Tasermiut Fjord is a roadless fjord of seventy kilometres in the Kujalleq municipality of South Greenland, near the town of Nanortalik, walled by faces of granite that are among the largest on Earth and known to climbers as the Arctic Patagonia, with the only natural forest in Greenland standing in the valley at its head, and it is entered by boat from Nanortalik and camped in under walls of a thousand metres. The granite was left standing when the ice cut the fjord, and the walls draw big-wall climbers each summer to Ulamertorsuaq, whose west face rises a thousand metres of pale near-flawless granite from the tundra, and to Ketil, Nalumasortoq and the Tasermiut spire, climbed over days on portaledges; the boat runs up the fjord past the walls and the glacier calving at its head, and the trekking is along the shore and up the side valleys, where the slopes see so few people that Arctic foxes forage in broad daylight within camera range. At the inner end the valley of Qinngua holds downy birch and willow seven or eight metres tall, the only true forest on the island, sheltered by the walls and warmed by the fjord, turning red and gold in September.
Nanortalik at the fjord's mouth means the place with polar bears, which are not residents but arrive by ice, since the storis, the multiyear pack ice riding the current around Cape Farewell, jams the south coast each spring and can block the fjord into June, so the first boats thread through drift ice and the odd bear. The hill of Quassik above the town is a short steep walk that opens the skerry-strewn coast and the mouth of the fjord, and a side valley near the head is called Klosterdalen, Monastery Valley, though nobody has proved the Norse built one there. From September the aurora appears over the granite walls while the nights are still mild and the last boats are running. Tasermiut is a fjord of walls at the bottom of Greenland, and the only forest on the island hides at its end.