This Explorer Discovered A Decaying World War II Airstrip – And It’s Hauntingly Creepy

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►CanadaSpeedoMan https://goo.gl/F7yuBD

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Imgur user CanadaSpeedoMan and his wife were on a backcountry hiking trip in Greenland. For days, they trekked through the fjords, getting farther and farther from anything resembling civilization. Then they came upon piles of old barrels and the twisted frames of long-collapsed buildings.

East Greenland is a remote and lonely part of the world. Its landscape is one of mountains and lakes, and for much of the year it’s locked in pack ice. But in this great wilderness the hikers discovered the rusting remains of a facility – one that dates from a time when the area played a very important strategic role.

Amid the rocky peaks, on a shelf of land close to an Eskimo encampment known as Ikateq, the United States had built an airstrip. It was designed to be a refueling station for military aircraft flying from America to Europe during the Second World War. And it’s still there, slowly collapsing into the dirt.

Work began on the airstrip, known as Bluie East Two, in 1942. A year earlier America had taken over the defense of Greenland and began looking for sites on which to place a 5,000-foot runway. Eventually, they found the best location, 35 miles northeast of Tasiilaq. So it was that a supply flotilla arrived on July 26, 1942, and building work began.

The airfield remained open from 1942 until 1947. After the war came to an end in 1945, though, the importance of Bluie East Two began to wane. In fact, like other American bases in Greenland, it was vacated two years later. But the site’s inaccessibility is largely responsible for the fact that its legacy remains visible for anyone lucky enough to find it.

You see, everything that the Americans used to build Bluie East Two had to be shipped in. There are few, if any, trees in East Greenland, so the timber needed to be ferried over. But this also meant that when it was time to leave, there was no desire to take anything from the site.

It wasn’t just the buildings that were left, though. Almost everything was abandoned to the elements. And now, hundreds of barrels litter the area. These containers were used to refuel the planes, and some of them still hold fuel in their rusting shells. All told, it’s certainly a strange thing to stumble across in the middle of nowhere.

Nowadays, alongside the barrels are huge pieces of machinery. These would have been used to build the runway that was the heart of Bluie East Two. Completed in 1943, the landing strip was made out of gravel, and you can still see it cut into the cold earth today.

Most of the useful things that were left behind at Bluie East Two have, though, been removed over the past 70 years by the native Inuit people. However, anything that couldn’t be taken away by foot or in small fishing boats remains where it was left.

Interestingly, too, old photos from when the facility was being built show that it wasn’t just machinery that was needed to create the airstrip. Huge crates of explosives were also used. East Greenland isn’t, after all, the sort of place that makes building, or maintaining, large complexes easy.

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