FROZEN MOMENTS
The icy majesty of Russia’s Franz Josef Land archipelago transcends time and politics
JOSEF LAND, Russia — This isn’t the Russia you’ve heard about on cable news. You can’t fake the beauty of this place a few hundred miles from the North Pole.
I watched as the rays of the midnight sun caught a giant white bear curled up on an ice floe. A tiny fur ball playfully licked its mom’s snout. The mother bear, waking up grumpy, splashed into the frigid water as the 297-foot ship on which I was a passenger zigzagged through the Barents Sea.
This is Franz Josef Land, the northernmost point in Russia where neither people nor politics exists. Besides the handful of park rangers stationed on these islands, you’ll find no permanent inhabitants and few structures. This is true wilderness.
I was aboard Poseidon Expeditions’ 114-passenger Sea Spirit for 15 days in the high Arctic, a place I’ve long been curious about. As I stared at the gray sky, I saw all manner of f loating ice forms that looked like sculptures calved from ancient glaciers.
These surroundings felt otherworldly, yet life was everywhere, even if hidden by fog or freezing seas.
Just off Alexandra Land, the westernmost of this 192-island archipelago, I watched polar bears paddle until the waves of the Cambridge Bay swallowed them.
A challenge to visit
The natural magic is so real in Franz Josef Land that propaganda couldn’t do it justice. The archipelago, part of the Russian Arctic National Park, is the country’s largest protected area and the region’s largest marine reserve.
A National Geographic moment quickly gave way to howling wind and stinging flurries. I could easily imagine how hellish life had been here before down jackets and modern navigation.
In 1926 Russia annexed the archipelago, which an Austro-Hungarian North Pole expedition had discovered in the late 19th century.
It was a strategic location for Soviet bases during the Cold War, and little has changed since 1994 when FJL became a zakaznik ,or nature reserve. No infrastructure has been installed, but some decrepit bases have been rebuilt.
About 1,000 tourists visit annually, according to the Kremlin, which claims to want ecotourism but is conservative with permits.
There is nowhere to stay, which makes a visit by ship ideal, and you must be on an icebreaker most of the year. (The Sea Spirit is ice class, good enough in summer.)
These challenges keep people away but also keep the place pristine. Aside from polar bears, there are 150 species of moss, 167 of lichen and 50 of flowering plants, plus nesting seabirds and pods of walruses and bowhead and humpback whales.
Have a ball
On Champ Island, a highlight, I saw stone spheres that reinforced the otherworldly feeling.
Some were big enough to climb on, others palm-sized as though they were sent by an angry god eaFRANZ ger to play some form of celestial soccer.
The spheres were everywhere, some so flawless I wondered how they got here.
Geologists say they were molded by centuries of melting glaciers. I spent a day among them, snapping selfies as Russian rangers, wary of curious bears, looked on with automatic weapons.
The cosmic stones have stayed with me. I knew they were natural, I knew their origin, yet their singularity, scattered for eternity on an icy beach, punctuated how end of the world this land felt.
More bears than humans
Some claim there are more polar bears in FJL than anywhere else.
“Russia revoked permission for the joint Norway-Russia polar bear survey a few years back, so there’s no meaningful new estimate,” said Andrew Derocher, a professor of biological studies at the University of Alberta, Canada.
He said the “bears in western Russian are highly polluted,” referring to polychlorinated biphenyls, or PCBs. The chemical was banned in the 1970s but was trapped in the ice, then released as it melted. It accumulates in bears when they eat seals, which could affect fertility.
Yet the mother and cub I watched earlier looked healthy. Fat even. It shows how complicated and confusing this landscape can be to an outsider.
Some of FJL’s islands have wildlife that would rival the contents of Noah’s ark. I saw thousands of guillemots, birds in the auk family, perched on Rubini Rock on Hooker Island, while other isles had nothing. Eightyfive percent are glaciated, after all, with islets and floes galore. I lost track of how many islands I saw.
On Alexandra Land, a base and immigration stop called Nagurskoye reminded me of the frozen outpost in John Carpenter’s “The Thing.”
I handed my passport to a young ranger. He scanned my picture, eyes lingering. I felt sweaty under my parka.
“Same,” he said, pointing. “Same birthday.”
He smiled, stamped, handed back the passport, then bowed. I mumbled “Spasiba” and headed back to the Zodiac and my world.