MIKE FLETCHER & ANNE-MARIE NUTTALL Snowy Summits in East Greenland (Plates 22 -25) T he 1995 Alpine Club Symposium on mountaineering in Polar regions provided the motivation we needed to start making serious plans for an expedition to Greenland. We were looking for snowy peaks rather than big walls, and quite fancied the idea of going to a group of mountains where no one had climbed before. East Greenland seemed the perfect des- tination. Although the idea of approaching by sea had the feel of genuine exploration about it, we were keen to maximise our climbing time by flying in to the mountains. After some research, we established that for a month in the field, with a charter flight from Iceland by Twin Otter, we would need a team of five people to make the trip financially viable, and if anyone dropped out, it would be seriously expensive for everyone else. A friend who had been to Greenland the year before suggested that we contact Paul Walker of Tangent Expeditions. Paul has been organising trips to Greenland for a number of years, and offers a logistics service. As a small team, we lacked any leeway to enable us to continue if anyone changed their plans, but the figures Paul sent us indicated that it wouldn't cost any more to go as a group of two and let him do the the logistics than it would cost to do it ourselves. There foIl owed a period of soul-searching about the pros and cons of letting a commercial organisation sort out the detailed planning of our trip. On all previous expeditions each of us had been on, we had done the planning ourselves, which gave us a greater feeling of involvement and an opportunity to prepare mentally for the trip. We were concerned that leaving the planning to someone else would mean missing out on part of the experience, but in the end this was the only practical way we could make the trip, so we decided to give it a go. Paul organised two weekends where participants could get to know each other and discuss various aspects of the planning. Logistically, the two of us could be completely independent once we got there, and this flexibility was very important to us. It is a debatable point whether we comprised one expedition or several. The two of us stayed for six weeks, having arrived with twelve others on 20 July. For the first half of the trip, a group of six of us headed off to climb together. The rest of that group left at the midpoint of the trip. For the second half, when a new group arrived, four of us travelled and climbed together until we got back to base camp to be picked up by the plane. To us 39