After another bluebird day and two laps from an unnamed summit, we return to the waiting Zodiac, and eventually the Noorderlicht. Photo credit: Rob Coppolillo
Polar bears, schooners and endless ski lines
As close to the North Pole as it is to mainland Europe, the Svalbard archipelago delivers all the ingredients of true adventure-skiing: unforgettable landscapes, once-in-a-lifetime experiences, some fantastic skiing, and stories you’ll tell for the rest of your life. Where else can you have a near-miss with a polar bear, enjoy 3000 feet of pristine corn, share a beer under full sail on a 150-foot sailboat, discuss Muay Thai boxing with a Dutch weightlifter, photo your friends with a bust of Lenin, and summit an unclimbed peak, all in the same day?
TRIP BETA
Location: Svalbard Archipelago, Norway
Aspects: all of ‘em
Starting point: Longyearbyen Harbor
Distance: six days, hundreds of kilometers by boat and by ski
Time: May 22-29, 2019
Top elevation: 3200 feet
Vertical: lots
USGS map: none (Svalbardguiden app!)
Expedition leader Phil Wickens enjoys sun-softened snow with glaciers disappearing into the horizon … and three teammates coming back up the skintrack for another serving. PC: Rob Coppolillo
“Robert, the bear is moving north, approximately 250m from where you are now. He is walking at you.” –Captain Floris
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“Seals. It’s seals talking to each other.” –Tom Wolfe, IFMGA/ACMG mountain guide
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“I have no idea if anyone has skied off this peak. Good question!” –Phil Wickens, Expedition Leader, Oceanwide Expeditions
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The first mention of Svalbard comes from an Icelandic saga, around 1200, which describes an island four days sailing to the north and east. There’s no archaeological evidence that humans had set up shop on Svalbard, though. It appears Inuit migrations ended in Greenland, meaning the polar bears and Arctic foxes ran the place until the Euros began visiting more regularly after 1600. Dutch, Russian, English, Norwegian, and French sailors visited the islands throughout history, but it wasn’t until 1920 that the Svalbard Treaty officially designated the islands as part of Norway. An agreement between signatories granted access to natural resources, which means whaling and mining by other countries could continue — this notably resulted in two Russian outposts on the island, Barentsburg and Pyramiden. Comrade Lenin makes his appearances in these villages.
The bust of Lenin watches over a nearly deserted Svalbard village.
Covered by sixty-percent glaciers with more polar bears than people, Svalbard presents a few challenges to the adventurous skier: yes, the bears, but also–how to get around? Dog-sled teams can get you just about anywhere, until the seasonal snow ends. The capital town, Longyearbyen, has several hundred snowmobiles parked just about everywhere, also pretty useful until the snow melts around town and the cracks open up on the glaciers. There’s about 50km of roads in and around Longyear, so not much help there.
The answer? The boat. My colleague, Tom Wolfe; a full mountain guide from Canmore, Alberta; came home from his 2018 trip as psyched on the boat as he was on the skiing. “Wait ‘til you see the Noorderlicht,” he said. “You can’t believe this thing–it’s 45 meters, a two-masted schooner with a chef and this captain, Floris–you’re going to love this guy.”
Left: The crazy Dutchman, Floris de Waard, captain of the Noorderlicht, and the author. Right: King Grant ascends Svalbard’s sea of glaciers and summits.
Having now spent a week on the boat with him, I do love Floris. He’s a kook…and a great boat captain! Tom wasn’t joking, either. The Noorderlicht (“Northern Lights” in Dutch) made a great home base for us. Dogs and snow machines aren’t as comfortable or convenient for a team of skiers headed onto the glaciers and peaks of Svalbard, so once the sea ice retreats a bit, the Noorderlicht grants access to fjords and channels and unskied peaks on the northwest side of the islands. Awesome.
And then there’s the wildlife. When Tom arrived back in harbor in 2018, he immediately texted me, “You’re coming next year. This is so cool!” We put down a deposit on the boat before he’d left Svalbard, just like we did this year, after our 2019 voyage. The boat, the ski-mountaineering, the crew, the experience, were all-time, but the wildlife sealed the deal for me. You won’t see bears in Iceland or Antarctica. Or caribou. Arctic foxes poke their heads up, checking out the group. They’re tiny, the size of a house cat!
Ursus maritimus, or “maritime bear,” or “isbjørn” (ice bear) in Norwegian, or just a polar bear to us gringos. They feed on seals and spend most of their lives on the sea ice. PC: Rob Coppilillo
Oh, and the skiing? Did I mention the skiing? Yes, right. A typical day: guides meet at 06:30 over fresh coffee, eat breakfast, load the Zodiac, scope a landing, shuttle the team ashore, watch for bears, and then…tour. We leave the gleaming sea ice and a saturated blue sea, aiming for peaks still blanketed in the winter’s snow. We had a meter-and-a-half snowpack still on the ground this May, which granted us GS turns from summits, our skis pointed at the speck of the boat, kilometers away and anchored in a shimmering fjord. Still a thousand feet above the sea, we spot polar bear tracks, traversing between seal holes. We choose our line onto the ice with care: fall-line turns towards a calving glacier, but avoiding blind spots where we might spook a hunting bear. Heads up!
Skinning across the surface of the frozen ocean, Cooper Caillier approaches teetering seracs on Spitsbergen.
By day four we’re negotiating a deposit for 2020. Tom and I chat with Captain Floris while he steers the ship at nine p.m., the sun still high in the sky, no sign of it setting, as we sail into open water and head towards yet another fjord. More skiing to be done. See more here.
This is the first in a series of essays and trip reports from the Svalbard Archipelago, so stay tuned for more over the coming months!
Tom Wolfe, IFMGA/ACMG mountain guide, relaxing after another stellar day touring and sailing in Svalbard.
Rob Coppolillo is WildSnow’s official “Mud Season Correspondent” and an IFMGA/AMGA full mountain guide, newly based in Chamonix, France. He and Tom will sail again in Svalbard, May 9-16, 2020, aboard the Noorderlicht with Captain Floris.
12 comments
Hmmm
Sounds like a fabulous trip but I do have to question the sustainability of it all. Flights, boats, dinghy’s, fluorocarbons, . Worst case, what would have happened to a bear if it had become a danger to you? With glaciers melting, fires raging and micro plastics in the Arctic is a second trip really necessary? I know Lou believes that we have to innovate our way out of this environmental mess we’ve created …yet still perhaps the motto ‘ do your best, compensate the rest ‘ is worth considering while the engineers come up with a ‘cunning plan’
I agree, Rich, frequent trips to the Arctic may not be ‘necessary’ but I do think perspective is important when talking and thinking about climate change. For those of us who can’t experience the Arctic firsthand, hearing on the ground reports from a source other than mainstream media is important and gives a wider lens to see places undergoing great changes, whether that’s to celebrate the awesomeness of the places or to show that they’re changing. But yes, we can all do our best, however that looks in practice.
Hi Rich—Ack, I just lost a long response to your valid points! I’ll write more in the morn—stay tuned, just wanted to let you know I’d read your comment and will respond! RC
OK, Morning Rich—-again, valid points. Ones that haunt a trip like this — should we even be there? Aren’t we helping to ruin the very place we’re celebrating and visiting?
Indeed, having to shoot a bear would be a tragedy. It has happened, most recently with a tourism ship in 2018. I recall a source saying there have been five fatal polar bear attacks over the last 50 years on the islands. Ironically our bear encounter seems large provoked by two younger Norwegian men who were hunting seals. After killing three seals, they had them cached immediately beside their tent. Sort of a WTF moment for us on the boat and for those of us accustomed to backpacking in bear country, but there you have it. The two Norwegians actually boarded our boat after the encounter, seeking safety (nice young guys). All told, though, the odds of a bear encounter are very, very low.
I share your reservations about sustainability and our impacts, mainly in terms of co2/climate. One easy and imperfect mitigation strategy is buying carbon offsets for our travel there. I used terrapass.com in 2018 to offset all my guiding travel and I’m nudging my guests to do the same for their trips. I’m waiting on a response from POW regarding offset programs and I’ll share what they tell me here. Terrapass doesn’t raise any red flags and comes recommended by some metrics.
Another strategy from my end is limiting my trips and bundling them–I’ll go to Canada once this winter, rather than a couple separate trips, for example. Adding another Svalbard week on the boat is pretty low-impact for me (I’ve already flown there, which is the big impact, another week on a sailboat is the least of my worries), but it does invite another gaggle of guests to fly up there.
I guess my thoughts behind all of this are that my few trips during the year matter less than what I and my family are doing the other 275 days. (We’re moving to France next week, so I’ll be on the nuclear teat by Wednesday at noon. Low carbon … but man, the consequences of an accident don’t seem worth it to me. Digression.) I drive a hybrid, bike commute; we’ve installed LED bulbs in our home, have PV panels, solar hot-water collectors, check the box for wind energy from our utility provider, and line-dry our wash; we compost as much as we can; we try to shop and eat with an eye towards reducing our impacts. When we installed the PV, the electrical utility wouldn’t believe that our home was our primary residence, as we used so little energy. Small victory.
All this falls somewhere between a skinny white Boulderite convincing himself he’s doing all right and a pretty low-carbon/low-impact lifestyle. I’m afraid if Amory Lovins sat down and calculated it all, I’d be closer to the former than the latter. Wherever the truth lies, it’s how I get out of bed in the morning and do the work I do.
Thanks for reading the post and I look forward to hearing your thoughts — be frank; I’m interested! Sincerely, RC
Reminds me of that old bear joke, paraphrased: “If you get in trouble with polar bears, you don’t need to run fast, you just need to run faster than the guys with seal meat around their camp. And since they’re in their sleeping bags, that shouldn’t be a problem.”
Dear Robert
Thank you very much for your reply. Let me digest and then get back to you.
regards
Rich
Perfect polar bear sighting: with a little distance and water between you!
Indeed, Peter, we lucked out and skirted around the bear to a nice, safe exit from the ice via Zodiac … then had a good hour watching the bear … rare and cool!
Jordan–We had mostly flat water during our week, just a couple choppy crossings to switch fjords…but yeah, if a kayak gets her, maybe a land-based trip is a better fit, eh? (Thinking for you as much as her!)
Hank–Blizzard ZeroG 95 with a TLT6 boot. Great set-up, that ski is mega versatile…though they’ve changed it for 2020–I’ll be interested to see how it rides. I have the newer 105 version, softer than the previous 108, more forgiving, less “charger” and prob appeals to more people. We’ll see.
Kevin–Temps were between -5 and +1 or 2 the whole week, 24-hour daylight, high RH, so even at -4C, it felt COLD up on deck and sailing. Yes, hot showers, whenever you want!
This looks insane. My wife gets seasick on kayaks (true story) so I’m not sure we could pull something like this off one day? She’d love the combo of skiing and polar bears – amazing!
Looks like an amazing trip. What was your setup for skis and boots? Also, the second photo of you skiing….are you skiing with a rifle?
What were the Temps like there? Any shower opportunities during the trip?
Fun Fact! The last German soldiers to surrender in WWII were manning a station on Svalbard. September 4, 1945. They were not there to ski, nor to hunt seals, but the Norwegians they surrendered to were seal hunters and also were not there to ski.