April. Her name is April. And now she is gone. I have slept 10 of the last 72 hours on this ledge — just long enough for nightmares and hallucinations to haunt my semi-lucid state. The ceiling of the tent licks my face and clings to my damp sleeping bag, which sags from the weight of the snow. For three days I’ve been soaked, lying in darkness, miserable and claustrophobic, fighting the rising tide of panic. Snow and ice continue to crash onto my tent from the wall above. I peel the nylon fly from my face, unzip the door, and claw my way through the snow — mounded high as my chest — to dig myself out once again.
April. Her name is April: the month my child will be born, eight months from now.

When I received the package postmarked Greenland at the end of September 2001, I knew what it contained. My friend Hans Christian had sent me these rare Danish military photos of the island’s east coast, taken from an airplane at 30,000 feet. When I was in Greenland the year before on a solo trip to climb the Fox Incisor, I inquired about finding such photos. Following the obsession/addiction I’ve fostered for the last eight years, I wanted to find spectacular, never-before-seen granite walls and towers to climb. Greenland is governed by Denmark, and Hans Christian is a surgeon serving much of the Danish military in eastern Greenland, so the photos turned out to be rather easy to acquire.

At a hobby shop near my home, just outside Salt Lake City, I found the perfect five-inch-diameter magnifying glass to start my research. With photos covering my furniture-less living room floor, I hunched over like Sherlock Holmes hot on the trail of a criminal. I focussed on every detail, searching for clues that would lead me to virgin granite towers. Several eye-straining hours later I pinpointed four small areas on the photos, each about the size of a dime. These areas were 250 miles apart from one another, spread out along Greenland’s desolate eastern coast. The miniscule, jagged-edged shadows around the saw-toothed snowy peaks in the photos suggested families of steep, massive granite walls. Further research revealed that these areas were very remote, probably untrodden except by the local Greenlandic Inuit people and early Viking and Danish explorers.
Several months later I dragged seven 69.5-pound haul bags (an overweight fee is added for bags over 70 pounds) into the Salt Lake airport. I had decided to go alone on this grand expedition. Removing the crutch of a partner would add freedom and absolute challenge to the mysterious-expedition equation. Relying completely on my own abilities while answering to uncertain mental and physical demands — as I’d done before in Greenland, Baffin Island, and China — has created an appreciation for the gift of life that I’ve found addictive. I tucked my pillow under the back of my head, pulled up my little blue airplane blanket, opened my new Stephen King book, and sipped tomato juice with lemon. The airplane rose off the tarmac at sunset, heading east toward Greenland.
Two bad-weather days in Reykjavik, Iceland, shut down the airport, but not my enthusiasm. I called home to check in with my fiancée, Natalie. To my surprise, she gave me some very intense news: She was late — we were potentially expecting a child. She had a doctor’s appointment the next day. Overwhelmed with emotion, I told Natalie I loved her and would call when I arrived in Greenland. I could not stop smiling after I hung up the phone, totally absorbed in the fact that our first child might be growing at that very moment. Yet I had to stay focussed on what was in front of me: a solo expedition into the unknown.
The wind and rain stopped long enough in Iceland for my plane to continue its journey to Kulusuk, Greenland. From there a helicopter quickly shipped me 50 miles to Tasiilaq, the town nearest my final destination. Located just south of the Arctic Circle and populated by Greenlandic Inuit, Greenlandic Huskies, and a handful of Danes, Tasiilaq is a cluster of storybook houses of bright red, blue, green, and yellow scattered among gray, rocky hills. In the distance, ivory icebergs glow against a sky-blue ocean.