Colourful white

We are out now for over one month. The day we left Longyearbyen feels like a day a long time ago but still time passes fast.

We have an everyday life out here, even tough it differs a lot from what is commonly seen as everyday life in civilization, with daily routines of melting snow, building the camp and of course, skiing.

The days are similar to each other but still it never gets boring and everyday has its own character.

Many glaciers and passes we crossed in the last month, skiing through a seemingly endless landscape in white and blue.



But the white is never the same, it can be grey in a whiteout or blue in the shadow, or all kinds of red, orange, pink in the low evening sun or better, the night sun, since the time of the midnight sun started by now.

That allow us to use the timelessness of the Arctic summer.

We do not have to plan our day according to the light. In the last days, we shifted our rhythm to skiing in the afternoon and night, when the light is beautiful, and sleep during the day when the sun is sleeping as well.

When there is no wind, there is often no sound to hear in the white endless snow desert and the surroundings seem dead.


So I’m always very happy to meet signs of life, like the reindeer couple we met at Sorkapp. They came very close to inspect what strange creatures crossed their land.

Or like the birds of which we meet more and more.

Today we also met our second polar bear but as the first one, he seemed to be more afraid of us than the other way around. And he was running away even before we spotted him.

It seems that our caravan of seven pulkas, five people and one dog is looking suspicious to most inhabitants of Svalbard !

And so we move further along the East coast of Spitzbergen towards North making a track through the colourful white leaving dead land.

Hella