It began with a proposition: Spend the better part of three weeks with six other guys — some of whom you’ve never met — lumbering elevated monster trucks across Greenland’s massive ice sheet without a hot shower, much sleep, or even a guarantee of making it back home, and you’ve got what most of us would call a nonstarter.

But for emergency physician Jon Solberg, MD, FAWM, FACEP, DiMM, the invitation to explore uncharted territory with a caravan of trailblazers eager to complete the first-ever long-axis traverse of Greenland by vehicle was too enticing to pass up.

Luckily, our fellow armchair adventurers can watch the spectacular journey in the documentary, Expedition: Greenland, available on most streaming platforms.

Filmed over the course of 30 days in spring 2018, the documentary follows Dr. Solberg and an intrepid band of seven expertly skilled outdoor journeymen en route to Wulffland, on Greenland’s northern coast, in overland vehicles — a feat that had never been done before.

Ironing out trip logistics was years in the making, largely coordinated by extreme travel veteran Greg Miller, an entrepreneur and philanthropist who had driven in vehicle teams across all seven continents with Scott Brady, publisher of Overland Journal, a glossy adventure travel magazine that prizes inspirational stories about remote global excursions. Dr. Solberg, an emergency and trauma physician at Trinity Health in Minot, North Dakota, has also served as the magazine’s medical editor for more than a dozen years.

Working around exposed crevasses required team members to utilize mountaineering and rescue skills that Dr. Solberg learned while earning his diploma in mountain medicine from the Wilderness Medical Society and University of Utah. PHOTOS DR. JON SOLBERG. (Click to enlarge.)

The road trip covered 3,000 miles in 20 days, stretching from Greenland’s southern tip to its vast northern expanse in three hulking, specially outfitted Toyota Hilux trucks packed down with supplies and dragging jet fuel bladders on sleds across thousands of barren miles. Blizzards, unforgiving terrain, temps that dipped well below –40°F, and equipment failures were constant reminders of the trip’s inherent perils.

“I worried about everyone’s safety; I had anxiety about whether we were all going to get along, but you had to trust everyone 100 percent,” Dr. Solberg remembered. “Every person was integral to the mission. It was collaborative survival for the entire expedition.”

Cold Weather Conditioning

Mastering survival skills for cold weather adventures is something Dr. Solberg started long before he saddled up for the Greenland trip. As a young teenager growing up in Stanley, North Dakota, he’d crunch snowshoes across a wintry backyard until he found the perfect spot to build a snow cave.

Fixing a broken sled during an overnight camp required removal of two 150 gallon fuel bladders and working in -40° F conditions. (Click to enlarge.)

“I used to set off from our living room in North Dakota and put on my snowshoes and go across this valley and dig a snow cave. And I’d flash a flashlight back at my mom in the window to let her know that I was okay and was going to spend the night. I’ve always enjoyed being in the cold.”

History lessons in school about ancient explorers also resonated.

“I always was fascinated with the age of exploration and ships that went all over the world. Many of them carried a physician or some kind of medical person with them, and oftentimes, those people had multiple roles,” Dr. Solberg said.

Years later, Dr. Solberg’s pursuits led him to study medicine at the University of North Dakota (UND) School of Medicine and Health Sciences, where he gravitated toward the unconventional before graduating in 2006.

“When I first got into medical school and they asked me what I wanted to be, I said an expedition doctor, and everyone laughed at me and said, ‘no one does that anymore.’”

The comments didn’t deter him.

During his last rotation in medical school, Dr. Solberg found a UND alumnus physician who had traveled to Cameroon in Central Africa years earlier to work as a family physician and then expanded his practice to better serve the region. Dr. Solberg traveled to Cameroon to join him and realized within weeks that having a medical background allowed him to “visit interesting places without being just a tourist. You have something to offer the local population and that really gives you an insight.”

Emergency Medicine + Travel = Career Path

Dr. Solberg completed his emergency medicine residency at Madigan Army Medical Center in Fort Lewis, Washington, in 2009, and afterwards deployed with the U.S. Army to a tent hospital in a hostile region of southern Afghanistan.

Following military service, Dr. Solberg returned to UND’s School of Medicine and Health Sciences where he served for five years as the chair of emergency medicine. He currently teaches at and serves as director of the department’s Wilderness Medicine program. Dr. Solberg also holds a Diploma in Mountain Medicine (DiMM) from the Wilderness Medical Society and University of Utah and uses his experience as a backcountry pilot and airplane owner to work collaboratively with the John D. Odegard School of Aerospace Sciences to teach wilderness survival skills to aviation students.

As a board-certified emergency physician, Dr. Solberg has practiced in both civilian and military settings in North Dakota, Louisiana, New Mexico, Texas, and California. He’s traveled professionally as an expedition doctor throughout Alaska, South Africa, Lesotho, and Botswana, often accompanying film crews to seldom-tread locales. So, when the Miller–Brady team decided to traverse Greenland and figured it would be a good idea “to take some kind of a medical person with them,” Dr. Solberg was an obvious choice.

Getting to Greenland

After a weekend meeting with Mr. Miller to hash out details and a medical plan to cover all kinds of environmental factors, conditions, and possibilities, Dr. Solberg was in.

Careful planning and preparation were essential.

Dr. Solberg poses with a frozen musk ox calf, excavated from the snow when the team stopped to investigate a small patch of brown protruding through the snow. (Click to enlarge.)

“In Greenland, all of our supplies had to be capable of freezing,” Dr. Solberg said. “There was no way to take IVs or anything like that because there was no place to even get an IV started and be in a warm area.”

Dr. Solberg brought an NG tube; a foley catheter; an array of pills, creams, and oral dissolvables; and a handful of pharmaceuticals that could be given as intramuscular injections. Liquids, like eye drops, epinephrine, injectable antibiotics, pain meds, and an albuterol inhaler were tucked in a pouch on his chest that he wore inside his jacket for nearly a month to prevent the medicines from freezing. Splints, bandages, and medical tools were stored in the rear of the trucks and allowed to freeze. The medical kit was split among the three trucks, in case a truck was lost to a fire or dropped into a crevasse.

He even brought along a carbon monoxide detector to warn the team if truck cabins started filling up with the gas triggered by an exhaust leak.

Knowing the health histories of each traveler was essential too, but those conversations and pre-departure health screenings had to be conducted remotely, said Dr. Solberg. In one case, Dr. Solberg and Miller declined to greenlight a would-be Greenland traveler after the individual revealed he had a recent syncopal episode at work.

Without being able to identify the cause of the syncope, Dr. Solberg referred the man to obtain an ECG and visit a cardiologist in his home country to determine whether there was an underlying condition. But after weeks without a clinical update, Dr. Solberg advised the man against going to Greenland.

“Within the next couple of months, he was diagnosed with a second-degree Type 2 [atrioventricular] AV block and then required a pacemaker,” Dr. Solberg recalled. “Just think of what could have happened in northern Greenland if we’d had someone who was passing out and bradycardic.”

Going Solo

Knowing that he’d be the only doctor on board meant that he’d have to be ready for pretty much anything at any time. Training in emergency medicine provided a solid foundation.

“A physician on an expedition has many roles and some of them are not very glamorous,” said Dr. Solberg. “Dealing with human waste and the latrine and clean water, making sure everyone had adequate calories and at least some sleep, and trying to identify problems” before they presented topped his list for keeping people safe, sane, and able to power through 15- to 20-hour shifts behind the wheel staring at an endlessly white landscape—or knowing when to surrender to sleep deprivation and pass the wheel to another driver.

“After several weeks of living like this, we all realized the important moral support offered to expeditions by those in logistics or cooking roles,” he added.

It also meant protecting himself from suffering an injury or falling ill as best he could. For this self-described “car guy” with a passion for tinkering with trucks and motors, that meant staying on the sidelines most of the time when mechanical repairs were done to keep the trucks rolling.

The goal of getting to Wulffland also posed a distinct challenge. The northern edge of Greenland is so remote that no outside rescue would have been possible, at least, not for a while.

“No aircraft or vehicle carries enough fuel to travel to that portion of the glacier, has the capability to land, and the capability to then get home,” Dr. Solberg said. “Any rescue attempt would have required multiple trips to stage fuel and equipment to get to us and get us home. We were totally dependent on each other during that portion of the expedition.”

A Close Call

The reality of how quickly one mishap could result in disaster hit home when Dr. Solberg hiked at dusk in front of the vehicle caravan, plunging a long pole into the snow while searching for hidden crevasses. He found one.

Just feet away from one truck, his pole sank and he stumbled briefly into the crevasse before pulling himself up and out.

“I thought, wow, this is not very smart,” he recalled. “In the end, the ground did not cave way under us, but at the time, there was a great deal of uncertainty.”

Fortunately, Dr. Solberg put his crevasse rescue training skills to work, making sure that everyone was roped up, harnessed, and belayed by another team member who was attached to a vehicle before anyone walked to a crevasse edge. They also had a z-pulley system in place just in case someone had to be dragged out.

“When we were able to look back at some of these crevasses, it was certainly possible that they could have been open underneath,” he added. “The responsibility for rescuing somebody [from a crevasse] would have fallen to me and one other individual who had done a [National Outdoor Leadership School] NOLS course.”

Luckily, the pulley system wasn’t put to the test, but his instinct for wilderness survival was, which meant knowing that the front cab of a mid-sized truck was his only out-of-harsh weather option for performing a procedure on an ailing team member if needed.

“As [emergency] doctors, we are used to meeting patients on our terms in our facility, where the environment and situation are controlled and familiar to us,” Dr. Solberg said. “In the wilderness, we have to give up control of our environment and approach problems from unfamiliar angles. We don’t usually have to do that in the ED.”

Benefits of Teamwork

A valuable asset that Dr. Solberg brought with him—something that couldn’t be packed in a medical kit or dragged behind on sleds—was a seamless approach to working with a team, even with teammates he didn’t know well at the start.

“There were hours of boredom, you know, of just driving into nothingness,” Dr. Solberg remembered. “Science, technology, and engineering made the trip possible. But it was the [shared] humanity that kept everybody reasonable with each other,” he noted. “I mean, these were individuals from different countries, with different religious backgrounds, different political affiliations, and we were locked together inside of a vehicle for almost a month.”

“Some people brought wonderful music; all different genres, and we listened to some wonderful books on tape,” he said. “We had really civilized but passionate discussions about all of these different extreme ends of the spectrum on many things, but we all were able to do it with respect for each other. Just being open and being engaged in that discussion was really important to keeping us civil. I grew as a person and learned new insights that changed some of my own opinions. Everybody was able to speak their mind, and no one felt intimidated.”

“We came together; we worked to overcome many challenging situations, and yet not one single cross word was spoken amongst the group. The world needs more collaboration like this,” Dr. Solberg said.

The emergency department is an ideal training ground for lessons in teamwork, he offered.

“We do that in the ED every day too,” Dr. Solberg said. “You walk into a resuscitation, and you might not know the respiratory therapist or the lab tech or the charge nurse who shows up. But for that moment in time, you put everything else aside and you focus on what needs to be done as a team and then, hopefully, you succeed.”

Donna Petrozzello is the editor of ACEP Now.