What to see in Greenland: 10 must-sees

Sail to the front of the Eqi Glacier, one of the few accessible glaciers where ice plunges down 200-meter walls in constant thunder, and have lunch at the lodge with a front-row view of the calving. Watch the white avalanches break the Arctic silence every few minutes, walk the moraine to the glacier camp, and sleep in cabins if you want to see the midnight light on the ice. It's the most photogenic active glacier in the Arctic.

Step out of towns free of artificial light when the sky goes dark and watch the northern lights ripple in green and violet over the ice, with clear-sky statistics favoring Kangerlussuaq and the north. Walk in crampons across the crunchy snow to the viewpoint, photograph the phenomenon with a tripod, and return to the shelter for hot tea. It's the show that makes an entire Arctic winter worthwhile.

Stroll through the world's smallest capital with an international airport: colorful houses, the wooden cathedral, the national museum with the Inuit mummies of Qilakitsoq, and the aurora-shaped Katuaq cultural center. Take a boat out into the Nuuk fjord among humpback whales that swim up to the city, hike up Mount Lille Malene for views of the fjord system, and dine on moss and caribou at its restaurants. It's the urban gateway to the Arctic.

Take the ferry to the volcanic island of black basalt, where glacier, hot springs, and dark-sand beaches with icebergs stranded on the shore coexist. Head up to the Lyngmark glacier valley on a summer sledding excursion, swim at the beach where ice and sea meet, and wander the bay-side town of painted wooden houses. It's the strangest and most beautiful geological contrast in western Greenland.

Take in the fjord from the Sermermiut viewpoint, where the Sermeq Kujalleq glacier, the most active in the Northern Hemisphere, calves skyscraper-sized icebergs that drift toward Disko Bay. Walk the shoreline trail at dusk, when the pink light sets the ice aglow, listen to the distant thunder of the calvings, and understand why UNESCO has protected it since 2004. It's Greenland's most awe-inspiring natural spectacle.

Walk an hour and a half south of Ilulissat among the turf ruins of the Inuit settlement inhabited for 4,000 years by three successive cultures, with the fjord's icebergs as a perpetual backdrop. Look at the mounds of shells and whale bones marking each house, sit on the stones of the fjord's official viewpoint, and let the scale of the landscape do the rest. It's history and nature on the same plane.

Learn the art of mushing that the Inuit perfected over a thousand years: let the sled glide across the sea ice, pulled by a team of Greenland dogs, while the guide shouts the commands in Greenlandic. Feel the white silence broken only by paws and lines, pass icebergs stranded in the bay, and finish with coffee at the musher's house. This is living culture, not a tourist attraction.