this is a staff story from our colleague Elin working in our marketing team. She took a week off this spring to ski-tour West Greenland — these are her notes.

"The Targa idles a hundred metres off a stony beach, and the only sound besides the engine is the slap of small waves against the hull. On either side of the fjord, granite walls drop straight into the water. Above them, the snow line. Above that, peaks that don't have names on most maps.

We unload the skis onto the beach. Boots on. Climbing skins applied while the captain watches from the wheelhouse. We step from rocks, to moss, to snow, and start walking up. By the time we summit, we'll have climbed a thousand metres straight out of the Atlantic Ocean.

Most ski tours begin in a parking lot. This one begins with an idling outboard and the smell of salt.

The skiing this week is not the prize, and we know it before we land. A warm front moved through the previous week, and the snowpack is refrozen — hard and cold, closer to a Scandinavian piste than to anything you'd describe as a powder trip.

What you remember afterwards isn't the skiing.

You remember standing on a summit and seeing nothing — no roads, no buildings, no lift towers, no contrails. The fjord below is a blue cut between mountains. The boat is a black dot in the bay. There is a kind of light over an Arctic coastline in spring that the eye registers as familiar before the brain catches up: this is what the rest of the world looked like before we built on it."