Tasermiut Fjord runs 70 kilometres inland between granite walls more than a kilometre high, and ends in the only natural forest in Greenland. The walls line the eastern shore: Ketil, 2,010 metres, whose sheer face of over 1,000 metres ranks among the hardest big walls on Earth; Ulamertorsuaq, a 1,000-metre line of near-flawless granite up its west side; and Nalumasortoq, split like an open book, each half of it some 900 metres tall. Climbers call the fjord Arctic Patagonia; the rock rises straight out of dark water, with no road, pylon or building in the frame. At the inner end the ground turns green: the valley of Qinngua, protected since 1930, holds a thicket of downy birch and gray-leaf willow growing seven to eight metres high — a forest you can walk beneath, on an island where a waist-high shrub normally passes for a tree.
You arrive by boat from Nanortalik, Greenland's southernmost town, and only once the drift ice rounding Cape Farewell has cleared the coast — in practice, June to August. There is no road, no lodge, no ticket; you land on a beach, carry your camp onto the tundra, and the silence under the cliffs is close to total. The fjord sits below the Arctic Circle, so there is no midnight sun — but through June and July the night never goes fully dark, and the low sun keeps working across the granite for hours. Arctic foxes hunt the slopes in daylight, unbothered. Near the head of the fjord, low stone foundations lie in a side valley named Klosterdalen — Monastery Valley — after a 1932 survey tied them to medieval Norse monks, a claim nobody has excavated since. By September the birch and the tundra turn red and gold, the first dark nights return, and the boats stop soon after.