New Year’s Day is always the first day of another new polar bear hunting season. The announcement is made when a quota notice is stapled on to the side of the bank/post office building. For Ittoqqortoormiit the bear quota is 30, same as last year and the year before that. 30 bears are taken usually before June, so that means at least one bear is shot here every week for half of the year. There’s no sign of diminishing numbers here. In fact hunters say they see more now than ever before. I do my best to avoid them so I can’t say.

I’ve lived here nearly three years. I am now fluent in three Greenlandic words. Three. Think you could do better? The Greenlandic word for adventure is - depending on where you live in Greenland - opauttualiaq or nuannisaarneq. Forget phonetics, it doesn’t work that way. Now try, aap qujanaq. That means, yes please. Or tsumugalerpi, this means, where are you going? Name a day of the week? What about Thursday? Tsisiamanngorner. And so I still make sure my food purchases have pictures labels on the front.

Maybe I’m just thick but my Danish is no better.

Some of the real old time hunters here can only speak the Greenlandic dialect unique to Ittoqqortoormiit. They can’t understand me and outside of here nobody can understand them either which continues to leave me very frustrated. There are some great dog men in Ittoqqortoormiit and I only wish I could listen to them talk about their adventures. For now it remains for me to watch them as much as possible. At least my dog speak is fluent in several languages.

Boas Madsen is my neighbour. He’s a legend. Over the years I've heard so much about what he's done. I don’t know what order these events took place but I’ve heard it said that he kayaked Greenland’s east coast and on one hunting trip with his dogs returned with five polar bears to feed his family and share with the rest of the community.

But what still has me shudder with horror is a trip that, in the end, must have reduced him to a state with the mightiest will to survive.

For a week he walked without food, stove, shelter or his dogs in a storm that had ripped everything from his clutches and killed all his dogs.

I went to talk to Boas with his daughter-in-law Lea as interpreter. We talked about my upcoming journey and he was very enthusiastic with his answers to all my questions about my intended route.

I mentioned the story of the mysterious old hunters seen in the fjord. Boas had more evidence to add. He said, not so long ago a helicopter pilot saw hunters in skin kayaks hunting narwhale in the fjord. Upon returning to town and asking if he could buy some of the whale meat, the reply the pilot got was, there’s nobody from here hunting narwhale from a kayak. The next known community is Kulusuk hundreds and hundreds of miles away.

Eventually I looked at Boas and he looked at me. I asked Lea to please let Boas know that I wish I could talk with him about all the adventures he’s had with his dogs. He liked travelling alone too and he replied in Greenlandic saying, yes he wished he could share his experiences with me too. Nearly every time I’ve seen Boas I wished we could talk the same language.

It was later that Lea said to me that Boas was so upbeat that I’d gone to see him about my plans. Apparently when I’d left his house he’d talked for ages about our conversation. He had relived some of his wonderful memories.

In the middle of January I was sawing up walrus blubber and hide. It really is the toughest bloody stuff on the planet but my dogs love it. I bagged 57 lb (26 kg) of it for the journey.

Around the same time I weighed my dogs. Heaviest was King at 112 lb, (51 kg) with Girly, my lone female, least heavy at 77 lb, (35 kg). How do I weigh them? I stand on the scales to weigh myself, step off, lift the dog and step on to the scales again. Total weight minus my weight equals dog weight.

Even though I’m 6’ tall, I have to go on tiptoes to straddle King to harness him. Astride King I always get the comparable feeling of being on a pony. He’s a very big boy.

Dog conditioning was going up the scale and I began to run 10 dogs in every team I was taking out. As usual they loved it. After all if they’re not enjoying it, it just doesn’t work and I’d be in a great deal of trouble out there.

I’d been feeding my dogs twice daily since the New Year and watering twice daily on training run days. I don’t know anyone else in Ittoqqortoormiit who waters their dogs in the winter. I do and here it’s looked upon as very odd. Dogs are expected to eat snow. Sure enough the breed can metabolise water from stored body fat but I want my dogs to be fit but still carrying extra body fat before the journey.

I certainly don’t have money to throw about so if Ittoqqortoormiit hunters knew I purchased liver, honey and vegetable oil from our little store to get more calories into my dogs’ water they’d have something to say. I think they’d classify me as mad.

By end of January Loads was back to complete my quartet of leaders, The Awesome Foursome: Loads, Vital, Bigness and Girly.

And talking of awesome foursomes, with four per blister pack Energizer’s Ultimate Lithium AA batteries are the world’s longest lasting AA battery.

I don’t use alkaline batteries they’re hopelessly inadequate in the cold. They contain water that obviously freezes rendering them useless, even warm they still don’t last long, and they’re twice as heavy as the Ultimate Lithium. Throughout perpetual winter polar dark and Arctic cold Energizer AA Ultimate Lithium batteries power, without weakness, devices like my Petzl’s Myo 3 headtorch, the light of which enables me to do the necessary like find a way over good or bad ice, check my dogs' paws and feed.

When they run I watch my dogs’ gait. I’m very attentive because the gait is a good indication that all is well or subtle changes indicate otherwise. Anything wrong they tend to drop their heads on the down stride of a sore leg, else they look behind to let me know all is not well. Or sometimes a tail will drop. Most of all I watch their feet. Unattended problems can render a dog lame. For all this watching I need perfect vision.

I’m short sighted. Without eye correction I wouldn’t be able to build a snowman let alone do what I do safely. Spectacle frames freeze to my face. It’s not a good place for contact lens solutions either so I wear CIBA Vision DAILIES AquaComfort Plus or CIBA Vision Focus DAILIES one-day contact lenses.

I watch for bears. With dustbin lid sized paws they fear nothing and have a tendency to eat people. I look out for their kills and determine male footprints from protective sows with cubs. I also watch for stalking bears attacking from downwind. In poor light they appear yellow. In bright light they’re perfectly camouflaged. Lone male polar bears never hibernate. They kill year round. Seeing springtime cubs I make a wide detour. Coming between a sow and cubs always gets mum mad. Charging bears tend to spoil my day.

My last winter journey in the Canadian Arctic was a nasty one. Winds were so violent ice was black with strewn tundra. I had to keep moving. Wind borne pebbles pummelled me by day. At night the thought of being woken by ice breaking up under my camp and scrambling blindly out of water had me wide awake with fear. For three nights and days I didn’t sleep.

Times like that I wear CIBA Vision NIGHT & DAY continuous wear contact lenses.

The temperature always falls with the return of the sun and by the end of January temperatures fell rendering the land numb.

During minus 30ºC training runs with my dogs my sock combination was Bridgedale’s lightweight Ultra Fit sock as a liner with the heavyweight Endurance Summit Knee sock over the top. This side of Christmas and throughout the coldest winter temperatures I ran in Bridgedale’s Cross Country Ski sock.

I had a magazine send me a Q&A. All was published except my answer to what music do I listen to? So here you are: Motörhead, The Ramones, UK Subs, Sham 69, GBH and Sex Pistols. And because I don’t ever go to church I listen to them all twice on Sundays.

Despite what the media portrayed at the time, these bands, at the height of their fame – or infamy depending on your point of view – had a positive get-off-your-arse-and-make-it-happen attitude. I still carry that around with me. And what of the obstacles? Motörhead’s Lemmy summed it up when he said, “The easiest way to survive is to never give up. Simple. “ That’s me inside too.

Loads killed a raven. We Are Motörhead.

Hefty snowfalls and unbroken training run trails meant hard packed snow balls would form between the heavily furred toes of my dogs. I trimmed pad hair else it would have had my dogs feel they were running on ball bearings. Not good at all.