“The Fox Jaw,” Molar Tooth, Lovin’All the Right Places. In mid to late summer, Mike Libecki and I flew via Iceland to Kulusik Island and the full-service village of Tasiilaq before getting helicoptered into the Schweizerland mountains of east Greenland. We were located ca. 30 kilometers from the nearest Inuit village of Kummuit on the Arctic Circle and a three- to four-hour hike from the Tasiilaq Mountain Hut. We spent 23 days in the area exploring and climbing.

Due to time limitations and a heavy year of sea ice, we chartered the helicopter to drop us in the valley below walls I had seen the previous year. Upon landing, we were struck with the beauty and enormous potential of climbing in the area, which we named “The Fox Jaw” for an arctic fox that marked our food cache and the fact that the walls look like a row of teeth. We used the name Fox Jaw because after extensive research and air reconnaissance and studies of Saga maps we were not able to find any names of history or previous ascents. The name is meant strictly to help with location and identification. Other walls in the Jaw are the “Baby,” “Cavity Ridge” and “the Fang.” We decided to climb one of the walls that we called “the Molar. Over nine days (July 30-August 7), we fixed four 60-meter pitches, spent four days waiting out rain and snow storms in the portaledge, then free climbed the last two-and-a-half pitches to the summit. Our route, Lovin’All the Right Places (V 5.10 A2+) was, like most of the walls in the area, 1,400 feet long. We placed one bolt and six rivets plus bolts at the belays. The rock was very solid and clean granite with great potential for free climbs. Views from the summit allowed us to see many walls on the other side that rivaled and surpassed those on ours.

We descended our route. It took us four days to ferry our loads the nine miles out to the fjord for a boat pick-up.

Dave Briggs