Karen Ciegler in her dog sled outfit

Karen Ciegler Hanson, daughter of Jan Ciegler, explorer fellow of the Greater Piedmont Chapter, looks like any cute, pretty, petite, delicate young woman. Looks can be deceiving, and delicate she is not.

Karen Hanson, in a slide presentation to the Greater Piedmont Chapter of The Explorers Club, recounted her two week 2001 experience dog sledding and ice camping in Greenland. From within the traditional Inuit camping tent, with her face blistered by at least 12 hours of sledding beneath the glaring sun of a timeless 24 hour day, her feet blanched white with cold that could range from –20 degrees to +20 degrees, and her wet boots dangling from one of the tent’s tethers behind her, Hanson smiled for the camera.

Karen Ciegler “I felt so lucky,” she said, “to spend some time alongside explorers Lonnie Dupre and John Hoelscher, as they carried The Explorer’s flag and became the first persons to circumnavigate Greenland by dog sled and kayak.”

Also in the party were descendents of Matthew Henson, a black explorer, master sledger and dog handler who was one of the first men, with his partner Robert Peary, to reach the North Pole in 1904. 

“The Inuit people are wonderful,” said Hanson. “They laugh all the time, and they laugh at everything, especially mistakes.” One time when the party’s sled was damaged, stranding them in the middle of a frozen nowhere with no tools or materials for repairs, the Inuit guides “laughed like crazy” before pitching in to figure things out. After more than two hours, using this and that at hand, the sled was repaired

“That’s why there are no snowmobiles allowed in Greenland,” Hanson explained. Apparently, when you have to make do with what you’ve got, it’s a whole lot easier to fix a wooden sled.

Another thing that is strictly controlled in Greenland is its canine population. The Inuit sled dogs are a breed exclusive to the continent, and the self–ruling Inuits plan to keep it that way. The dogs are workers and the only means of transportation. They are not petted or pampered. A puppy is allowed to be a puppy until six months of age, at which time he is tethered for sled pulling and those tethers are never again removed.

“The adult dogs weigh about 70 pounds, and a dog can pull its own weight,” said Hanson. “The sleds on this expedition were pulled by ten to 14 dogs per sled. Sometimes we’d have 100 or so dogs with us.”

One of Hanson’s slides, however, showed a group of Inuit school children in bright down jackets as they walked away from a school house on stilts, while several other children dared to ride home across the icy whiteness on any regular old bicycle you might find at Walmart.

   Hanson lives with her husband in Minnesota. “I love the cold,” she said. “I love dog sledding and ice camping. When I got wind of this trek I called my husband at work and he immediately told me, ‘Go for it.’”