The Tech behind finding your way in the Arctic

Finding your way in the Arctic is nothing like plotting a casual road trip. There are no marked paths, no comforting signposts, just a vast, unbroken canvas of white where all landmarks vanish and every direction feels identical. Out here, navigation becomes both an art and a lifeline.

My tech setup is anchored in reliable GPS navigation using the Garmin GPS 67i, paired with an inReach satellite plan that ensures global communication and emergency messaging even when the rest of the world is far beyond reach. The Garmin BaseCamp software serves as mission control, allowing detailed planning, programming, and visualization of waypoints and tracks before setting out into the deep freeze.

Working with detailed Greenland digital maps and the recorded paths of past expeditions, there’s a painstaking craft in creating your own waypoints, plotting precise GPS coordinates that, linked together, form the track you’ll rely on once you step into the Arctic wilderness. Along the Arctic Circle Trail, only nine small wooden huts punctuate the route like quiet sentinels, offering rare and welcome reference points. But between them, it’s all about trusting the chain of coordinates you carefully assembled back home in the warmth of your desktop, long before the wind and silence of the ice claimed your full attention.

The real advantage as well of a GPS over a traditional compass is peace of mind. You don’t have to constantly adjust for magnetic declination, which could easily send you kilometers off course each day. Magnetic declination is the angle between true north (geographic north) and magnetic north (the direction a compass points). At the Arctic Circle Trail, that declination sits at 25.56° west, meaning magnetic north is 25.56° to the west of true north. A number worth remembering if you ever need to rely on a compass and paper maps in the field, which obviously we also bring if we need to switch to manual mode.

Equally crucial is the inReach system, a specific subscription plan which provides a lifeline when you’re hundreds of kilometers from the nearest settlement. It allows for two-way messaging and emergency SOS signals. No voice only SMS, weather forecast and position tracking.

And hopefully, the GPS device will work all along, thanks to the solar panel set-up to keep the charge going on.