Page 28 - 2007/08 AMA Winter

BOREAL ZENITH
FIRST ASCENTS IN NORTH EAST GREENLAND
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he wing tip of our small After three years of planning, Tplane, dwarfed on all Exercise BOREAL ZENITH sides by steep sided had finally begun. BOREAL
the AMA formed. This was to be achieved by visiting a remote and mountainous region that had seen little or no mountaineering activity.
“A tall order" you might say, in this day and age, when almost the entire globe has been explored, mapped and written about. There are, however, still some area’s that have had little or no attention. One such area is Andrees Land. At 73035’N, 26000’W and 500 miles North of the
Arctic Circle, inside the North East Greenland National Park, Andrees Land is both moun­ tainous and remote. First vis­ ited by mountaineers in 1950 there had been almost no activity in the area, except for some geological surveying. The best mapping of Andrees Land had been drawn with a crayon in 1932 and no other documented evidence of mountaineering visits could be found.
mountains, seemed to almoZstENITH was one of a series of scrape the ground. Musk Oexpeditions, which took place dashed in all directions. Wtoe commemorate fifty years of made one final circuit as thAermy Mountaineering. It pilot scanned the grounda,imed to capture the checking it was safe to laned,xploratory nature of moun­ before finally touching dowtanineering that existed when in the Grejsdalen valley. The
landing was relatively smooth considering there is no airstrip...
Crossing the river.
Unloading the Twin Otter on arrival in the Grejsdalen valley.
26 ARMY MOUNTAINE
By Sam Marshall
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