A Sail & Ski Adventure in Svalbard
7 days skiing at high latitude
I once found myself anchored off of South Georgia Island in the South Atlantic with the sailing legend Skip Novak. Dave Hahn and I were guiding the Shackleton traverse. Most everyone else on board were deeply experienced sailors, including Kim Lundgren, who had organized our expedition. We were relieved to have finished the 950 NM crossing from the Falklands to South Georgia, a notoriously challenging passage in the South Atlantic. The boat lay relatively still for the first time in almost a week, wine was uncorked, and the conversation turned to landfall.
I listened, rapt, as team members described a planet covered mostly with water. They recalled sailing into Cape Town with Table Mountain looming in the background, crossing the equator and making sacrifices to Neptune, and rounding critical capes, horns, and points. They repeatedly mentioned a mysterious place called Svalbard, or was it Spitsbergen? Their perspective of being at sea, looking toward land, set in motion more sailing than expected. My family took a sailing course in 2019 and purchased a small sloop soon after. We used that boat, Yemaya, to explore the Salish Sea & Straight of Georgia on the coasts of Washington and British Columbia. We improbably logged almost 200 days just those first 3 summers. We eventually crossed the Atlantic and made landfall in Martinique. I sailed through the Straight of Gibraltar, touching Morocco in the process, and I crewed from Sitka, AK to the Straight of Juan de Fuca, staying well offshore the whole way. All that time, Svalbard was at the top of my list of places to visit by boat, and this past April I finally got my chance!
Svalbard, previously called Spitsbergen, lies between 74 degrees and 81 degrees north, with its administrative capital, Longyearbyen, just over 78 degrees north. When you get to Longyearbyen, you are just 814 miles / 1380 km from the North Pole. This proximity to the North Pole is the main reason the archipelago was used in early attempts to reach the Pole. For reference, the northernmost part of Alaska is Point Barrow, which lies at 71 degrees north. Due to the influence of the Gulf Stream, the west coast of Svalbard remains ice-free for most of the year, with pack ice starting just to the north, and the east side locked in ice for most of the year, except for a portion of the polar summer. If you want some really gripping reading, check out this article from Nature regarding the weakening and potential collapse of the Gulf Stream (aka Atlantic Meridional Overturning Circulation - AMOC) and try to wrap your head around what places like Scotland, Ireland, Norway, etc. would be like if this warm jet of water from the Caribbean were to stop circulating. (Gulf Stream Collapse)
Olivia and I recently struck up a relationship with Tom Wolfe, the owner of Sawback Adventures, through the work we are doing at Burnie Glacier Chalet (BGC). Tom and his wife, Deb Lantz, recently purchased BGC from our friend Christoph Dietzfelbinger. Sawback runs a big, well-respected Svalbard progam and I inquired about going. My space as a guide on the trip was secured by the addition of our friends Bill and Susan from Leavenworth. I had run into them at a friend’s memorial and mentioned the possibility of a ski/sail trip to Svalbard this spring. Our stars aligned, and on April 21, I found myself climbing off a 737 at Longyearbyen Airport.
After a day spent exploring one of the strangest and most pleasant places I have been to, our group of 12 loaded our skis and gear onto Meander, a 98-foot steel, two-masted schooner, crewed by 4 Germans with Captain Mario Czok in charge. Once onboard, we set off almost immediately for a week of skiing, using Meander as our comfortable base. As we crossed the Isafjord (Ice Fjord), the sea state was near flat, and we quickly fell in love with the quiet chug chug of Meander’s very large, reliable, and very old diesel engine. The noise it made reminded me of the train in a kid’s book, ”I think I can, I think I can….” Mario would start the engine each day, a good 30 minutes before we departed, and when the tempo finally increased, we knew we were underway. You never missed the sound of the anchor dropping, chain rattling over the windlass, but it magically always came up silently. As with most sail ski adventures, the primary goal was skiing; so we generally motored from place to place, only raising the sails when they eased the boat's motion in certain sea states.
Norway was granted full sovereignty over this Arctic archipelago in the 1920 Svalbard Treaty and has since invested heavily in making it clear that this is Norwegian territory, particularly given its proximity to Russia. The signatories of the treaty included almost every major nation in the world at the time and granted foreigners the right to work and live visa-free in Svalbard, a spirit evident in the number of different nationalities encountered wandering the streets of Longyearbyen.
Due to its remote, northern location, Svalbard is one of the few places on the planet that has never had an indigenous population. Dutch Mariner, Willem Barentz is credited with the first undisputed discovery of the archipelago in 1595, naming it Spitzbergen (“pointed mountains”). There is also a Norwegian claim that it appears in Norse sagas from the late 100s under the name Svalbarõi (“cold edge”), as well as undocumented claims that Russian Pomor hunters may have been there before Barentz. Stand on the windy beach in Longyearbyen on a nice spring day, and the name “cold edge” seems appropriate.
Longyearbyen was, until recently, a coal-mining town, and is now a tourist base with a small university. The place bustles with young people and tourists. The town only recently switched to diesel to generate electricity, with the coal-burning power plant’s smokestacks towering over the town, now unused. It was mesmerizing to wander between the well-stocked grocery and liquor stores, through outdoor stores selling everything from crampons to the latest down clothing, and into brew pubs and high-end restaurants with dishes like Whale and Seal on the menu. Most interesting was the Svalbard Museum, with another museum dedicated to North Pole exploration nearby.
After a short safety briefing, we departed Longyearbyen, motored across the Isafjord (Ice Fjord), and anchored for the night at Ymerbukta under Hovtinden (574m) and Karlstadttoppen (547m), our ski objectives for the next day. Svalbard is warming at 5 times the rate of the rest of the planet, a pattern consistent with that in other high-latitude regions. April 2026 was the second warmest on record for the area. We experienced ideal ski temps consistently below freezing, but a rain event early in the month had glazed the slopes around our first ski objectives, making for heads-up travel.
Two highlights of the trip were the guides I was working with. Peter Alex Wainwright is an ACMG ski guide who has developed a specialty in Arctic ski guiding and was one of the most professional guides I have worked with. Working in Svalbard requires, of course, the ski guiding component, but also has a host of other challenges: providing “lethal” (rifle) and “non-lethal” (flares) deterrence for Polar Bears, evaluating ice crossings, and working with the boat crew to figure out which anchorages would be free of brash ice based on current wind conditions, etc. What impressed me most was Peter’s knowledge and, more importantly, his interest in, local natural history. The type of work that Peter does was what I envisioned when I started Northwest Mountain School in 1994, but had yet to see in action in the 32 years that followed… technically skilled guides with an equally developed sense of the natural history, geology, and human history of the area where they worked. You hear a lot in the mountains of Washington these days about 27 ways to set up a crevasse rescue system, but very little about how our public lands came into being and the plants and animals living there. I was in paradise.
The other guide was Jack Arnold, who had recently completed the Arctic Nature Guide program at the university in Svalbard and was paired with me because he had his permit to carry a rifle, which I had yet to obtain. Perhaps of interest only to me is the Arctic Nature Guide’s association with the International Mountain Leader (UIMLA) program, which is kind of the hiking equivalent of the IFMGA/UIAGM qualifications that Olivia and I hold. I think programs like this and UIMLA represent a practical way forward for guiding as the cost to obtain IFMGA grows out of reach for most. Jack grew up in Northern Ireland and is just getting started in the ski guide flow, but already has a lot of kilometers under his belt and brought a highly professional approach to the mission. Both were just really easy, nice folks to work with. In the absence of a rifle permit, I was given the small honor of bearing the “non-lethal” deterrence, a flare gun and 8 shells that were to be expended upon encounters with a polar bear. After watching these two in action, skiing with rifles, I concluded that it was best I did not show up with the bare minimum of training, and am planning to enroll in a multi-day course for next year’s program that focuses specifically on Polar bears.
On day 1, we skied high onto the shoulder of Hovtinden, finally turning before the firm slopes got too steep for a safe transition to downhill, and then climbed Karlstadtoppen. The ski conditions on both were near bulletproof, but Karlstadtoppen was slightly friendlier, netting us a good first day. Following the ski, the crew moved the boat to Trygghamna, perhaps the most-visited bay on the island for skiing, given its proximity to Longyearbyen.
On day 2, we climbed high on Daudmannen (768m), finally turning back when the combination of slope angle, firm conditions and exposure was sufficient to raise concern. Fortunately, this was the most challenging skinning day of the trip as conditions quickly improved on subsequent outings.
The Captain of the Meander is Mario Czok. It is hard to imagine the pressure one would often feel running a boat in a remote place like this, but Mario was super level-headed, at times mischievous, and easy to work with. The guides and the boat crew really have to be in sync to make these things work. I did not really know what to expect coming into the trip, and was super impressed with the boat crew’s willingness to shift meal times and boat movements at any hour to make the ski component work well.
After our ski on Day 2, we moved north to St. Jonsfjorden and anchored under the Gaffelbreen (“breen” means glacier). En route, we spotted our first walrus. What followed on Day 3 was an exceptional day of skiing after a long (8.5 kilometer approach up the gentle Gaffelbreen to ski Konowryggen (743m). The views from the summit across the massive Løvenskioldfonna (ice cap) and down the Konobreen were staggering. We could see small holes in the ice made by seals and glassed the area closely in hopes of spotting a hunting polar bear. Polar bear encounters on the island south of the pack ice are fairly rare, but evidently, if you do encounter one, they can be extremely curious, and any polar bear sighting would trigger a hasty exit by boat. As Peter pointed out during the safety briefing, once the rifles come out in a polar bear encounter, you “shoot to kill” if the bear gets too close and the flares have not dissuaded it. Hard to imagine a worse event than shooting a polar bear, but fortunately, encounters with ski parties are extremely rare in this zone. Guides work hard to avoid bears, for both parties safety.
After skiing Konowryggen, we toured up two more side peaks, the last of which required a brief use of the rope as we worked our way up and through crevasses. Conditions had softened just enough to provide better skiing than on days 1 and 2. Spirits were high when we hit the boat that night. Jan, the onboard Chef, per usual, served up something amazing for dinner as we moved to Forlandsundet to anchor off Prins Karls Forland, the island blocking the main Greenland Sea from the coast of Spitsbergen. Peter pointed out that it was a bit of a gamble, as we would need the wind to shift as forecast to allow us to land the next morning. I was pretty fascinated and happy not to be in charge of the boat as Mario worked with the crew to find a suitable anchorage in 6 meters of water, 1.6 miles offshore, for the night.
Having sailed quite a bit on our boat, it was a bit of a relief to go to bed on a windy night knowing that I had zero responsibility for monitoring how well the boat was staying fast overnight. One positive is that 24-hour daylight would make a middle-of-the-night move less stressful than in the dark. Regardless, the anchor held, and we woke in the morning to NE winds stronger than forecast. The ice had pushed brash ice in against the shore, so we soon concluded that we would not touch land on Prins Karls Forland on this trip, pulled anchor, and headed for Hornbækbukta.
We got a late start on Day 4 skiing and had a long, sinuous approach to the saddle at the top of Haakenbreen, during which we were treated to sightings of Caribou, an Arctic Fox, and a colony of Little Auks. Views from the saddle of the North were again massive, and on the approach, we had the backdrop of the Aavatsmarkbreen, one of the more impressive tidewater glaciers I have seen. Svalbard is between 55% and 60% covered in glacial ice, with most other areas locked in snow or fast ice for much of the year. Having traveled in the Arctic and ranges like the Cascades and Alps, you gain a real understanding of what those places must have looked like when buried beneath glacial ice 10,000+ years ago.
We had a good ski down the Haakenbreen, then wrapped around to climb a tight gully littered with Ptarmigan and Caribou droppings en route to Dahltoppen, our last objective of the day. Jack and I split off with Will, whose snowboard boots had given his feet enough exercise for the day, and dropped through a cliff band to work our way across the ice flows and almost flat snow gullies that led back to the pickup zone. On the way, we were looking for the best entrance to get through the cliffs and stumbled upon an old fox trap and a walrus skull. In the late 1800s and early 1900s, this area was worked by trappers and whalers, with the main land animal taken being the Arctic Fox. In the century leading up to protection in 1973, 30,000+ polar bears were killed by hunters. Harvest of up to 500 bears annually continued well after WWII, and by the time they were protected, only 1-2,000 remained. The population has rebounded since protection measures were put in place, but the loss of sea ice poses a real challenge to the long-term survival of these incredible creatures.
We got back to the boat quite late, which added extra work for Jan and the crew, but they cheerfully shuttled us back, fed us an amazing meal, and then rallied to take us ashore at 10:30 to a walrus haul-out. Other than a few seen in the water in the days before, I had not seen a walrus in the wild. We stayed well short of the “huddle” and watched in amazement as they rolled about in a large pile, with the occasional walrus logrolling off the beach and into the water. Evidently, they don’t collect like this for warmth, but rather for the social aspect and, presumably, defense against polar bears, which have a really hard time taking a walrus due to their thick hides, strong tusks, and sheer mass, which can reach up to 1,700 kg (3,700 lbs). They primarily forage for mollusks on the sea floor and use those tusks for digging, hauling themselves onto ice, and a bit of defense. Their only other non-human predators are Orcas, which have just as much trouble subduing their prey as Polar Bears.
We spent a good hour watching them roll, scratch, and argue over who slept where before heading back to the boat for Gluwein and sleep well after midnight.
On Day 5, we moved back down to St. Jonsfjord and managed the spectacular traverse from Dahlrebukta up the Ujamnbreen, over a high pass, and then down another lobe of the Gaffelbreen to the bay we had skied out of a few days earlier. Ski conditions continued to improve significantly, but we encountered some bizarre round features on one aspect that made for exciting low-angle skiing. This day remained sunny and comfortable with temperatures below freezing. We all agreed that perfect visibility and the ability to range far and wide were preferable to white outs with powder, but we could also see that the weather was finally changing. Like all skiers we would have loved powder + sun! Per usual, Mario used the evening hours to move us over to Gronfjorden so we could visit Barentsburg and one of the only bars on the island outside Longyearbyen.
On the move, we had an off-angle following sea with a swell of maybe 1.5 meters, making for a rolling ride. The good old “washing machine.” Everyone did well, with those more prone to seasickness laying down, which generally works. First Mate Jonas and Deckhand Lisbeth threw up some sails to ease the motion as we motored back around the corner into the Isafjord.
We arrived in Barentsburg just in time for last call at the hotel bar. Barentsburg is a coal-mining town owned by a Russian company, presumably to maintain a presence on what will inevitably become a disputed chunk of land as the pack ice recedes. Only about 300 people live there, and it has an abandoned feel. I ordered a gin and tonic; they were out of tonic, so switched to an Aperol spritz; they were out of Prosecco, so settled for a beer from the brewery. Expeditions require their sacrifices…. We spent the night moored to the dock so that we could refill the water tanks in the morning. We were underway early.
For our last day of skiing, we motored towards Longyearbyen and pulled into Colesbukta with plans to climb Lindstromfjellet (966m) and then descend the small pocket glacier on the NE corner of the peak. We started and finished in the ruins of coal-mining communities long since abandoned, touring beneath the train tracks that transported coal mined in Grumantbyen to the slightly deeper water in Colesbukta, where it was loaded onto boats. The weather was now closing in a bit, but we had received about 1cm of new snow overnight and were looking forward to skiing up high.
Once again, we skied up a closed drainage to reach a plateau where we spotted many caribou, then continued up to the summit, our highest for the trip. The summit was basically whiteout, but Peter had been there before and led us across the top to the small pocket glacier. Within a few dozen turns, we got under the clouds, and the skiing was GOOD! The dusting of snow overnight up high had blown into the lee slope, and we had exceptionally smooth, soft conditions on what became a memorable ski run.
We skied almost 1000 meters down what became a tighter and tighter gully leading to the ocean. Despite relatively little new snow, the skiing remained improbably good until the very end, when small rocks began to work their way through the snow. As we got closer and closer to the abandoned mining settlement at Grumantbyen, we began to encounter old mine shafts, train tracks horribly twisted by what must be permafrost melt, and, eventually, the buildings of a settlement that was once home to over 1,000 people. Kittiwakes had taken over the sea-facing window ledges of the buildings here. One of the larger colonies of Little Auks dominated the cliff just above. The guano from these long-established colonies has produced some of the island’s deepest soil and with it, one of Svalbards largest collection of plants. These large bird colonies are a good place to see Arctic foxes, as they spend a lot of time at the base of the cliff scavenging any eggs that fall out of the nest or young birds that do not succeed on their first flight when they fledge.
Lisbeth and Jonas cheerfully swooped in to pick us up in the Zodiacs as we reached the beach. There was a lot of twisted metal debris in the water, so getting in and out without putting a hole in one of the tenders was on everyone’s mind. Once on board, we motored back to the public dock in Longyearbyen. The boat was so comfortable, and everyone in the group was so happy, that we were not tempted to go into town that night. Jan prepared us a “Captain’s” meal, and we celebrated our good fortune in having such a great week.
Reading for those interested in Svalbard:
A Woman in the Polar Night by Christiane Ritter: Probably the most popular non-fiction book currently in circulation about life in Svalbard in the first half of the 20th century. Austrian artist Christiane joins her husband, Hermann, a trapper living on Spitzbergen, trapping foxes, living off seal and ptarmigan, and the occasional polar bear, with his friend Karl. This book has made a small comeback and is a really interesting description of the very difficult life of overwintering this far north in small, simple huts. Svalbard never had an indigenous population, so the early days are generally descriptions of the lives of whalers and trappers, and this is the best I have read. People were very tough back then.
The Memoirs of Stockholm Sven by Nathanial Ian Miller: Fiction based loosely on an actual person, but written in 2021. This was making the rounds in our group and is reportedly a good read. My son is interested in Jack London’s books, so we will be taking this on the trip north to Alaska this summer for some tent reading.
Spitsbergen - Svalbard. The Complete Guide by Rolf Stange: This was the book that fellow guide Peter seemed to reference most. The author, Stange, was leading a trip following our week on Meander. This is a book worth reading and taking with you if you visit Svalbard, but it might be a bit dry if you’re just trying to get a feel for the place. I am working my way through it and find it really helps open up my understanding of the places I visited on this first trip.
Want to do a Ski-Sail trip to Svalbard: Check our our upcoming Svalbard Ski & Sail programs.
More information about the Arctic Nature Guide program that my guide friend Jack recently completed. Thanks for reading John's Substack! Subscribe for free to receive new posts and support my work.