned from violent and windy to frozen and windswept, and I relaxed a bit. An emergency place to land, at sea.

After a coastal refuel, the big climb begins:

First a flight over a fjord that stretches so long the journey takes nearly an hour end to end. Along the way, we sweep over mountaintops, which must be a mere 200 meters beneath us. The plane slowly climbs, and the ruggedness of the terrain below is surreal under a nascent polar sun.

In the distance rises an even larger behemoth. Sloping upwards like the dome of a stadium, a white field of ice arcs across the entire horizon. There is no apex, and there is no way to fully comprehend its scale. Mountains, often a symbol of the enormous, are tiny thorns protruding from this sheet of ice. As we ascend upslope, these mountains become increasingly engulfed in ice, and soon crevassed bumps—strain marks from the ice flowing over topography—are the only evidence of the buried ranges far beneath.

After another hour we landed as smoothly as a ski-equipped plane would allow on chalky snow, and suddenly I was stepping down a ladder and bracing against the coldest blast of air in my life. Summit Station.

“Welcome to the void” said one of the current crew. Or at least that’s what I thought I heard between the clawing wind and the propeller. Covered in a frosty Michelin man jumpsuit head to toe, I never caught the guy’s face, and I would never get to say hello as he took my seat on the plane, eager to leave.

The margin of the ice sheet, inland of Scoresbysund.

The landscape here is mundane. Atop the ice sheet, sloping imperceptibly in all directions down to an eventual sea hundreds of miles away, it’s Kansas dressed in white.

Then there are the temperatures. It’s cold: the freezer is just a ditch dug outside in the snow. Want to cook a turkey? Remember to start defrosting it the day before from a crisp -30. But the cold does come in different modes, and when it reaches levels where I’m not sure if a fifth layer under my parka makes a difference or not (because can I really distinguish -50 from -60?) I realize today might not be an outdoor kind of day. Then there are those perfectly still mornings where the sky is huge and I can hear the blood in my ears and walk between buildings in my sandals thanks to a persistent sun and motionless air, no matter how cold…

Inventory: landscape, like Kansas. Sky, moody. Temperature, chilled beyond perception.

That leaves the people—precisely 4 others. People bring the culture, the scientific inquiry, and all of the purpose to an otherwise people-free place. Someone once asked me why anyone would ever live here. I’m still figuring that out.

To some, it’s refining what matters in life, and living differently from normal routine back home. A bottle of hot sauce (Sriracha), a torn poster of some British rock band (Pink Floyd), a collection of movies (all the Simon Pegg ones) and a packet of seeds (lettuce) reveal themselves as objects oddly critical above all else, the result of filtering of limited luggage. It’s also partly about throwing oneself into this alien world that turns traveling back to lower latitudes into a rediscovering and re-appreciation of the world.

So here I am, still on Earth, but experiencing the moon. This long journey to Summit, Greenland is to support research in one of the most pristine and vulnerable locations on the planet. I’m slowly acclimating to the elevation and to the cold, and now I’m just hoping I am ready for this marathon: 4 months, 14 days.