Norway’s wild islands
The tiny, windswept archipelago of Svalbard is a haven for great rivers of ice — with more polar bears than people
“Do you want to hear the most beautiful sound in the world?” asks Morten, my guide. He uses his ax to scrape pieces of gleaming ice from the glacier, then lets them tumble down a deep blue crevasse, the end of which is not in sight.
When the ice gently drops into the glacial water, it sounds like delicate chimes, almost like a fantastical Arctic version of fairy dust.
Blues and whites and grays blend together in a starkly breathtaking palette atop the Nordenskiöld Glacier that, like a giant brush stroke, sweeps up from Billefjorden in the southwest of Svalbard, an archipelago in the Arctic Ocean halfway between Norway (which holds sovereignty over the islands) and the North Pole. The only sounds here in the wilderness are elemental: the whistling wind, the crack of the glacier, the roar of calving ice into the frigid water.
At a little more than 78 degrees north, I’m within the Arctic Circle. The remote frontier at the very edge of the planet was first used as a whaling base in the 17th and 18th centuries, then home to trappers and coal miners. Today, it lures adventure travelers looking to explore the wilder side of life.
This spot in the High Arctic is the kind of place where beauty is found in the sound of ice and the sight of snow-draped mountains, and where there’s always a chance of running into a polar bear if you’re not paying attention.
This far north at the height of summer, the sun dominates the sky around the clock, and when steely clouds part, rays of sunlight splash across the ice as my group of nine slowly files across the glacier, roped together for safety. We zigzag our way ever higher, pause for chocolate breaks and admire how the landscape subtly changes as our vantage point rises.
Across the ice, at the edges of the glacier and a rocky beach, sits our cabin, the Nordenskiöld Lodge. Strapped to its foundation against the forces of the howling winds, it offers a cozy
and rustic shelter with candlelight and glacier water for the few intrepid adventurers who want a temporary chance at experiencing Arctic silence.
“One hundred years ago, the glacier stretched a mile and a half farther that way, past the cabin,” Morten says. It seems a short time for such a drastic change, even in a place where drastic describes the weather, seasons, geography and even living conditions.
To get here, a little more than 37 miles from Longyearbyen, the northernmost settlement in the world (with an annual population of approximately 2,500 people), visitors have to take a boat in summer or snowmobile in winter — if conditions allow. It makes reaching the destination a more treasured experience, and small luxuries seem grand.
After a day on the glacier, we climb down past snow bridges and sapphire-blue ice tunnels, back to the tiny cabin at the edge of the fjord, where smoke from the sauna chimney curls into the slate-gray sky. After a few minutes in the wood-fired heat, any residual glacial chill is gone. Not yet satisfied with the day’s allotment of adventure, we flee the sauna with towels and wool blankets and plunge (briefly) into the fjord, amid chunks of glacial ice.
Strolling past the coal-miner statue on Longyearbyen’s pedestrian thoroughfare, I count three Svalbard reindeer grazing among the patches of summertime grass between buildings. This smallest reindeer species pays no attention to the humans only a few feet away. They seem to nibble faster, getting in all they can before the snow comes.
Longyearbyen was established as a mining town, and as I walk from the waterfront through “downtown” and to the farthest edges of the settlement, remnants of the industry appear — from old Mine 2B on the hillside to the wooden towers of the aerial tramway. At Gruvelageret, a restaurant in a former mining storage building, a table made from the original floorboards has permanent footprints of coal dust.
A frontier spirit lingers here, even after the heyday of mining and trapping. The Basecamp Explorer Hotel is fashioned of driftwood and slate, in true trapper style. Two museums highlight the area’s wildlife and history, as well as Svalbard’s importance as a base for expeditions to the North Pole. Signs at the edges of the settlement remind people that “all over Svalbard,” polar bears outnumber humans, and it’s the law that if two-legged folks travel away from town, they must go armed, just in case. In town, buildings and cars remain unlocked — as shelter from bears.
But modern touches mix with the remoteness — restaurants that feature reindeer stew also offer beer from the local brewery, Wi-Fi is a basic amenity in hotels, tax-free stores stock stylish and functional outdoor gear and polar bear souvenirs, and a chef in search of “the freshest food” sells homegrown microgreens to restaurants.
Almost everything in Longyearbyen is the “northernmost” something. I sip beer from the northernmost brewery, eat chocolate from the northernmost chocolate maker, view artwork in the northernmost art gallery, shop for snacks at the northernmost grocery store and catch a polar circle boat out to the Nordenskiöld Glacier from the northernmost harbor to stay at the northernmost commercially available cabin out in the Arctic wild.
The cabin’s two-canine alarm system against sneaky polar bear visitors, Putin (his brother is named Bush) and Kuling (Norwegian for “gale wind”), howl a farewell to us as we depart on a hiking excursion. Around the edges of the glacier, mountains of moraine divide streams of glacial runoff from loose boulders and boggy patches of moss and mud.
“This part up here is a little loose,” warns Rakel, another guide and co-host of the expedition lodge, along with Morten.
The terrain, with changing weather and the melting of glaciers and permafrost, is best described as unstable. But the silent allure of the land calls, and as we hike among tiny alpine flowers, mosses and lichen, we reach above the glacier for a greater understanding of its enormous span.
In Svalbard, the lifestyle of the trapper is revered, and solitude is respected. Despite sharing the cabin with a handful of other visitors, there’s something about the vastness and the silence that makes me feel alone with the beauty of the Arctic.
I walk carefully around the nest of a purple sandpiper filled with four green eggs flecked with brown. The cold breeze ruffles my hair. The rumble of the glacier heaves like a not-sodistant thunderstorm.
The sauna is ready for weary hikers at the day’s end, and we take turns baking in the heat and plunging into the icy fjord. What looks like white waves just beyond the beach becomes a pod of belugas, headed past the cabin and toward the glacier, as blue chunks of ice slide off its edge and into the water.
My ears tuned to the sounds of ice and wind, I clutch two small pieces of iceberg and walk back to the cabin. The sound of the glacier in my evening cocktail may not be as striking as the Arctic silence, but it’s as close as a human can get to re-creating the most beautiful sound in the world.