Sometimes climate change puts a spoke in adventurer’s wheel. Actually, German top climber Alexander Huber and his teammates from East Tyrol, Mario Walder, Bruno Schneider and Christian Zenz, had planned this summer to free climb the South Face of Tupilak in East Greenland, 16 years after the first ascent. “This is an absolutely awesome, steep wall,” says Alexander. “But we have not even got there. It was impossible to walk 40 to 50 km to the mountain without the use of sledges.” The bare glacier ice without snow cover and the small stones on it had wrecked the Pulkas, the plastic sledges, within only one third of the distance. The four climbers had taken their skis in vain.

Alexander Huber had already visited East Greenland last year, but in another season. “You just cannot imagine in arctic winter that everything is completely free of snow in summer. This shows quite clearly the effect of climate change”, tells me the 47-year-old, the younger of the two Huber brothers. “It’s very unusual that the zero-degree line in Greenland is permanently at a height of 2500 to 3000 meters.”

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