Northen plans for summer 96! Three of us, Manu Eggermann, Pascal Luthi and Alex Masselot, from the University of Geneva (Switzerland) headed to one of the northest island on earth, Spitsbergen. The idea of the trip was to ski 14 days, to climb its highest peak , the Newtontoppen (1717m) and reach the russian mine Pyramiden.
A short history review
Svalbard has probably been discovered in 1194, by Vikings from
Iceland. Forgotten, rediscovered by Dutchmen in the XVIth century,
the interest in the archipelago increased with the intensive whaling
since the XVIIth century followed by hunting. Since the beginning
of this century, the main stakes there are coal mining and scientific
research. Mines are actually runned by Russians (Pyramiden,
Barentsburg) and Norwegian (Longyearbyen, Svéagruva). Ny-Ålesund is
mainly a scientific village, with researchers from many countries
involved in the polar field (glaciology, biology...). Svalbard has
also obviously been a key place for many attempt to discover the North
Pole area.
Since the Paris treaty in 1920, the Svalbard is under the
Norwegian sovereignthy trough a Sysselman based in Longyearbyen, but
any signatory states have equal rights. In some features (including
the interdiciton of any military base), this treaty is a precursor of
the Antarctic Treaty.
Longyearbyen is the main settlement (ca 1000 inhabitants). It is
mainly a coal mine, but since a few years, tourism has became more and
more important. Planes fly there almost daily during high season,
almost anything (clothes, polar equipment, food...) can be purchased
there, and without taxes, which make some norwegian high quality
products very attractive (Ajungilak sleeping bags, Hell Sport
tents...).
More informations can be found here.
"Spitsbergen", this name sounds great to the ears of any polar
attracted people. Facing the fascinating arctic wilderness is a king
of drug, and skiing deep into it is a wonderful shoot. Returning from
a solo ski trip in Iceland,
the idea of getting there raised obviously to my mind. I guess that
0.01 second was enough to decide two friends, Manu (with who we went
to a long Greenland trek last year) and Pascal (an accomplished
sailor) to head north. Trained to ski touring here in the Alps, such
an expedition was a "natural" long ski tour. The
equipment, the effort, are approximatively the same as for
mountaineering here in the Alps, so we didn't encounter special
problems in the preparation.
The itinerary, totalizing something like 130km:
If
you don't have the gif animated feature, click here .
If you wish to have a
more detailled map (700K), click here .
Landing in Longyearbyen - last preparations
We fly SAS from Oslo. The end of the flight above
the sunny and snowy south part of the island is really wonderful. We
land at 2:00am, the sun is high in the sky. In the morning, the first
thing is to go and meet Jørn:
-Hi! you must be the guys from
Switzerland. I've waited for you til 3am.
-Yeah. aah... (We
discover here that the notion of awaked period is directly related to
the sun)
-I've got two news: a bad one and a good one.
-?
-The good one: summer is cold, snow conditions are wonderful for
this period of the year, you're lucky men.
-...
-The bad
one: summer is cold. The fjord is full of packed ice and the boat
cannot move, you're not lucky. It never happens at this period of the
year.
-let's fix the problem.
As the ultimate goal of money is to be spent, we decide to hire a helicopter to be dropped on a glacier 40km south from our previous planned departure. The rest of this last day is spent in preparing the daily food rations, fixing the last practical details... and drinking a last and unforgettable beer.
Short night. We wake up, thinking about having a big last breakfast,
taking a last shower, filling up calmly the sledges, talking with some
people... Jørn is coming:
-Hi! good night?
-yes.
-Okay, you take off in 30 minutes.
-?
We have only the time to load the sledges, and praying some troll
to protect us from forgetting anything important. We fly. We are
dropped. The helicopter is gone. We are alone, disconnected from the
civilisation.
A great
advantage of this trip is the absence of heavy backpack. As all the
way is on glaciers and the weight of the equipment reaches 65kg, each
of us pull a fiberglass sledge (Fjellpulken model rented at SWS for
Manu and Pascal, and a french made Ellesmere for me). A small pack can
be carried with only little food, drink, photo camera... So we move,
in the polar bear country. The bear we will never see (only tracks
three times, going from west to east), but who is always present in
our mind. Pascal will always carry a rifle, in case of... The bear we
fear, but the bear we'd like to see - from some distance. It's
something like one the most powerful land animal, running over 60km/h,
swiming over 10km/h (twice as fast as an olympic racer), totally
adapted to its world, incredibly intelligent and sometime very
curious... We will live with the eye of the bear around us for 14
days.
Our skis are
alpine touring or cross country models with mountaineering shoes, and
skins most of the time (Dynastar vertical + Silveretta 400 for Manu,
touring ski + heavy Frichti for Manu, Fisher E99 + the untrustable
Emery's chrono model for me; Manu and I have Koflach arctic model with
always the normal slipper, Pascal has Raichle mountaineering shoes
(with a One Sport's Everest slipper sometimes)). When the glacier
invites to do so , we tie a rope between us, to protect from crevasse
falling. In fact two ropes are necessary: one to tie the sledges and
one for the men. If one falls, the two others don't have to pull him+
the sledge; he can untie himself from the sledge and both can be
pulled off separately. In the whole journey, we will never ski across
higly crevassed area, but one never knows.
As a trip is
always before another one, we carry one kite with us to perform
tests. The idea is to profit on the wind to move, as already did
F. Nansen on century ago for his crossing of Greenland. The sail is a
reduced (5.5 square meter) copy of an Advance paraglide (designed by
Robert Graham). It is linked by two pair of ropes, one for traction
and one for steering. The steering is very precise and comfortable, if
we put the system in a windsurf hook tied up to the sledge belt. After
some tries, I would recommend to put the hook directly on the climbing
harness so the strains on the sledge pulling system are more equally
shared but a system should be found to transmit directly the force of
the kite to the sledge. The sail works very well with 90degres wind
and it is possible to windward like with a sail boat. Going with the
wind is more disapointing. The 5.5m2 work up to 50km/h winds I think,
even if it would be better to carry a smaller sail for such
winds. Flat area crossing can be done very quickly, but has sailing is
dependent upon so many factors, I would not recommend to rely to much
on it when planning trips delays (at least the short ones) - "the
route to the North Pole is 900 hundred km, I can move 30km/h, so I
need 30 hours, roughly 4 days" - good luck!!!. This has been
heard. Polar travel includes some other factors and, as would say the
spanish team who tried to reach he North Pole by motorbike and stopped
200 meters after the airport, it's not so easy. A last point using a
sail when in group: I think that it's really easy to loose the
partners within a second in the fog; relying on the tracks can be
hazardous and as loosing the contact can be extremely dangerous, I
would recommend perhaps to carry each a GPS (or even a radio) end to
have precise rendez-vous - this is only my point, and I definitely
think it is not shared. 
A "normal" day is skiing from 9pm to 6am (as the snow is a bit harder
at this time and there is no light change), setting the camp and
eating from 6am to 9am, sleeping from 9am to 6pm, eating breakfast and
packing the camp from 6pm to 9pm.
When comes the time, we stop on a flat area. A tent is set to eat, 30 meters away from the ones to sleep. They are protect against wind by a snow wall, and the sleeping ones are surrounded by a wire connected to "bear mines", kind of crackers supposed to explode when a bear would come to close. One did exploded once by accident, letting us in our tent, a bit tensed with the raising question: "well, there is probably a bear, I'm in the tent, what should I do now?". To protect us from the wind, we often dig a hole with a small wall as a comfortable toilet.
Here comes the eating time. We have two MSR XGK-II stoves (in case of trouble, we prefered carry two, even if we used one at a time) runned with unleaded regular gas bought in Longyearbyen (we used 6.5 liters for 13 full days and 3 three men). The dinner meal is mainly pasta/rice/polenta with sauces/lyophylised food, with sometimes Wallis dry meat and tea; Breakfast is semolina/porridge with dry fruits and cappuccino. During the day or for dessert we have chocolate, almond pastry, unforgetable home made fruit cakes, biscuits... instead of white sugar, we have brown natural "mascobado", much more tasty. In prevision of a bad day, friends at home prepared us a "surprise meal". This time, creamed apricot with rhum and sausages were great to eat once (the idea of the "surprise meal" is always great during an expedition). For more details about the food rations, go here.
July is not the finest period for such a ski trip. Temperature did
range from -10C to 0C (and 0C to +5C the 3 last days), so it is
warm for such a country, but july is well known for its fog. So we had
fog. A deep one, where it is impossible to walk straight, where the
concept of distance doesn't exist anymore for the front man. It is
hard to imagine how crazy you can become walking for hours facing
nothing but this withe fog. Being three is a great advantage as
we can swap our positions (for the tail skiers, it's much easier as
there is the one in front to look at). The tail man has the compass (a
Silva model...) and is supposed to steer the caravan. Walking in the
fog is mainly rythmed by the shouted litany (as the fog is often there
a direct consequence from the sea wind):"-LEFT TWO!! (where the unity
is a kind of non-linear approximative psycho-adapted angle
measure)...LEFT ONE!! -what? -LEFT ONE!!... LEFT
TWO!!... RIGHT ONE!!".
Anyway, orientation is greatly helped (one would say it is not orientation anymore) with GPS (two Garmin models: 40 and 45) and accurate 1:100'000 maps from the Norsk Polarinstitutt. Routes can be previously entered in the machine and in a couple of minutes we get our position (ca. 50 meters) and the direction to head to the next point. Despite its latitude, the declination is very small in Svalbard, and the use of the compass gives no trouble.
The fog can be
treacherous. Skiing to a pass in the deep fog near Pyramiden, we
analysed a situation: "We are on the left of the pass, approximatively
at its heigth (that was true). Don't keep on climbing and being too
high, so we should go flat to it, straight south (the compass was
okay)". We walk for several minutes, and then I have a doubt, look at
the compass and ask my friend:
-where is the north,guys?
-there, behind us obviously, you idiot!
-no. We are currently
heading north...
Within a few minutes, even being three
following each other, we had made a 180 rotation, skiing a bit lower
than our pass. Fog can really be treacherous...
We reach the Newtontoppen on our 6th day. Our rythm of walking is cool
and as the snow conditions are perfect, we are not completely
exhausted. We have some spare days, so we decide to stay there some
time to climb a few peaks. On the arrival day, the first thing is to
make an igloo and to use it as the eating place. We are not inuit and
we make some mistake: a to large base (2.5 meters of diameter), we
don't incline the walls before the third level of block... But after
6h30min (Amundsen was able to build a small one alone in 1h30!!! and I
don't know the classical inuit time). Anyway, with some fear, and
often discouragement, we finish the building high of 2.5 meters, were
8 peoples could be wihout any problem. We set a table in the middle,
with seats and all the sophisticated equipment we can imagine.
To get in the
more alpine like area surrounding Pyramiden, we need to cross a river
(west of Mittag-Lefferbreen) with no obvious passage. The current is
strong and crossing it with all the equipment seems risky. There we
use the Ellesmere sledge as a rope-ferry for the equipment and with a
few there and back, everything make it safely. Crossing for us is a
bit cold, in an almost waist deep cold water (on one side of the river
is the glacier). Neoprene slippers are of a great use, avoiding the
anckles to get frozen, except for Pascal who has to jump all dressed
in the water to catch my sledge pulling system he dropped in!
Hopefully we all have two pairs of moutaineering shoes slippers and he
won't have to finish the trip with wet shoes. After this crossing, we
end exhausted a 15 hours days.
Next day we have to carry all our equipment as there is no snow til next glacier, a couple of kilometers further. The day is short, compared to yesterday, but I fall in love with a summit ("for the very first second I saw it, I knew I should try to get up there"). As my two friends don't really want to come (Manu has some knee trouble), I head alone to the Faraofjellet. The way I choose is a beautiful 40-45 degres north couloir to reach the final ridge. The end is a bit steep and I'm happy to have two ice axes. On the ridge, not very far away from what I think to be the summit, I face a fantastic cornice. The fog is all around now, and I cannot imagine a route further. I decide to get back fustrated, but happy to have climbed this wild route. I've let my ski at the bottom of the couloir, so in a few instants slaloming between the glacier streams, I'm back to the camp where my friends have prepared a nice meal.
We have now three days (crossing this part in two days can be done very easily) trough the mountains to reach Pyramiden. Previous expeditions often preferred to reach it by a long and tiring portage along the sea shore. Thinking that sledge and skis are made for the snow, we decide to go by the glaciers way. The snow is wetter than previously and the slopes are steeper but we make it without trouble, except for Manu who finds it funny to fall into a glacier stream. On the last day, we take a shortcut which bring us to a dead end. We try to use the ropes to descent a steep icy slope but continuous small avalanches around us make us go backward and take another planned route.
In the evenning, we reach the surrounding of Pyramiden. We fall asleep five meters away from a tiny creek which grows during our night comes just in front of the door in the morning! Hopefully our sledges were not taken away by the flow. We had luck!
Some miners take their breakfast and invite us to come with them in the canteen. The first civilized meal for two weeks is greatly appreciated. Later on we phone to the mine interpretor-postman-tourist guide-policeman who tells us that the boat is supposed to come at noon.
In Pyramiden, don't look for a bar, a grocery or anything like that; they are very well hidden. Anyway we decide to carry the stuff to the port and wait for the boat. Noon... 1:00... The man we had on the phone comes to tell us the boat is going to be late... 2:00... 3:00... He comes back to learn us there won't be any boat today because of the packed ice further on in the fjord ("These norwegian boats, they can go trough little ice! ha! ha! ha!", in fact he doesn't really like Norwegians). The situation is a bit tensed. We are saturday, our plane leave Longyearbyen on Monday morning, and we cannot expect a boat tomorrow (it has only come twice this year). Phoning to Longyearbyen is an adventure. As there is no public phone ("The norwegian Sysselmann, she doesn't want to put a public phone here..."), he has to awake (we are saturday) the responsible of the office where is the outgoing phone, and trying again and again, we solve our problem three hours and 50NOK later. An helicopter from Longyearbyen will come to pick us up tomorrow afternoon, we'll catch our plane.
One last
problem: we've burned all our food this morning, so we have 24 hours
to wait without nothing. We find (in fact, our "guide" shows us) the
bar, hidden inside a building. We drink our last kroners and the
barmaid gives us a tough bread and... a Pyramiden grown up
cucumber. We spend the night beside the settlement and I'm waked up by
a russian man doing his sunday morning walk. Follows a long russian
discussion (my words are "da", "niet", and something like "thanks
you") which i suppose was very interessant. The helicopter comes and
pick us up, and we're back to Longyearbyen. The russian mining comagny
own a helicopter and we've been told afterwards that it can be hired
for much cheaper than the norwegian compagny- this option can be
thought for a longer flight (thinking that price is correlated with
security).
In 20 minutes, we jump from an eastern to a western country. There we find showers, girls smiles, FOOD!!!!, beers. We eat at Nybyen (upper Longyearbyen), in the blue building, where the food is good and consequent. As the plane leaves at 5:00am, we prefer to avoid sleeping and spend our night in Longyearbyen by "virtual" night.
