Back in Longyearbyen

The ride back to Longyearbyen is much quicker and we are able to take our time and enjoy some of the sites along the way. Still, I crave one thing: a shower. After unloading the sleds that we have pulled with our snowmobiles that carried our supplies and baggage, we are back to the hotel. I see myself. What this insanity has done to my appearance I will survive too, much more easily. Finally, a hot shower and a bed. It is done.

I am thinking it would be great to come back when the sun never rises, or the sun never sets, or February when the sky is mostly blue and you can see the reflection of the sun on the Earth´s surface, even if you cannot see the sun itself until March.

On second thought....

Day

I have not seen myself in a week. Not any part of me. Apart from the fact that I have no mirror, it is too frigid to expose any part of my skin, even in my tent or sleeping bag, even for a second. There is only one function I cannot avoid that will be an exception, but I am otherwise fully layered. I never imagined I would ever be so unhygenic, but there is no question about it for me: I am staying covered and clothed for the duration.

During the day we eat freeze-dried food with hot (or at least warm) water to give it back some of it´s life. For dinner, in addition to seal, we have had reindeer, beef and salmon, along with a snack of ram or pringles, both of which I pass over. Breakfast is porridge and toast.

The weather changes quickly, which can be dangerous, as once again, on our way back to camp from an eight-hour day on the snowmobiles, whiteout. The fear is back with a vengeance too. I know Audun cannot see anything either, and I only hope he can see his GPS, because it is the only way we will find our way back. We are driving too fast I think. I am unbearably cold from the snow and searing wind. The snowmobile tosses, bangs against hard, uneven ice, slides and tips and shakes me, yet for some reason I also am afraid that I am falling asleep. I feel danger and anger until we finally reach our tents. I can only now think about the night.

The weather changes quickly, which can be miraculous. It is not until the last day when we are leaving that I see for the first time where our camp is situated...beween mountains and on the crest above us we can see forever and it is beautiful. In fact the sun on the top is overheating me and burning my skin when I remove my helmet. But it is glorious. We also found clear weather for periods of time during two of our days in the arctic wilderness. What we saw was Heaven made and it was magnificent. Blue fjords, glacier ice, those strange formations of ice in the middle of the frozen sea that glisten and sparkle in the sun that so mystify me. A seal with a face like a racoon lay on her side, pregnant and waiting to deliver puppies within days, watches us. We can see she wonders whether she will have to escape in the hole in the ice she has clawed out of looking to make a small snow cave to hide her pups from birds of prey and polar bears.

But no polar bears. We search for many hours every day but there have been no sitings of bear in many weeks. There are theories but no one knows exactly why they are so scarce here or where they have gone, but they can travel great distances smelling their way to their favorite food, seal puppies. I am resigned. It is strange, Audun says, that he cannot even find bear tracks. I know that it is the ice and snowy mountains that I will have to rely on to rationalize the struggle. I have not taken many pictures. The weather has not permitted for the most part. The incessant search for the elusive creature means we are racing past the opportunities otherwise.

Night

It is 11 p.m. or so. It is still relatively light outside. But the snow and wind are howling through our campsite. I struggle to my tent. I pull off my Sorels, rated for arctic conditions, lumbering, heavy black rubber blocks for my feet, making certain to avoid getting snow on my socks. Wet feet are a major danger in this cold. I yank off my snowmobile suit and with three layers remaining, the bitter cold is stinging. Next my snowpants and with two layers on my bottom half and shivering I lunge myself into my sleeping bag. Now my Gortex shell. I start to warm up after a while, but cannot bear going down to one layer of clothing. My neck and head are covered with a balaclava and fleece hat. Still, with part of my face exposed, I cannot stand the cold. I bury myself inside the sleeping bag, zipping both layers to the top with only a tiny airhole. I will still wake often because I am unbearably cold.

I cannot believe this tent will stand against the wind. The wind is beating on the nylon. I cannot believe this tent will withstand the weight of the snow accumulating quickly, snow that will cause us to have to dig out. Under my bag is a thin mat and air mattress. Audun tells us it is self-inflating. He raises his eyebrows when he tells us this. Sleep will be hard and fitfull.

It will be bright again by 4 a.m. but the hardest part of the day will be bearing up again in the morning to crawl out of the bag.

Raising Camp

We finally arrive at the site that will be our base camp for the next week. It is a site Audun concludes he will never again use. We will hug the side of a mountain peak in between a mountain range that will serve as our jumping off point for our daily expeditions. The mountain gods will send us blizzards and violent wins to punish us for our choice of "refuge."

Upon our arrival, I am hoping for some rest and to ease my nerves. But we have arrived late, and while it will not be completely dark (or at least nearly dark) until midnight, it is only getting colder. So while the wind dares us and the snow races against us, we start digging. We will have to dig out a place for our tents and smooth and pack the snow to give us some decent surface on which to "sleep" at night. Almost immediately and despite Audun's warnings, one of our camp mates walks right through the wire that stakes out our space in the snow from any possible polar bear intruders. The wire is a couple of feet from the top of the snow pack and if a bear walks into the wire, it sets off firecracker sounds intended to scare him off. Audun now has to stop and reconstruct our bear wire.

It takes the five of us and several hours to fight against the conditions and raise our tents, and then we will each dig our own ditch between the outer and inner openings to the tent. The hole is so that we can take our boots off and put them on again, and Audun tells us the theory is that the cold that enters the outer zipper entrance will go down into the hole rather than into the interior of the tent. He raises his eyebrows when he tells us this.

We have a small common tent where we will cook and eat our meals and play cards after dinners. Our first meal consists of seal meat, a repugnant tasting plate, but after our first day, I have no room for hunger anyway.

Whiteout

There is no ground. No sky. Nowhere to look, nothing to see, no reference point. There is nothing but white. We cannot see. Not one of us. Not our Norwegian guide Audun, nor any of the four of us on this insane expedition to the eastern coast of Spitsbergen. Audun has a GPS device. It is the only way he can make it. I have no idea how he manages to see it. We left Longyearbyen on snowmobiles for a one-week camping trip in the mountains. We will push from 78 to 80 degrees North, as far to the North Pole as we are permitted to travel this way.

The first four hours of our drive to base camp is deceiving. There is nowhere in the World to see scenery like this, all made of snow and ice. We drive at speeds topping off just over 60km\hr. At this rate we can make it in four hours. Four will become eight. At midpoint, whiteout. It snows so hard and the winds are blowing at least 40 miles an hour. Despite all my gear for this weather, I am bitterly cold. Freezing is no longer an adjective that applies. Freezing is tragically laughable at this point. These are subzero temperatures at their most severe.

We may be driving considerably slower, but it is sheer terror. This is rugged terrain. But I cannot see any of it. I cannot anticipate it to slow down or speed up a mountainside without becoming stuck. I cannot see the slope in order to lean over the machine in the opposite direction and keep it from rolling over. Remarkably I only roll my vehicle twice on the way to our campsite. I cannot feel the pain of being thrown and landing where I cannot see, either because it is so damn cold or because my fear is all I can concentrate on. I can only see a dot of light in front of me, which I know to be Audun's snowmobile and I try to regulate my speed by staying the same distance from that dot of light as we push on. I have now come to ask myself the question I will repeat in my head over and over for a week: Why?

Arctic Ice Caves

By snowcat up the snow-covered glacier, we reach the crest and finally the roar and rumble of the beast comes to a halt. My redheaded, freckle-faced driver and guide, Ingrid, a 30-year old native of Svalbard, Spitsbergen, jumps out of her perch into the permafrost. She hands me my crampons and helmet and tells me the headlamp is turned on by a button on the left. Ingrid explains that the rifle is in case we encounter a polar bear on the way out of the ice cave. There is a small ditch dug out of the snow and a shovel just in case. A wood plank stands on end to one side of the ditch. Ingrid lifts it to uncover a narrow hole. She points. We are headed down she tells me. I grab the rope and try in vain to find some footing in the ice. I lower myself down the narrow hole in the ice and land hard at the bottom. What lies ahead are winding pathways cut into the glacier over the millenia by the summer melt. Every year when it freezes and the cave can be re-entered the landscape of the passageways has changed from the year before. The curving walls appear as though they will close in on each other, crushing us. We crawl, we slide, we climb and slither deeper. The cave looks like glass. The glass is ribbed, studded by giant icicles, clear or white or blue, lit only by our headlamps. There is no sound but the crackle of the ice pack under our crampons. The temperature outside is about zero farenheit, but inside the cave the farther we travel it is getting warmer, uncomfortably so as I am dressed for sub-zero conditions. My left hand is badly hurt from the day before, bruised, swolen just below the wrist, and causing me excruciating pain any time I move it. But I have no choice now. My hands, my arms, my back and legs are all needed to engage the terrain of the interior of the glacier. About an hour and a half in, we reach a small crevice filled with water. We can go no farther; it is time to turn back.

Just before we reach the rope to climb up and out of the hole we stop and drink a hot black currant juice from a thermos. Ingrid tells me about life in Svalbard when she was little. Her father worked in the coal mine. In those days, there were only miners and scientists in Spitsbergen. The miners lived in housing owned by the company. There were no shops or stores. The miners filled out a list at the company and every month the ship would come in from Norway with their kilo of sugar and other non-perishable foods. What was left of the miners`s paycheck was paid with a currency printed by the coal company and usable only in Spitsbergen. In fact, there were three different currencies, depending on whether you worked in a Russian mine, a Norwegian mine or for the government as a research scientist. But, as there was no place to shop, there was no need, and by this system, the company never really paid its workers at all. The company simply fed, clothed and sheltered the employees and their families. There was no retirement here. When the worker retired, he had to move his family out of the company housing and leave the island. Today, there is private housing and workers are paid in Norwegian kroner. Still, people generally stay only a handful of years in this place.

Climbing back out of the hole and feeling that arctic air and the sun reflecting off of the snowy cliffs feels exilerating, and worth being tossed around in the beast again back down the glacier.

78th Parallel

The beginning of March brought the first light to Spitsbergen, an island of snow and ice peaks north of the Arctic Circle, home to polar bears and itinerant scientists from Norway and Russia. There is no light here until March. It is pitch blackness. It is impossible without a watch to know whether it is 2 p.m. or 2 a.m. The sun shows up in March. By April, there will be no more sunsets. There will be no darkness, at all, but then there will be blackness again. Now there is light in the day and darkness by 9:00 p.m., but blackness only between about midnight and 4:00 a.m. I spent today dog sledding through icy peaks and snowy valleys, the black or tan or gray fur of my huskies, and the sky above, the only crack in the whiteness around me. I was thrown from my sled three times, landing on my cameras, bruising falls that have left one hand with what I hope are only badly bruised bones and no fractures. One camera is down, inoperable. I cannot tell if I it is the minus-20 degree temperatures or my unintentional flights and landings. Tomorrow will bring more adventures.