E X P E D I T I O N S VA L B A R D

L O S T V I E W S O N T H E S H O R E L I N E S

O F E C O N O M Y

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FOREWORD /// 007

TYRONE MARTINSSON /// 009

EXPEDITION JOURNAL

MARIE DESPLECHIN /// 079

PEOPLE OF SVALBARD

SOPHIE CALLE /// 087

A PHOTOGRAPHY

PER HOLMLUND /// 093

GLACIERS IN NORTHERN SVALBARD

IN A GLOBAL CHANGE CONTEXT

JOAN FONTCUBERTA /// 103

ICE MEMORIES

REBECCA SOLNIT /// 127

CYCLOPEDIA OF AN EXPEDITION

AROUND SVALBARD

STEVIE BEZENCENET /// 141

POSTCARDS FROM THE ARCTIC

URBAN WRÅKBERG /// 157

RE-PHOTOGRAPHY IN NORTHERN

INTERDISCIPLINARY FIELD STUDIES:

CULTURAL TESTING GROUNDS

AROUND ICE FJORD, SVALBARD

CHRIS WAINWRIGHT /// 171

WHERE ICE COMES TO DIE

HANS HEDBERG /// 187

ALONG THE COLD COAST — NOTES ON

THE ARTIC AND THE SUBLIME

GUNILLA BANDOLIN /// 195

PROPOSED WHALE MONUMENT

AT SMEERENBURG, SVALBARD

GUNILLA KNAPE /// 201

MICROLANDSCAPES

PARTICIPANTS /// 217

ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS /// 221

C O N T E N T S

FOR E WOR D

On September 8, 2011, M/S Stockholm sailed out from Longyearbyen, Svalbard.On board were twelve artists, scientists and writers. The intention with the ex-pedition was to have a dialogue through art and science around environmental issues, wilderness and the wild, narratives of history, place and travel in responseto the Arctic landscape.

The project, Art, Science and the Research Journey: Expedition Svalbard 2011,originated from an interest in the possibilities of collaboration across disciplineswith regard to environmental narratives. It was a project partly inspired by thebook Voyage Into Substance by Barbara M Stafford. A book, long out of print, thatwith its subtitle, Art, Science, Nature and the Illustrated Travel account, 1760-1840in a very inspiring and substantial way discusses the relation between science andart and our representation of travel and nature in a period that layed the founda-tion for modernity.

Svalbard, an Arctic desert, with its traces of a human history of exploration,colonisation and traditions along with its natural characteristics is in a unique position to evidence the dramatic and escalating effects of climate change. It is alandscape filled with stories not only in books, images, maps and reports but alsopreserved and embedded in the physical landscape itself. Svalbard has since itsdiscovery in 1596 been in the midst of political interests in the Arctic. It continuesto be a pivotal point at the frontier of change as we seek to address the conflictingneeds for conservation and energy generation.

The current state of the northern environments has created a fragile lastfrontier for exploitation of some remaining pockets of natural resources both

marine and terrestrial. Historically the Arctic has seen and continues to see, the aggressive expansion of its frontiers for exploitation of earth’s natural re-sources with consequences ranging from the extinction of animal species and ecological disasters to acts of war between competing nations and colonizing peoples of the North. The political Arctic, with its colonial history is a burningissue in a world where the climate is changing and its declining natural resources have become valued at an economic premium. The Far North can be referred to asboth a place and idea with a long history of narratives and representations thatcontinue to influence our current thinking and perception of what we mean by The Arctic.

Contemporary western culture has a complex and somewhat difficult rela-tionship with nature and embracing the notion and value of the wild. The impactof our escalating and energy intensive industrialised culture on nature is the mostpressing and urgent issue regarding the quality and future of human existence ina world where we are seeking to produce and consume more and more energythrough the extraction of the earth’s natural resources and increase the levels ofcarbon emissions to dangerous levels.

It is vital that we understand environmental changes to be able to preparefor the future of our planet. The impact of photography, science and writing has atradition of being able to raise awareness among the public and support and influ-ence policymakers, politicians, researchers, environmentalists and activists. Thiscollection of different responses to the Arctic landscape of Svalbard intends tocontribute to and develop that tradition.

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On June 3 1818 the British expedition — led by CaptainDavid Buchan on the HMS Dorothea and accompaniedby the HMS Trent, commanded by Lieutenant JohnFranklin — anchored its ships in Trinity Harbour atMagdalena Bay in Spitsbergen. Ice conditions hadforced them to turn back from any attempts at pene-trating the pack ice towards the north. They enteredthe bay after sailing through a severe and fearsomestorm, with heavy snowfall threatening to bring downthe ships when ice accumulated on the planks andropes, adding tonnes of weight to the vessels. Havingmade it out of the drift ice and stormy weather, theywere quite relieved to be entering the protected covein the bay. Magdalena Bay was their first port of an-chor in the polar regions and they were struck by thegrandeur of the rugged and wild scenery — mountainsrising from 600 to 800 metres high, immense massesof ice covering the valleys between the peaks andcliffs and glaciers sloping from the summits of themountainous margins all the way down to the veryedge of the sea. With its most remarkable feature(also a landmark for the safe anchor site) being the“Hanging Iceberg”, the bay was to gain a reputationas one of the most beautiful and impressive sites innorthwest Spitsbergen.

The bay is rendered conspicuous by four glaciers, of whichthe most remarkable, though the smallest in size, is situ-ated, two hundred feet above the sea on the slope of amountain. This glacier, from its peculiar appearance,has been appropriately termed the Hanging Iceberg. Itsposition is such, that it seems as if a very small matterwould detach it from the mountain, and project it intothe sea. And, indeed, large portions of its front do occa-sionally break away and fall with headlong impetuosityupon the beach, to the great hazard of any boat that maychance to be near.1

Silence in the Arctic landscape

We arrived with Captain Per Engwall and his ship theM/S Stockholm at the anchor site of Buchan’s expedi-tion on the morning of September 9 2011. The weatherwas gloomy, with drizzling rain and fog veils coveringthe mountain slopes and blocking a full view of thescenery. The Norwegian name, Magdalenefjorden, isnow on all contemporary maps. The name Magdalenawas introduced during the early 17th century eventhough the Dutch discoverers of Spitsbergen hadnamed the bay Tusk Bay in 1596 after finding walrustusks on the beach of what is today Gravneset, an Eng-lish burial ground from the whaling era.2 The naming

history of places illustrates and indicates how the landhas been used, and also the different cultural views thathave shaped the perceptions of the region. The namesof places and features on maps all have a story to tell.When chronicling Otto Torell’s 1861 expedition toSpitsbergen, Karl Chydenius described Magdalena Bayas one of the most interesting places in Spitsbergen as,within its boundaries, it has everything that charac-terises this land’s nature. Chydenius refers back to thesurvey carried out by Buchan’s expedition that becamethe most important description of the bay of its time.

I was carrying photographs of the bay taken by Brit-ish Lieutenant Herbert C. Chermside during BenjaminLee Smith’s expedition to Svalbard in 1873. Cherm-side had photographed the famous hanging glacier in Magdalenefjorden and we were determined to tryto find the glacier, or what might be left of it. NilsStrindberg also photographed the famous glacier in1896 during the Andrée Polar Expedition. Axel Goëshad previously photographed the glacier during OttoTorell’s expedition of 1861, as part of a panorama ofthe south side of the bay. The original photographstaken by Goës have yet to be found, but the detailedlithographic drawing included in the 1865 book fromthat expedition still exists and offers a good referencepoint for how the bay looked 150 years ago.

E X P E D I T I O N J O U R N A L

The land along which we sailed was rugged for the most part, and steep, mostly mountains and jagged peaks,from which we gave it the name of Spitsbergen.

Willem Barents, 1596

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We searched in vain for the hanging glacier but got agood sense of where it had been located on a steepand rocky slope between the Trankollane Mountains.Nothing was left of it, however, and it is hard to imag-ine the way this bay looked when Buchan, Goës orChermside visited. The immense walls of ice coveringalmost the entire south side — as seen in drawings,photographs and a view described by Chydenius dur-ing a climb to a mountaintop on the north side of thefjord — are all but gone. We wondered whether thebay had looked that different from when the Dutchexplorers came here in 1596 and from Buchan’s visitin 1818. When did the more dramatic changes occur?What will this place look like in twenty, fifty, a hundredor even ten years from now? The changes observed innorthwest Svalbard are part of the global environmen-tal issues that had taken us to the Arctic regions inthe first place.

The aim of our 2011 expedition was, as a group of art-ists, scientists and writers, to discuss and encounterissues relating to the environment and our relation-ship with the land and nature. As I walked around on the rocks searching for a close enough position torephotograph some of Chermside's images, questionsfilled the views. Questions of being a father to myyoung daughter and the future she will inherit. The

places I want her to see and be able to visit for thetonic of wildness — that human need expressed byThoreau. Questions that went unanswered in the lightrain, looking at the remains of ice on the mountainslopes and listening to the melting glacier as the onlysound in the Arctic stillness. A sound that reminds usof a concept of a frozen north, literally changing whilewe watch it disappear. The sound of melting waterwas the interruption that amplified the stillness that“bordered on the sublime — a stillness which was interrupted only by the bursting of an iceberg or the report of some fragment of rock loosened from itshold,” to quote Frederick W. Beechey, who wrote thebook on Buchan’s expedition.3 Interruptions that evenfurther amplified the very strange silence in the Arcticlandscape. Beechey describes a unique and dramaticlandscape featuring a mix of rugged mountain rangeswith deep valleys in between, filled either with largebeds of snow or with glaciers down the slopes of themountains and into the sea. The views of these unfre-quented places and the remote wilderness describedby Beechey and so many others who came before us,are often gone or dramatically changed. Svalbard, be-ing a rather dry and rocky semi-desert, often remindsme of the American Southwest, albeit with glaciersand ice instead of rivers and washes. Without ice inSvalbard, Spitsbergen would be like a Southwestern

desert deprived of its plants, wildlife and pockets ofwater — quite unimaginable. How will the concept of afrozen north, and subsequently our perceptions of theArctic, change in the future of climate change? If thesea ice is gone, seal numbers will decrease, polarbears will be gone, what will then be the characteris-tics of the Arctic?

The only thing left worth saving

Henry David Thoreau knew, as far back as the 1850s —the dawn of the industrial economy, that modernity’sprogress was destroying the very foundation ofmankind, and the very foundation of our future. Theprogress of industrialism and technological develop-ments have given us much in terms of an easier andhealthier life — here, I think of medical science, effec-tive food production, energy and so forth, and this is not to be forgotten. However, we need to balance that progress. The preservation of the world in the wilderness and the wild that Thoreau called for is the foundation for the history of Mankind. The same hindsight was expressed by John Muir in his endlessstruggle to make modern society see its connectionwith nature, to see and experience nature. We need toremind ourselves that, as Aldo Leopold wrote in 1949:

1 // Gerhard von Yhlen 1861. View north from Gravneset with Buchanbreen.

2 // Buchanbreen, inset image Herbert Chermside 1873. 3 // Buchanbreen 2011.

“Wilderness is the raw material out of which Man hashammered the artefact called civilization”. Arguablythere is a need always to make sure that some of thatraw material is preserved, if only as a sample of whatour society derives from. What we were made of. Theonly sustainable (a word so misused by consumptionideologies) society is one that completely rethinks andrecreates the economic system and its attitudes to-wards progress, consumption and quality of life, as pro-pounded by Norwegian philosopher and mountaineer

Arne Naess. That would be a society aiming for a bal-ance between Man, culture and nature. A society thatis really moving towards an ecological awareness thatvalues nature, biodiversity and a living landscape.Svalbard is often referred to as one of the world’s lastwilderness areas. The concept of “wilderness” is nowsuch a rarity that Edward Abbey’s call for it to be “theonly thing left worth saving” sounds more like a hol-low echo from past times than a call to arms from thewild, for environmentalist movements.

4 // Site of the Hanging Glacier, Magdalenefjorden 2011. Inset image left, Herbert Chermside 1873 and right Nils Strindberg 1896.

Climate scientists and academics, as well as writerson nature and environmentalism, keep reminding usthat Man has interfered with the Earth in a way thatperhaps makes it difficult to argue for any true wilder-ness in its original sense. In Svalbard the coastlinesare literally layered with cultural remains. Its shore-lines of cultural heritage are a reminder of our effortsand unique abilities to conquer every corner of theworld. Of course there are places that are truly wildand that can be experienced as wilderness areas, butsadly enough Man has interfered with the whole eco-system of the Earth through atmospheric pollutionand toxic waste in the seas and rivers. Svalbard is noexception. The amount of pollution and toxic wasterecorded by scientists in the islands’ ecosystem speaksfor itself. It is part of the collateral damage of moder-nity. The whole of James Lovelock’s Gaia is temperedwith. Like Arne Naess, Thoreau argues that nature hasan inherent and intrinsic value. That value is far moreimportant than the extremely short-sighted contem-porary progress ideologies and the material econo-mical values that fit the frames of a mythical globalmarket with its runaway expansion and growth. PaulJ. Crutzen, awarded the 1995 Nobel Prize in Chemistry,has, rather frighteningly, argued that we have enter-ed a new geological era, the Anthropocene, in Earth’shistory.4 The reason being the way that mankind hasinterfered with the Earth and will most likely contin-ue to do so for a long time to come, despite an urgentneed for a strategy for sustainable environmentalmanagement and relief of the stress induced by Manon Earth’s ecosystems. Reflections and thoughts pro-voked by Thoreau, Muir and Crutzen followed us onthis journey into the Arctic. The sites on our routealong the northern shores of the Polar Sea all have astory to tell, be it natural or cultural.

Potential close bear

Our ship slowly approached the Waggonwaybreen atthe end of Magdalenefjorden. Once one of the mostimpressive on the west coast of Svalbard, the glacieris still a remarkable experience of ice, but the scars ofits retreat mark the mountain slopes, whereas in the

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photographs taken in 1873 the glacier filled the en-tire end of the bay from the north side at the base ofAlkekongen Mountain through its connection withMiethebreen and to the south side with its connectionwith Brokebreen. The colours are intense, with blue-green water and ice shifting from a brilliant white todark blue and black, and the rocks and mountainscontrasting with hues of brown right down to coal-black in the towering peaks above the glacier. The shipapproached to a distance of about 300 metres fromthe glacial wall. The birds flying in towards the iceprovided a much-needed scale for the view. As weturned to follow the northern shore of the bay to-wards its entrance, we heard the first call of a bear-

sighting. Three bears were visible on the mountainslopes of the Alkekongen Mountain. When Buchanvisited, the mountain was called Rotge Hill, andBeechey and some of the other expedition membersbecame the first to attempt to climb the mountain in1818. The polar bear (Ursus maritimus) is no doubt an impressive predator. Stories from previous expe-ditions’ encounters with them are often both sad and horrific. The Dutch discoverers of Svalbard killedbears along their way from Bear Island — where theychased and killed a swimming bear, hence the name —down the west coast when returning from the north-ern shores of their newly discovered land. Killing thebears seemed to have been the only way to approachthem. In 1773, when Commander Constantine Phippsand Captain Skeffington Lutwidge came to Spitsberg-en in the HMS Racehorse and Carcass extremely vio-lent and raging bear killings are recorded in theirjournal of the expedition. The killing of a female bearwith her cubs illustrates particularly well the relation-ship that European explorers had with nature.

Early in the morning, the man at the masthead of theCarcass gave notice, that three bears were making theirway very fast over the ice, and that they were directingtheir course towards the ship. They had without question,been invited by the scent of the blubber of the sea-horsekilled a few days before, which the men had set on fire,and which was burning on the ice at the time of their ap-proach. They proved to be a she-bear and her two cubbs;but the cubbs were nearly as large as the dam. They raneagerly to the fire, and drew out from the flames part ofthe flesh of the sea-horse that remained unconsumed,and eat it voraciously. The crew from the ship, by way ofdiversion, threw great lumps of the flesh of the sea-horsewhich they had still left, out upon the ice, which the oldbear fetched away singly, laid each lump before her cubbsas she brought it, and dividing it, gave each a share, re-serving but a small portion to herself. As she was fetch-ing away the last piece they had to bestow, they levelledtheir muskets at the cubbs, and shot them both dead; andin her retreat, they also wounded the dam, but not mor-tally. It would have drawn tears of pity from any but un-feeling minds, to have marked the affectionate concernexpressed by this poor beast in the dying moments of her

expiring young. Tho’ she was sorely wounded, and couldbut just crawl to the place where they lay, she carried thelump of flesh she had fetched away, as she had done theothers before, tore it in pieces, and laid it down beforethem, and when she saw that they refused to eat, she laidher paws first upon one, and then upon the other, and en-deavoured to raise them up. All this while it was pitifulto hear her moan. When she found she could not stir them,she went off, and when she had got at some distance,looked back and moaned; and that not availing her to en-tice them away, she returned, and smelling round them,began to lick their wounds. She went off a second time,as before, and having crawled a few paces, looked againbehind her, and for some time stood moaning. But still hercubbs not rising to follow her, she returned to them again,and with signs of inexpressible fondness, went round andround the other, pawing them, and moaning. Finding atlast that they were cold and lifeless, she raised head to-wards the ship, and like Caliban in the tempest, growleda curse upon the murderers, which they returned with avolley of musket-balls. She fell between her cubbs, anddied licking their wounds.5

A similar bear-killing is reported in Chydenius’ ac-counts of Torell’s expedition to Spitsbergen wherethey shot and killed a female polar bear and her twocubs on August 12 1861 and seem to have left thembehind when returning to their ship. They shot bearsand walruses on several occasions, for no reason otherthan the thrill of the sport. This is, however, a practicethat is part and parcel of all expeditions through-out the 19th century, and the habit of shooting andkilling does not change until well into the 20th centu-ry. In his book on the naval captain Ralph Bergendahl,Swedish polar historian Anders Larsson gives severalexamples of brutal killings during the Duke of Orléans’1905 expedition to Spitsbergen. Here, not only grimtales of “hunting” are described but also unique ani-mal cruelty for the sake of art when a shot and mortal-ly wounded bird and polar bear are kept alive for aslong as it takes for the artist on board to finish hisdrawings!6

Travel in Svalbard is always to be taken seriously interms of polar bears. You are not allowed to leave the

5 // Waggonwaybreen, top to bottom, Axel Goes 1861, Herbert C. Chermside 1873, Unknown German photographer 1891,Erling J. Nødtvedt 1960 and a view of the glacier from Gravneset July 2012.

vicinity of Longyearbyen, the islands’ main village,without carrying a powerful rifle for protection, andyou need to know how to use it or it might do moreharm than good. These days, though, the last thingyou want is to have to shoot a bear. Statistically, be-tween one and five bears are shot in Svalbard eachyear, with about half being shot in self-defence, oftenby scientists doing fieldwork. Polar bears have beenprotected in Svalbard since 1973 and any bear-shoot-ing is investigated and, if probable cause is not justi-fied, the shooter will be prosecuted and fined. No saneand serious person going into the wild does so with-out preparation and respect for the environment to beencountered far away from urban safety. Along withrifles, other means of bear-protection are advised andnecessary in order to try always to scare away a bearin a potential close bear encounter. The ground rule isnever to approach a bear and always to stay at a dis-tance and back off if possible. Working in the field inSvalbard, you might have to shoot a bear in self-de-fence, but unlike historical expeditions that shot andkilled birds, foxes, polar bears, walruses and everyanimal encountered just for target practice or for thesport of it, shooting a bear is the absolute last resort.Protecting bears is, for us today, as natural as notshooting each other when meeting in the wild. Afterall, most polar bear encounters are an amazing expe-

rience of meeting one of the world’s largest top pred-ators in its own environment.

Every time I see a polar bear I am filled with that joyand spirit that is the tonic of the wild that Thoreauwas talking about. It is a reminder of what we are partof, nature in the raw, a reminder of who we are, trav-ellers through time, but also an electricity breakdownfrom our civilisation and cultures crashing back in-to the wild we walked out of. Experiencing the gla-ciers leaving their traces of retreat on the landscape,watching their masses sunken in, seeing bears mov-ing through the harsh landscape in search of food, butbeing far away from the sea ice they need — these areurgent reminders of the need to find a balance betweenmankind and the natural world. 2011 was yet anotheryear with the sea ice far above 82°N, and not onceduring our entire journey towards the northern SevenIslands did we encounter or even see any sea ice.

The country is stony

A light rain was still falling when we sailed out ofMagdalenefjorden, bound for Smeerenburg in the farnorthwestern corner of Spitsbergen. We intended tospend the night in a bay on the north side of the island

of Danskøya, named after Danish whalers who used itas a base from the 1630s. The haven we were seeking,Virgohamna, was named after the steamer, the Virgo,that brought a Swedish expedition to the Arctic in1896 — the Andrée Balloon Expedition that built a basecamp and balloon house on the northern shores ofthe island. They spent the summer of 1896 in the areaand returned to Sweden in August that year, only tocome back in the summer of 1897 for their attempt attravelling across the Polar Sea and the North Pole in ahydrogen balloon. It was an expedition that could havesailed out of the pages of a Jules Verne novel. They leftDanskøya on July 11 and disappeared into the frozenunknown. After 33 years they were found on the is-land of Kvitøya, northeast of Svalbard, and their sadand grim story was pieced together from journals,photographic films and their frozen remains.

There were three men in the balloon that left Danskøyaon that sunny day in July 1897: the leader engineerSalomon August Andrée, engineer Knut Frænkel andphotographer, navigator and scientist Nils Strindberg.The latter had, just one year previously, mapped thearea using photography and I was now carrying some ofthe photographs that he had taken of the landscape inthe area surrounding their basecamp at Danskøya. Themap he produced was focused on Amsterdamøya to

6 // The Andrée Balloon Expedition sailing north towards Kennedy-breen, photo, G.V.E. Svedenborg July 1897.

7 // Kennedybreen September 2011.

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the north of Danskøya. Previous maps had been quiteinaccurate and Strindberg produced an updated versionthat was published in the Swedish scientific journalYmer in the spring of 1897. Amsterdamøya is one of themost historical places in Svalbard. The Dutch explorerslanded on the island in 1596 but did not name it. It latergot its name from the Dutch whaling base there fromaround 1614, and from the whale hunting in the area.Smeerenburg, the largest whaling station ever built inSpitsbergen, was settled on the southeast of the island.

We made Virgohamna in grey, rainy weather with lowclouds hanging over the mountains surrounding thecove. To the southeast was a small hope of clearingweather. The light coming down on the mountaintops in that direction was promising. On the shores ofDanskøya historical remains are layered in a mix ofblubber ovens, graves, planks from a house, Andrée’sfilter for his hydrogen machine and the junkyard leftfrom the American explorer Walter Wellman’s air-ship adventures, including the site of his hangar. Thesite is now closed and you are not allowed to enterwithout a permit. We decided to take a journey out toa small island, Albertøya, in Smeerenburgfjorden, eastof Danskøya. There is an old iron cross still standingthere, raised in 1869 by a German scientific expeditiontravelling on the Albert, a steamer from Bremen. The

little island, with its highest point being the rock for-mation where the cross is standing, is a nesting areafor the very aggressive Arctic terns, and landing be-came quite hazardous on the deeply dark green moss-covered east side. We eventually landed on the north-ern edge of the island. When we got ashore I noticedthat this was the vantage point used by Axel Enwallfor a photograph of Frambreen, a glacier on the eastside of Smeerenburgfjorden, on July 18 1873. Tryingto find his more precise vantage point, we decided tore-enact the photograph, which includes three figuresin the foreground of the image. We managed to find aclose enough position for the camera, and ChrisWainwright, Rebecca Solnit and Pelle Holmlund be-came part of the rephotography.

Having adopted this playful approach to some of thehistorical images, we continued and re-enacted a pho-tograph taken in 1896 at the cross on the island. It isan image where Salomon August Andrée is posingwith his rifle together with Nils Ekholm, the latter themeteorologist who left the balloon project. During thissession a number of our expedition members happilychatted away while assuming Ekholm and Andrée’spositions. The weather was now clearing and theevening calm, with excellent visibility towards thenorth and the islands of Fair Haven.

The next morning was sunny and absolutely brilliantwith a dead calm sea and chilly crisp clear autumnair. We left the M/S Stockholm in our zodiac for a visit to Amsterdamøya. We crossed Danskegattet andlanded on the southeast side of the island, facing therugged mountainside across the Smeerenburgfjord to the east. Frambreen, named by Nils Strindberg in1896, is the most spectacular glacier in the moun-tainous land across the fjord. The bluish colours ofthe ice coming down the slopes of the black sharpmountains surrounding the glacier are a view charac-teristic of Spitsbergen. The glacier was photographedin 1873 by Axel Enwall with his view from Albertøya,by Nils Strindberg in 1896 as part of a panorama fromthe cross at Albertøya, and by Norwegian photogra-pher Anders Beer Wilse in 1908 from Amsterdamøyaas part of a panorama. It is interesting to observehow photographers who almost certainly did notknow of each other’s work have photographed a viewfrom almost the same spot. It might tell us some-thing about our cultural baggage when finding whatMark Klett has called “viewpoints in the field”. Fram-breen is a dominating view in the area, and thismorning it was particularly striking as the lightplayed with the landscape and the sea so calm that itmirrored the scenery. On a similarly clear and calmday on July 13 1773 Phipps’ expedition came to an-

8 // Frambreen July 1873 from Albertøya, photograph Axel Enwall. 9 // Frambreen 2011 from Albertøya. From left to right, Chris Wainwright,Rebecca Solnit and Per Holmlund.

chor in Smeerenburg harbour where they remain-ed for six days, taking in fresh water and surveyingthe area.

The country is stony, and as far as can be seen full ofmountains, precipices and rocks. Between these are hillsof ice, generated, as it should seem, by the torrents thatflow from the melting of the snow on the fields of thosetowering elevations, which being once congealed, arecontinually increased by the snow in winter, and the rainin summer, which often freezes as soon as it falls. Bylooking on these hills, a stranger may fancy a thousanddifferent shapes of trees, castles, churches, ruins, ships,whales, monsters and all the various forms that fill theuniverse. Smearinburgh (sic.) harbour, where they land-ed, was first discovered by the Dutch. Here they erectedsheds conveniences for boiling the oil from the whales,instead of barrelling it up to be boiled at home. Herealso, allured by the hope of gain, they built a village, andendeavoured to fix a colony: but the first settlers all per-ished in the ensuing winter. The remains of the vil-lage may be traced to this day; and their stoves, kettles,kardels, troughs, ovens, and other implements, remainedin the shape of solid ice long after the utensils themselveswere decayed. Our voyagers were told that the Russianshave lately attempted the same thing, and the ten out offifteen perished.

Phipps’ expedition reports on the remains still visibleat Smeerenburg in 1773. The large whaling stationwas riding the peak of its success in the 1630s, andthe location was used by whalers before that and formore than 150 years after the grand days of Smeeren-burg. The whalers in Spitsbergen were many, andhailed from different nations. Hunting was graduallydeclining until the Greenland right whale (or bow-head whale) was exterminated from the seas aroundSvalbard around the 1850s. Walking among the re-mains of Smeerenburg it is difficult to imagine whatthis place looked and smelled like during the whale-hunting era. On the beach not far from where welanded, a lone gigantic male walrus, often referred toas a seahorse by earlier travellers, was resting. Weapproached with great care so as not to disturb itwhen passing on our way back to the zodiac after ourexcursion on the island. Atlantic walruses were hunt-ed from the early 1600s and, by around 1870, hadbeen completely eliminated from the marine ecosys-tem of Svalbard. Unlike the bowhead whale, theymade it back to Svalbard around 1970, migrating fromFranz Josef Land, and are now once again part of theislands’ ecosystem.

We returned to our ship and sailed north to visit a glacier and small lake on the north side of Amster-

damøya called Gjøavatnet. The lake, with its glacier, isdescribed by Chydenius in the journals of Torell’s ex-pedition in 1861, but had no name at the time. It wasgiven its name in 1988.7 The glacier at the lake is alsodescribed by Chydenius as being a remarkable sight,where the leg of a very large system of ice streamsclimbing down the steep north face of the HollenderMountain ends in a gentle slope into a lake. The lakeis separated from the sea by a small wall of stones andgravel. Back in 1861 the glacier was a wall of ice enter-ing the north end of the lake. When Nils Strindbergphotographed this place in August 1896 during hismap-making, the glacier still presented a wall of iceinto the lake. The photographs of the site resulted inone of the finest panoramas of his work and he alsonamed the glacier Anna’s Glacier after his fiancée.

She who was to wait for him for more than ten yearsafter he had vanished in 1897 in the frozen north, be-fore marrying an Englishman and moving to De-von. She happened to be in Stockholm in 1930 whenStrindberg was found and his remains were broughtback to Sweden. She died in 1949 and, as agreed withher husband, her heart was removed and on Septem-ber 4, Strindberg’s birthday, buried beside him inStockholm. Perhaps the most remarkable love storyin the history of polar exploration. We arrived at

10 // Nils Ekholm, left, and Salomon August Andrée, right at the cross at Albertøya , photograph Nils Strindberg 1896.

11 // Rebecca Solnit, left and Stevie Bezencenet right at the cross atAlbertøya 2011.

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Gjøavatnet on September 10 in a calm, light rain, nowind, absolute stillness, and quite warm weather.Running water from what was left of the glacier-cov-ered mountain slopes again amplified the silence ofthe Arctic. The glacier front mirrored in the water inStrindberg’s photograph is gone. The volume of theglacier is sunken into the mountainside and the valleyit once filled. The ice streams described in 1861 aregone. This glacier facing the shores of the Polar Sea issoon to be gone. It is a dramatic change in the land-scape. The mountains and the rocky ground are soonto be the only things left to be mirrored in the lake.The story of Anna and Nils is literally fading awayfrom the desolate Arctic landscape, as it will make nosense to have glaciers that no longer exist on futuremaps. Their sites might be told about in future ver-sions of the book Place names of Svalbard or intro-duced on maps as former glacial sites, but they aremore likely to be forgotten.

A very good landmark

In the evening we left the historical grounds of north-west Spitsbergen to sail east in an intensely colourfulsunset. With a red sun hanging low on the horizon wemade a brief visit to the most famous and well-known

landmark in the area, Klovningen, an island known forthe cut in its north corner. It was marked on the mapof Willem Barents and the Dutch explorers of 1596.They came upon it from the east, following the north-ern coastline of the new land they had discovered.They had sailed up from Norway and discovered BearIsland, sailed on to the northwest where they had en-countered the pack ice and followed it east until theywere forced south and came upon the coast of Spits-bergen. On June 21 the Dutch had anchored their twoships in what is today Fair Haven. Willem Barents waschief pilot of one ship, while the captain was JacobHeemskerke Hendickszoon, and Arend Martenszoonwas pilot of the other, with Jan Corneliszoon Rijp ascaptain. His reputation as pilot has meant that Bar-ents has become the most famous member of the ex-pedition, and his name is attached to the discovery ofSvalbard. Barents described the view to the east oftheir anchor site: “At the east point of the mouth was a rock, which was moreover split, a very good land-mark”. In his important history of Spitsbergen, NoMan’s Land, Martin Conway remarks that they wereprobably anchored between Fuglesangen and Klovnin-gen. Very little is left of the notes on the discovery ofSvalbard. Barents died of scurvy in 1597 after the ex-pedition had parted when returning to Bear Island,with Hendickszoon and Barents sailing on eastward

and being forced to winter in Novaja Semlja. We land-ed between the mountain slopes in the cleft. Up therewe found what appeared to be an old outlook, perhapsfrom the whaling era. On the plateau of the cleft wealso noticed a pile of stones that initially appeared tobe a grave but, on closer examination, was more likethe remains of a cairn or the foundations for a pole. Itbrought to mind the post with the arms of the Dutchupon it that Barents set up somewhere in the area,and that was removed by the English in 1612. Themountain wall on the north side of the cleft was host-ing plenty of Atlantic puffins. Some of the party climb-ed the rocks covered with moss and scurvy grass to getcloser to the birds for photographs. The soft moss onthe ledges up on the mountain offered a comfortableand rewarding view of the colourful-looking birds thatcontrasted with the wild and rugged landscape. De-spite the ice-covered peaks in the background, theevening setting reminded me of a late summer even-ing in more southerly latitudes like the Lofoten islandsoff northern mainland Norway.

The late evening, draped in a red sunset, was spent ondeck until it turned to dusk and darkness descended.The sea was calm and we all remarked upon the strangefeeling of watching the sunset on deck in the Arcticsea in September. Even the Northern Fulmars (Ful-

12 // Annabreen in northern Amsterdamøya by Nils Strindberg August 1896.

marus glacialis), characteristic and welcome compan-ions of travellers in these waters, sailing alongsidethe ship seemed to enjoy the calm and beautiful eve-ning. Klovningen and the western corner of Spits-bergen disappeared into the evening and our coursewas now set for Sorgfjorden.

Parry’s experience

In the morning of September 11 the M/S Stockholmanchored at Hecla harbour in Sorgfjorden. Theweather was absolutely calm and the silence was dif-ferent from most experienced in nature, a silence andstillness that fill one’s entire presence with a heart-warming peace. The bay is a historical site filled withdramatic narratives, ranging from the whalers andacts of war in 1693 to Parry’s 1827 North Pole expedi-tion and the remains of the Swedish base from theSwedish-Russian Arc of Meridian expedition of 1898-1902. The houses from the Swedish wintering station(only one still standing) are located on the shores ofHecla harbour below Hecla Mountain.

The name of the bay, Sorgfjorden, or on the old mapsTreurenburg bay, is believed to have come from aminor battle that occurred in the fjord in August 1693

when two French frigates attacked a fleet of aboutforty whalers in the bay. The background to this vio-lent northern drama was the revolution of 1688 thatseated William of Orange on the throne of England,and the subsequent war between the Great Allianceand France. Battles of war were subsequently launchedagainst areas with important trade and commerce.This is why French warships were scouting the seas ofSpitsbergen searching for English and Dutch whalerswith a view to confiscating their cargo and burningtheir ships. The French encountered a degree of re-sistance from the armed whalers that surprised them,and they managed to capture only thirteen of the Dutchships that were towed in the calm sea past the twoFrench warships blocking the mouth of the bay. Asduring our visit, the weather that violent day in Sorg-fjorden was dead calm, which probably saved the Dutch.Two French crew members are recorded as killed andseveral wounded but it is not known how many werekilled or wounded on the Dutch side.

Edward Parry had come to Spitsbergen for an attemptto reach the North Pole, or as far north as possible. Hehad visited Waldenøya searching for a place to anchorhis ship, the Hecla, as base for his journey towardsthe Pole but found no suitable place and on his returnfinally settled for Sorgfjorden.

On the evening of the 18th, while standing in for the high-land to the eastward of Verlegen Hook, which, with dueattention to the lead, may be approached with safety, weperceived from the crow‘s-nest what appeared a lowpoint, possibly affording some shelter for the ship, andwhich seemed to answer to an indentation of the coastlaid down in an old Dutch chart*, and there calledTreurenburg Bay.

* Nieuwe afteckening van Hot Eyland Spits-Bergen, opgegeven door de Commandeurs Giles en Outger Rep, en in‘t Light gebragt en uytgegevendoor Gerard Van Keulen, &c

Parry and his Pole party left Hecla Cove on the after-noon of June 21. They headed for Waldenøya in twoboats, stopping at Lågøya to set out a store of provi-sions as an intermediate depot between Waldenøyaand their ship. They had been delayed on their jour-ney north and were now racing with time due to alater start in the season than planned. It was a stren-uous and particularly arduous journey over the ice,dragging their boats, provisions and equipment. OnJuly 26 Parry realised that going further would onlyrisk the lives of his companions and that they wouldnot make much progress.

It had, for some time past, been too evident that the na-ture of the ice with which we had to contend was such,

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13 // Annabreen in northern Amsterdamøya September 2011.

and its drift to the southward, especially with a norther-ly wind, so great, as to put beyond our reach anything buta very moderate share of success in travelling to the north-ward. Still, however, we had been anxious to reach thehighest latitude which our means would allow, and, withthis view, although our whole object had long become un-attainable, had pushed on to the northward for thirty-five days, or until half our resources were expended, andthe middle of our season arrived. For the last few days, theeighty-third parallel was the limit to which we had ven-tured to extend our hopes; but even this expectation hadbecome considerably weakened since the setting in of thelast northerly wind, which continued to drive us to thesouthward, during the necessary hours of rest, nearly asmuch as we could gain by eleven or twelve hours of dailylabour. Had our success been at all proportionate to ourexertions, it was my full intention to have proceeded a fewdays beyond the middle of the period for which we wereprovided, trusting to the resources we expected to find atTable Island. But this was so far from being the case,that I could not but consider it as incurring useless fa-tigue to the officers and men, and unnecessary wear andtear for the boats, to persevere any longer in the attempt.

Parry’s experience was very important to future ex-plorations of the Arctic. This was a lesson learned abouthow hard it is to travel on the drifting ice. Parry andhis men turned, but were much safer facing a longjourney south to Hecla. Back in Sorgfjorden their shiphad been almost destroyed on July 7 when the icebroke in the bay and pushed it up onto land. Lots ofhard work and nervous activity from the crew savedthe ship. Parry and his men made it out to open wateron August 12 and sailed towards Waldenøya.

We had scarcely made sail when the weather became ex-tremely inclement, with a fresh gale and very thick snow,which obscured Walden Island from our view. Steeringby compass, however, we made a good landfall, the boatsbehaving well in a sea; and at seven, P.M., landed in thesmoothest place we could find under the lee of the island.Everything belonging to us was now completely drenchedby the spray and snow; we had been fifty-six hours with-out rest, and forty-eight at work in the boats, so that, bythe time they were unloaded, we had barely strength left

to haul them up on the rock. We noticed, on this occa-sion, that the men had that wildness in their looks whichusually accompanies excessive fatigue; and though justas willing as ever to obey orders, they seemed at timesnot to comprehend them. However, by dint of great exer-tion, we managed to get the boats above the surf; afterwhich, a hot supper, a blazing fire of drift-wood, and afew hours‘ quiet rest quite restored us.

On August 21 they returned to Hecla Cove and the fol-lowing day started to prepare the ship for its journeyback to England. Having raised a flagpole with a cop-per plate bearing an inscription of their expedition’sstay on the site, they sailed out of Hecla Cove on theevening of August 28. The expedition had carefullysurveyed the bay and Lieutenant Foster had soundedit and produced a chart of the results which was pub-lished in Parry’s narrative of the expedition. Parrymade an interesting remark in his journal on the pos-sible origin of the name of the bay in respect of thegravesite, located at the western entrance to the bay,that he called Graves Point, today Eolusneset.

The neighbourhood of this bay, like most of the northernshores of Spitzbergen, appears to have been much visitedby the Dutch at a very early period; of which circum-stance records are furnished on almost every spot wherewe landed, by the numerous graves which are met with.There are thirty of these on a point of land on the northside of the bay*. The bodies are usually deposited in anoblong wooden coffin, Which, on account of the difficultyof digging the ground, is not buried, but merely coveredby large stones and a board is generally placed near thehead, having, either cut or painted, upon it the name ofthe deceased, with those of his ship and commander, andthe month and year of his burial. Several of these werefifty or sixty years old; one bore the date of 1738; and an-other, which I found on the beach to the eastward ofHecla Cove, that of 1690, the inscription distinctly ap-pearing in prominent relief, occasioned by the preserva-tion of the wood by the paint, while the unpainted parthad decayed around it.

* Perhaps the name of this bay, from the Dutch word Treuren, “to lament,or be mournful”, may have some reference to the graves found here.

A sound like thunder roared over the bay

In July 1898 the Swedish reconnaissance expeditionfor the Swedish-Russian Arc of Meridian expeditioncame to Sorgfjorden. They anchored in Hecla Cove andspent a couple of days in the area working on one linkin the chain of the triangular positioning for the com-ing measuring project. They put up one of their sig-nals near Parry’s old flagpole at Crozierpynten on theshores of Hecla Cove. The site of Parry’s old base campharbour became the site of the wintering quarters forthe Swedes when returning in the summer of 1899.Their work, led by the geodesist and astronomer Ed-vard Jäderin, became quite difficult during the win-tering due to unfavourable ice conditions, and whatshould have been finished by the end of the season in1900 was not. During the stay at the site the family ofKnut Frænkel, the young engineer who had died onAndrée’s expedition, almost lost another member. Itwas Knut Frænkel’s brother Hans who, by luck alone,survived a solo attempt to hike to and climb into theChydenius Mountains south of the fjord. Initially be-lieved to have been one mountain, the mountains ac-tually proved to be a large mountain range stretchingsouth and including the highest peak in Svalbard,Newtontoppen, at 1,717 metres. Frænkel had slippedon his way up into the mountains and suffered a seri-ous fall. He had to spend a night in the open with abroken hipbone watching the lights of the base camphuts glimmer in the valley below across the fjord. Hewas found alive by a rescue party the following dayand managed to keep his frostbitten toes, but had tospend weeks in bed at the wintering station. One ofmy most striking thoughts when wondering about theremains of the Swedish houses is: Why we have nottaken care of this cultural heritage? What has madeSweden such a bad caretaker of its own cultural her-itage remains in Svalbard? These houses could havebeen saved and taken care of. They could have beennot only historical reminders of Swedish research activities in Svalbard but also active and living partsof our cultural heritage as platforms for contempo-rary researchers or photographers, writers and art-ists wanting to work in the area. Seeing the rubble ofplanks is seeing wasted opportunities and land-based

research platforms on the northern shores of Svalbardto dream about.

We packed ourselves into the zodiac and, as the calmsea permitted, crossed the fjord towards its entranceand the gravesite described in Parry’s journal. With a cross raised on a cairn up on a rocky hill above thefjord, the foreland was a strange experience of a pal-ette of dark colours, glacial light in the end of the fjordenhancing the sometimes black rock, with the onlysounds being the calls of some birds, increasing thesolitude of the place. We rejoined the M/S Stockholmand decided to sail for Lady Franklinfjorden and SøreFranklinbreen.

The September evening was almost too good to betrue, with the sea still calm and the sun setting slowlyin a light that only visuals can come close to describ-ing. I was just about to climb the lookout on our shipwhen a bear was spotted. It was a healthy looking animal eating a seal on an ice flow in the bay. We ap-proached with caution and passed slowly in silenceexcept for the stifled sound of the engine and the lowmetallic clicking of camera shutters. The bear lookedat us for a while, continued eating and then slowly de-cided to retreat with its prey, gliding into the waterand unhurriedly swimming away. I climbed the out-

look as we approached the glacier and the fulmarscame on a close inspection-round of the strange-looking figure with a video camera in a small basketabove the ship’s deck. The views from up there wererewarding: the glacier looked impressive and thecolours ranged from the black mountains through thewhite and bluish tones of the glacier to the hues ofsunset reds reflecting in the sea and on the ice. Thewater was sometimes a shimmering green and deepblue, and then a murky brown. The ship went throughglacial ice with its characteristic fizzing sounds fromair bubbles being released from the melting ice. Sud-denly the glacier calved, a sound like thunder roaredover the bay and the wave coming towards the shiplooked more serious from up where I stood. I realisedthat it might cause a bit of swell and held on to thebasket as it passed. The force of the masses of icefalling into the sea is not to be underestimated evenon a ship like this. We were at a safe distance of a cou-ple of hundred metres away and the wave had lostmost of its energy as it rolled past us. Serious acci-dents have occurred with smaller boats too close toglacial fronts being overturned by waves hitting ashard and fast as ice-breaks from the glacier. As weturned and the Stockholm was sailing out of the baythe sun had set and the dusk of evening was replacingit. In front of us, the sea to the north was ghostly calm

and a thick fog was forming around the ship as wesailed for night harbour in Beverlysundet. Approach-ing our anchor site close to Chermsideøya at 80°N,with its heavy black mountain slopes striped withpatterns of icy channels, we were surrounded by anight of fogbanks over the sea that can only be de-scribed as magical. It was the Arctic sublime that ma-terialised in the stillness of that night. It was not theroaring storms or howling blizzards, nor was it theextreme cold or vast fields of ice or massive, ruggedand wild mountains that got me thinking of MaryShelly and “Frankenstein”, Edwin Landseer and his “Man Proposes, God Disposes” or Kaspar DavidFriedrich’s “The Arctic Sea” for the first time on thistrip. It was the hard-to-define light and stillness ofthis Arctic night.

Tracks in the landscape

In the morning the weather had turned and a lightrain was falling. We were protected from the strongnortherly wind at our anchor site south of Cherm-sideøya. The captain had taken us to the island to showus the stone works on the site. The names and yearsof some of the visiting ships had been laid out on thesloping beach. The first was the Ran from the 1898

14 // Remains of the old Swedish house in Hecla Harbour, September 2011.

15 // The bottom of the bay Sorgfjorden and Hecla Harbour, September 2011.

16 // M/S Stockhom, September 2011.

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Swedish reconnaissance expedition for the Swedish-Russian Arc of Meridian led by Jäderin, whose namecould also be seen on the beach. They had come toBeverly Sound and anchored there at midnight on July8 during an attempt to sail north to Waldenøya andParryøya, but the ice had been too heavy east of thesound. The Ran had been followed by the Russian shipKrassin searching for Umberto Nobile and his crashedairship, the Italia in 1928, and in 1939 a German shiphad visited and laid out a swastika that now stood outamong the names and numbers on the ground. Cap-tain Engwall told us that the swastika had been van-dalised a couple of times but had been restored as theprotected cultural remain it strangely enough repre-sents as it pre-dates 1946.

Seeing that symbol in this remote area of Svalbard isbeyond strange, and is a ghostly reminder of the cul-tural, ideological and political baggage Man brings toevery corner of the Earth, and of the tracks we leavebehind. Viewing the names of the other visitors andtheir “we were here” reminders for future visitors givesme more pleasant associations and I come to think of Richard Long, Andy Goldsworthy, Hamish Fultonand the concepts of land art. Building cairns and mes-sages in the Arctic is quite a common practice andoften seen in Svalbard. We sometimes know the story

behind them, but can generally only speculate or beguided by them as signs when creating a story of pre-vious expeditions, and by the tracks in the landscapewhen searching for traces of those who came before.The attempt to go ashore was aborted by a polar bearthat had taken up a position on the beach of one of themost northerly cultural heritage sites in the world. AsI desperately wanted to see the site and also to film itwe decided that a small team should go ashore as thebear had started to walk away. Our two reliable bearguards assisted me and, as the bear headed north, Iwas able to closely examine the stone settings. Theweather was grey, rainy and a light wind had startedto build in the sound. It was a brief and military-stylevisit as we had to stay alert should the bear decide toreturn, and the weather was now clearly turning.

The northerly winds remained strong

Back onboard the ship, coffee and cake were servedand we started to sail north for Sjuøyane following theroute of the 1872 and 1898 Swedish expeditions. Theyhad both encountered difficult ice conditions at Sjuø-yane, as had been the case for Phipps in 1773. We metwith hard northerly winds coming down upon us witha vengeance. The ice-free Polar Sea was roaring and

we could not make it to Waldenøya as hoped in orderto visit the island and follow Jäderin and the others of 1898, as well as Parry’s party of 1827. The captainaimed for Phippsøya and Isflaksbukta instead, wherehe thought he would find a protected anchor site for avisit to the island and a chance to get out of the roughsea. Commander Phipps had encountered heavy iceup here in 1773 but had been able to go ashore at theisland that today bears his name. After a slow andrough journey north we finally came to anchor in thebay on the southeast of the island. We landed thegroup on the beach to the east of the little hut.

A group of walruses were on the beach and we spentsome time watching them in the now Arctic weatherconditions. A smaller group of us decided to go for anexcursion towards the hut and head out to the strip ofland between Eldsbukta and Horgvika on the island.The light was very distinct, despite the mild snow-storm that now proclaimed that we were at our mostnortherly stop on this journey. Underfoot, the rockand gravel were sometimes slippery, and caution whenwalking was absolutely necessary. We passed the hutand walked over the frozen ground to the remarkablenorthwest side of the island and the land-strip filledwith driftwood connecting the two halves of the island.The weather did not permit us to climb the mountain-

18 // Phippsøya, Driftwood, September 2011 19 // Phippsøya, Høgberget, September 201117 // Chermsideøya north coast Svalbard, the swastika laid out by aGerman ship in 1939.

tops. We went down to the sea and then crossed theopen windy expanse back towards the hut where ourzodiac was waiting to whisk us back to the ship. Itwas now snowing and the wind was harsh. The cap-tain explained that no better conditions were in sightand that going further east as planned would proba-bly be a quite unpleasant but, more importantly, a veryunproductive journey in heavy seas. He suggestedthat we head due south and seek safe haven at the endof Rijpfjorden, from where we could visit HaudegenWettertrupp’s World War II station and explore Wor-diebukta and Bengtssenbukta. The captain did a greatjob of taking us out of the heavy swell that seemed tocome at us from every direction, and we were all quiterelieved as we anchored in the calm of Wordiebuktawhen the weather cleared, though the northerly windsremained strong out in the open sea to the north of us.

A pile of fur and with its head intact

The Haudegen station is the only German weatherstation that remains intact. It is now protected and youare not allowed to go within 30 metres of the build-ings and other remains. When I first visited the site in2001 we were allowed to enter the buildings, whichwere in fairly poor condition and filled with remains

that could easily have been removed by careless col-lectors. The station had been set up in September of1944 and when the war ended in May 1945 the Ger-mans at the station found themselves cut off and in afairly tight spot. They had to prepare for another win-ter, which must have been a bleak prospect knowingthat the war was over and they were stationed in oneof the most remote places in Svalbard. The likelihoodof another winter in the Arctic ended when the Nor-wegian sealer Blåsäl came into the bay, and the lastoutpost of the German armed forces surrendered un-conditionally on September 4 1945. While we were try-ing to find a good spot to land our zodiac a bear wasspotted on the mountain slope to the north of the sta-tion. The visit was aborted, the zodiac crossed the bayand we landed on Wordieodden to the east of the sta-tion, where we spent a couple of hours walking off oursea legs among the rocks and hills. Having returnedto the ship, I wanted to get some footage of the sta-tion as I had old film from inside the houses takenback in 2001. Again we decided to do a quick landingwith the bear guards on red-alert and the zodiac readyto leave should the bear become interested. The sad-looking animal sitting beside the remains of a glacierhanging on the mountain wall seemed to be the watchguard of the old German intrusion into the landscape.The bear did not move or take any notice of us when

we landed just outside the station and I walked ashoreand filmed the buildings. It was still in its positionwhen we left for the ship and sailed out of the bay to-wards Bengtssenbukta at the western entrance of Rijp-fjorden. Over the course of just 24 hours we had seenthe traces of the rising of the German dark empire of1939 at Chermsideøya with its uncanny reminder ofwhat the stolen swastika symbol will forever repre-sent, followed by evidence of the fall of the empirewith the ruins of the 1945 remains of Haudegen’s hutin Wordiebukta. At both places it seemed like thebears wanted to have us stay away, observe and re-member but move on and forget; observe the culturalheritage of war that marks the landscape, forget theacts of war imposed on the land and see the beautybeyond the scars of the worst acts of Mankind, theunspeakable acts of war.

When geographer and glaciologist Alexander RichardGlen, along with second-in-command photographerAndrew Croft and the Oxford University Arctic Expe-dition 1935–1936, came to Svalbard they were joinedby the Norwegian trapper Karl J. Bengtssen. The ex-pedition was a survey expedition to Nordaustlandetand was working with observations of the glaciersand geological surveys on the north coast of the area.The expedition also worked on the ice cap of the large

21 // Bengtssenbukta, Stevie at Blaeuodden, September 2011. 22 // Rijpbreen 2011.20 // Bengtssenbukta, old ice, September 2011

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glacier Vestfonna, and they used dogs to circumnavi-gate Nordaustlandet. Today we find Glenhalvøya tothe north of Nordaustlandet. Looking west from Wor-dieodden we had caught a glimpse of Croftbreen andwere now approaching Rijpbreen in Bengtssenbukta.Considering the historic geographical and glacial workby Glen and Croft, it seemed right to take a closer lookat a glacier. We had decided to explore Bengtssenbuk-ta and take a walk on Rijpbreen.

We landed our zodiac at Blaeuodden and walked to-wards the glacier. On the black rocks by the sea wecame across a dead bear. It lay as a pile of fur with itshead intact.

The legs and spine were scattered among the rocks atthe site. It looked as if another bear had eaten it. Thetormented remains of the bear matched the twistedgeological formations of the landscape. The combinedviews around the site reminded me of the desert landsof the American Southwest. After paddling the zodiacduring a river crossing we reached the glacier, and onthe ridge by the ice the landscape resembled even moreits desert counterpart with its sliced and twisted rocks,sand banks and arid gravel fields with washes andstony ground through panoramic views of shiftingcolours. The light was late-afternoon-in-September,

the colours darkened but intense, ranging from thesolid black rock to the grey and bluish ice through huesof brown and red and green. The ground was frozenand covered in a light powder of frostlike snow. Beartracks in the frozen pools of mud looked like fossil pawprints from past times. We walked up on the ice andwatched our step as we approached a large crevasse. Ifollowed our glaciologist thinking that he knew whereto walk on a seemingly solid massive river of ice.

The view over the bay from the ice was spectacular.The Stockholm was seen in the far distance, cruisingthe bay among some of the blue icebergs that hadcalved from the glacier. The afternoon had becomeevening dusk and we decided to head back to the shipfor dinner. As we walked down the frozen ground alongthe glacier towards the bay I thought of Timothy O’-Sullivan and his photographs from Nevada during the King Surveys of 1867 and 1868. Here in the semi-desert of Svalbard there was no heat or hard sun, no desert plants or large rivers and falls, but there are mountains and dry ground and rocks, sand andwashes with melt water, with rivers and falls replacedby glacial ice streams which fall into the sea. The sur-vey photographers of the American West created a set of visuals that, to this day, play a part in definingthe landscape they portrayed. Their photographs, the

first camera views, became pioneering visual docu-ments and artistic representations of the AmericanWest. We still have much to learn about the photo-graphers from that same era and their work in thisArctic land.

A situation far different to ours

In the morning we came to Hinlopen and decided tovisit De Geerbukta and Faksedalen. This place was ofparticular interest to glaciologist Holmlund who want-ed to rephotograph some work that had been done inthe area in 1901 and 1931. The ground was frozen as wecame to another desert site, with a mountain rangebroken up by glaciers across the valley we looked outover from the range of hills we had climbed to find thevantage point from where photographs had beentaken by Gerard De Geer’s party in 1901, and later HansW:son Ahlmann in 1931. We found a small cairn on theridge, which was probably where De Geer had markedhis observational position. It was a cold but clear andcalm day and Holmlund was able to do the work heneeded for his study, as described in his accounts ofhis work included in this volume. As we continuedour journey back towards the western coast we madea short stop in Murchisonbukta at Krossøya, or Nor-

23 // Mosselbukta, Swedish wintering house, June 1873. Photograph Axel Enwall.

24 // Mosselbukta, Swedish wintering house, September 2011.

dre Russøya, at the entrance of Hinlopen to view theold wooden Russian cross still standing there as pho-tographed by Vilhelm Carlheim-Gyllensköld in July1898. The weather was clearing and as we headed forMosselbukta, where we were to anchor for the night,the sun was shining on the north coast of Svalbard.Reaching Mosselbukta on September 14 we againpicked up the trail of photographer Axel Enwall, whowas part of Adolf Erik Nordenskiöld’s wintering ex-pedition in 1872-73. This had been their wintering lo-cation, and when the Stockholm had anchored ourcaptain looked at the photographs of the ships frozeninto the bay for the winter, a situation far different toours. In the morning we planned to go ashore and visitthe remains of the Swedish house that had been builtthere in 1872 — another house and Swedish culturalheritage place we could have maintained. Had we doneso the house would no doubt still have been standingas a great terrestrial base for further research activi-ties in an area with a historical tradition. Today it isbut a pile of wood with a stove, robbed of its hatch,standing in the rubble.

Nordenskiöld had arrived in Mosselbukta on Septem-ber 3 in a “flood of light” and calm sea, rendering thebay most inviting and the landscape surrounding thelittle cove where they settled for the winter was colour-

ful in the Arctic autumn sun. According to Kjellman,the author of the expedition book, the bay would neveragain show itself from this inviting and beautiful sideduring their hard winter’s stay. The expedition ar-rived with no fewer than 66 men and 40 reindeer! Thelatter were with them as sledge animals for a journeynorth that was one of the main aims of the expedition.Originally their winter quarters should have been fur-ther north, preferably on one of Sjuøyane. Ice condi-tions prevented them from reaching the northern is-lands. The ship, the Polhem, was the only ship that in-tended to stay for the winter but bad luck, difficult iceand an early winter meant that the two cargo ships,the Gladan and the Onkel Adam, had to stay as well. InApril 1873 Nordenskiöld and his sledge party headedtowards the north. There were no reindeer, however,as all but one had escaped during a storm and werepossibly saved from certain death on that northwardjourney. Having reached Phippsøya on May 17, Nor-denskiöld realised that they had to change their plansand head back towards the north coast of Nordaust-landet as the ice was severe and extremely difficult tonavigate. This meant that they had no time to try tofind their way through the maze of hummocks, ridgesand frozen blocks. They managed to get beyond themost eastern point reached by Nordenskiöld on Torell’sexpedition in 1861 and finally ended up travelling on

the vast ice cap of the Austfonna glacier. Several criti-cal incidents with crevasses meant that they had toabandon plans to travel south across the ice cap, andthey decided to make for Mosselbukta. After a longand arduous journey on foot they all arrived back attheir base on June 29. The expedition had managed tosurvey the northeast corner of Nordaustlandet andproduced an expanded, more reliable and updatedmap of the area that confirmed the 1871 observationsof British traveller, adventurer and hunter BenjaminLeigh Smith of the land at the most north eastern endof Svalbard.

Having spent the night in the bay we went ashore andvisited the remains of the site of Nordenskiöld’s housefrom close to the vantage point of one of Enwall’s im-ages, which I rephotographed. The place has many in-teresting stories to tell, with many threads weavingthrough its narrative. One that comes to mind is, ofcourse, the tragedy of the winter of 1872. Norden-skiöld had faced difficult trouble early on, with bothhis cargo ships having to winter in the area, andthings only got worse when a group of Norwegiansealers froze in off the coast east and west of Mossel-bukta and approached him in early September. Hecould not help the 58 sealers but advised a party ofthem to try to reach the house that he had built that

25 // Svitjodbreen, Fuglefjorden, September 2011. 26 // Svitjodbreen #II, Fuglefjorden, September 2011. 27 // Larusbreen, Fuglefjorden, September 2011.

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summer at Kapp Thordsen, much further south in Is-fjorden. A group of 17 Norwegians took their chancesand set off in small boats for the house, which waswell stocked with supplies. They made it safely andalmost got through the winter there. In early Novem-ber the sea opened to the east and the rest of the Nor-wegians, except the two men who stayed behind tolook after the ships off the western location at Grå-huken, sailed for Norway. 39 of the sealers made itsafely to the mainland and back home and were luckyto have survived. The remaining men were not solucky. The 17 men at Kapp Thordsen all died duringthe winter and were found in the spring and buried onsite. Recent investigations indicate that they died ofillness related to lead poisoning from the tin cans’ foodstorage rather than of scurvy as previously assumed,or perhaps a combination of both, effectively grindingthem all down to a horrible death. The two men atGråhuken, Johan Mattilas and Gabriel Anderssen, hadbuilt a hut and were suffering horribly through thewinter before dying of scurvy late in the spring. Theyknew that help lay to the east but could not reach theSwedes’ station across the wide bay, and were buriedon the site.

Dark sharp mountains rising from sea level

At midday on September 15 the Stockholm set a wester-ly course, back towards Fair Haven where we intendedto explore the area shown in Axel Enwall’s photographs.At first the weather looked promising and the sailingwas good. However, while approaching Velkomstpyn-ten on Reinsdyrflya the fogbank ahead at Klovningenturned out to be like a wall. As we passed the land-mark we could barely make out the cleft on the islandand everything was grey. The sea was dead calm butvisibility almost zero and we had to rethink our plans.Experienced from previous encounters with the thickfog of Spitsbergen, Captain Engwall suggested that wego into Fuglefjorden towards Svitjodbreen. The fog issometimes lighter around the large glaciers and caneven offer a fairly dramatic experience of light andmist, mountains and glaciers. As we sailed into thefjord, following the eastern mountain wall at Skutelen,

the weather cleared and the landscape emerged like apainted scene from a novel by Tolkien.

Larusbreen on the western mountain slopes offered asharp contrast to the dark and gloomy mountainousland in the bay. The old glacier, portrayed by Enwallin 1872 and used by Elisee Recluse in his Nouvelle Ge-ographie Universelle La Terre Et Les Hommes in 1880and in the English version from 1882, had lost its vol-ume on the mountain and its wide front into the baybut still remained an impressive and colourful sight.In 1872 Enwall, along with physicist Wijkander,botanist Kjellman and four sailors from the Polhem,was a member of the party that explored this bay in asmall boat. They landed on one of the rocky islands onthe eastern side of the bay and started their work thatincluded magnetic observations by Wijkander, botan-ical notes by Kjellman and photographic recordings by Enwall. Fuglefjorden, then called Foul Bay, is one ofthe most spectacular places in northwestern Svalbardwith dark sharp mountains rising from sea level form-ing twisted ridges that surely explain why the Dutchgave the land the name of Spitsbergen. At the end ofthe bay lay the large glacier that was even more im-pressive in Enwall’s time. We experienced the same re-markable sound effects approaching the glacier, withthe sea boiling with a fizzing sound from the meltingice that entirely covered the dark blue and green sur-face closer to the glacial front. Kjellman comments onthat particular phenomenon and on his impressionsof the uncanny sound of ice breaking away from theglacier sending thunder-like echoing sound wavesover the bay that must have amplified the feeling ofrugged wildness that he writes about even further.

Enwall is one of the Swedish pioneers of Arctic pho-tography. Axel Goës on Torell’s 1861 expedition waspossibly the first Swedish photographer in the Arcticbut we don’t have Goës negatives or prints, only de-scriptions and drawings of his photographs. It is inter-esting that both Goës and Enwall were medical scien-tists and photographers. Both Enwall and Goës creat-ed photographic panoramas, (Goës in Magdalenefjor-den and Enwall in Fuglefjorden and Smeerenburgfjor-den). Enwall’s early camera views are important work

in the Swedish history of photography as a thoroughvisual recording of sites like Fuglefjorden and Smeeren-burgfjorden, as well as a visual recording of the expe-dition. These days the historic series of photographsoffers important renderings of the landscape in gener-al and the glaciers in particular, and is a good exampleof photographs as both documents and artistic repre-sentations. Having explored the bay with the Stock-holm sailing in towards the glacier, and having had arare opportunity to experience the landscape by navi-gating the bay’s narrow passages, we decided to tryHolmiabukta to find another glacier in some of thephotographs we had with us. The fog was too thick,however, and we decided to spend the night in the bayand see if it would clear in the morning. It was a calmand pleasant night on the ship with an, as always, ex-cellent dinner, with coffee and cake for dessert. Thefogbanks enclosed us and we lost all sense of wherewe were. In the morning nothing had changed when I woke up at six o’clock as agreed with the captain.Holmiabukta was still covered in a grey thick milky airand we could just about make out some light in the di-rection of the glacier. My camera and its 300-lenscoped with the light far better than I could with mynaked eye. The image is a ghostlike appearance of icein the mist. It came out like something from bygonedays, as if looking back in time, back into the realm ofthe cold, into the wild. I came to think of Frankensteinfor the second time on our journey.

Learning from past mistakes

The captain ordered the ship to sail south. Theweather was grey and gloomy with rain and windygusts as we cleared out of Fair Haven and soon passedthe entrance to Magdalenefjorden, all covered in thickfog. Our next goal was Camp Mansfield or New Lon-don on Blomstrandhalvøya in Krossfjorden. Mansfieldwas a British prospector who thought he had found arich well of marble and started a mine on the penin-sula only to realise too late that it was worthless anduseless as the marble was too fragile and, when takenout of the frost, no good. Still standing to this day, theindustrial remains of his enterprise are a monument

to yet another attempt to exploit the natural resourcesof the Arctic. Before our journey ended we would visitmore such attempts and it is impossible not to thinkof the political agenda of today’s dream of an ArcticKlondike of gas and oil. What if we were to take thebrave and sane decision to save the entire Arctic wild-ness? As American environmentalist Mardy Muriemight have had put it: is humanity so rich that we canafford to lose the Arctic wilderness, or are we so poorthat we cannot keep from exploiting amongst the mostfragile and last of the wild places on Earth? When it isgone, it is gone and too late to regret what we havedone. The greatest achievement of progress is some-times to halt and step back, step back wise from theexperiences gained from pushing forward to the turn-ing point. High-latitude travels in the tracks of polarhistory remind us of this, for sure. In our age, howev-er, it is not fashionable to learn from past mistakesand experience when it comes to nature. We wouldrather predict the future and view our options fromsimulated models, and hope for technical solutionsthat will help us plough on with business as usual.

We sailed south, crossing the route of the Dutch dis-coverers of Spitsbergen. Passing Grampienfjella, ris-ing above a mass of glaciers on the east side of For-land, we were again reminded of why the Dutch had

called this Spitsbergen. It was a remarkable sunsetwith red skies battling the dark hues of blue, purpleand grey of the September evening and the black sharp-ridged mountains and glowing white glaciers. It wasone of the most dramatic and spectacular evening viewsof the entire journey. As the sunset turned to autumnnight we left the Dutch explorers at Salpynten, or theold Black Point, the most southerly point of Prins KarlsForland. In the morning we sailed on towards theghost town of Pyramiden at 78°N in Billefjorden. Theweather was still grey, with low-hanging thick cloudscovering the Pyramiden mountain above the miningsettlement, and the mountains surrounding the fjordwere adorned with their first powder of snow of theseason.

Man proposes, the Arctic disposes

The frontier land in the Arctic sea, Svalbard, had astrategic role both during World War II and in the ColdWar era. The main settlements in Svalbard are Nor-wegian and Russian. The largest community in Sval-bard is Norwegian Longyearbyen, a developed andmodern settlement that lacks for nothing when itcomes to comfort. The mining village of Barentsburg,developed by Trust Arktigukol which was responsible

for the Russian coal mining in Svalbard, is the onlyactive Russian settlement. A claim on Pyramiden wasoriginally made by Sweden in 1910 but the Russiansfinally started mining there in 1956. Despite the nor-thern location, it became quite a popular place to work.An estimated 1,000 people lived and worked thereduring its heyday. In the 1970s and 80s, the miningsettlement in Svalbard was undergoing Soviet-stylemodernisation and renovation. Larger brick buildingswere raised and grass was transported from Siberia,which made the settlement look more and more like asmall village where many of the houses featured lotsof intricate wooden details. The village was more orless self-sufficient and animals were kept in the farm-house. The 1980s brought a swimming pool and sportscentre. For a short while, it was even ahead of Norwe-gian Longyearbyen.

Pyramiden was closed in 1998 and the industrial loca-tion was stripped of scrap metal, which was shippedout of Svalbard via Trust Arktigukol’s harbour in Bar-entsburg. It is now a ghost town that once belongedon the fringes of the former Soviet Union, but now be-longs to Russia. Pyramiden is just one example of themany problems Russia faced in maintaining the out-posts of its former borders. Modern Russia could notafford to maintain the mine. To visit Pyramiden is to

28 // The Mine, Pyramiden, Russian ghost town, September 2011. 29 // The Pigshouse, Pramiden 2011.

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walk back in time into a contemporary archaeologicalsite that stands like a monument to a fallen empire. Itis located in Billefjorden in Svalbard, and can easilybe reached from Longyearbyen by day tour boat or, inwinter, by snow scooter. There are no restrictions onvisiting Pyramiden, but the houses are locked andvisitors are not allowed to enter any buildings with-out a local Russian guide.

As the boat slowly entered the harbour I inevitablycame to think of Tarkovsky’s movie “Stalker”. You areabout to enter the “zone”. The ghostly feeling in thevillage was reinforced by the silent emptiness inter-rupted by the engines of tractors and lorries, sudden-ly a ghostly figure hurrying by and bleak lights in afew buildings. Clouds and mist often sweep throughthe Arctic landscape. The weather and light changerapidly and constantly reshape the views. One canonly imagine the place in the dark and cold Arcticwinter. There is an uncanny feeling of being watchedwhen you walk through the streets of Pyramiden. Asif there is something out there. The silence that goeswith old industrial landscapes is difficult to grasp. Insome parts of the village the fragments and traces ofhuman occupancy seem fresh and recent. As if thesite was abandoned in a hurry. Pyramiden is a placethat the perestroika never reached. When Russia be-

came the modern state that it is today, blood could nolonger be pumped out to the fringes of its former vastempire. The barren outposts suffered when the cen-tral government changed its politics. The Cold WarArctic frontier was confined to Barentsburg, wherethe final battle of the Russian presence in Svalbardmight be played out over the coming years. The coal-mines are historically important employers in Sval-bard, and mining is now one of the key issues in termsof the Russian presence in Svalbard. Tourism is thusnow one of Svalbard’s most important and lucrativebusinesses and employers. In 2011 the hotel in Pyra-miden was once again being prepared to open fortourists or scientists, and the hope of being able to at-tract visitors to Svalbard yet again was very muchalive on the site. There have been ideas of turningPyramiden into an archaeological laboratory, to use aterm coined by the American archaeologist Pete. J.Capelotti. The Arctic is a place where the natural de-struction of human traces is a slow process. The oldmining village could be studied for centuries, as it isslowly broken down by nature. Other (Russian) sug-gestions have been to resurrect the village as a touristand research centre. It is a fascinating place, like anoutdoor industrial historical museum, one of Sval-bard’s many industrial cultural heritage sites. It is areminder of the former Soviet Union, where Lenin,

from his position in front of the Gagarin sports cen-tre, is forever looking out over the village towards theNordenskiöld glacier in the distance. Man proposes,the Arctic disposes.

The weather had turned clear and sunny in Pyrami-den and, this being the last day of our journey, wewanted to make the most of it. On our way back toLongyearbyen we sailed into Skansbukta and cruisedthe bay looking at the remains of the old gypsum minefrom the ship. Once again Enwall’s photographs werewith us as one of his panorama views from Spitsber-gen was taken here at Skansen Mountain. The windswere fresh and the sky clear, with a low afternoonsun. We anchored in a moderate swell outside KappThordsen, a place notorious for difficult wet landings.Our luck was in, the sea would not disturb the land-ing site for a couple of hours. The walk up from thebeach is a steep climb on a narrow trail, followed by along walk in soft moss up to the old Swedish house,dated 1872, and the graves of the unfortunate Norwe-gian sealers of that same year.

The house at Kapp Thordsen is Svalbard’s oldest housestill standing. In 1882-83 it was used by the Swedishwintering expedition led by meteorologist Nils Ekholmas part of the first International Polar Year. Salomon

31 // Pyramiden, Russian Ghost Town, September 2011.30 // Nordenskiöldbreen, Billefjorden, September 2011.

August Andrée was a member of that expedition; it was his first visit to the Arctic. Andrée, the Man who — 14 years later — would sail out from Danskøyawith Nils Strindberg and Knut Frænkel in his balloon,The Eagle, and vanish in the frozen north. Reading hisdiary of that wintering, it is difficult to understandwhy he decided to go back to Svalbard to launch hisown expedition. It had not been a pleasant winter forhim, nor had he had any success with the group ofscientists during his time with the expedition. He expresses no desire to go back or to explore furtherthe land of the north. Having returned to the housefrom a guard watch in March 1883, he sat by the win-dow looking out over the frozen sea and was struck by a feeling of what we might describe “the Arcticsublime”. Being a Man of few emotions, and dismiss-ing any attempts at poetics, he concluded what manybefore had concluded when faced with the silence anddead calm emptiness of Arctic winter: he felt uncom-fortable and chilled to the bones when contemplatingon being out there in the realm of the cold, alone andfacing survival. The sea, he thought, might be his sav-iour, trying to build a net to catch plankton. He didjust that, 14 years later on an ice flow in polar watersnorth of the islands. It did not work and I have alwayswondered whether he thought back to that night inthe house at Kapp Thordsen. We had to get back down

to the zodiac and out to the ship before the tide madeit a difficult and very wet prospect. In the evening wecrossed Isfjorden to Longyearbyen and anchored atthe quay.

Notes

1 — Beechey, F.W., A Voyage of Discovery Towards The North Pole(London, 1843), pp. 45-46.2 — See: The Place Names of Svalbard, (Tromsø: Norsk Polarinstitutt,2001), Conway, M., No Man’s Land, (Cambridge: Cambridge UniversityPress, 1906).3 — Beechey, F.W., A Voyage of Discovery Towards The North Pole,(London, 1843).4 — Crutzen, P. J., “Geology of Mankind,” Nature, vol. 415, 3 January2002.5 — Phipps, C., The Journal Of A Voyage For making Discoveries towardsthe North Pole (London, 1774), pp. 74-75.6 — Larsson, A., “-skönt att än en gång vara bland isen,” Ralph Bergen-dahl och Johan Menander, Svenska sjöbefäl i polarforskningens tjänst,(Gothenburg: B4 Press, 2011), pp. 114-119. 7 — See: stadnamn.npolar.no at Norwegian Polar Institute.

32 // Isfjorden, September 2011. 33 // Longyearbyen, September 2011.

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The Polar Sea, Spitsbergen, September 2011

Magdalenefjorden, September 2011

View of Virgohamna from Smeerenburg, Amsterdamøya, September 2011

Søre Franklinbreen, Lady Franklinfjorden, September 2011

Sjuøyane, Nelsonøya, September 2011

Sjuøyane, September 2011

Phippsøya, Flakbukta Sjuøyane, September 2011

Rijpfjorden, Wordiebukta, September 2011

Rijpfjorden, Haudegen Wettertrup WWII Weather station, September 2011

Polar Bear remains, Blaeuodden, Bengtssenbukta, September 2011

Bengtssenbukta, Ice flow #1 September 2011

Bengtssenbukta, Ice flow #2 September 2011

Bengtssenbukta, Inlet, September 2011

M/S Stockholm, Bengtssenbukta, September 2011

View East from Rijpbreen, September 2011

Rijpbreen, Pelle, September 2011

Rijpbreen, Gunilla, September 2011

Rijpbreen, birds on ice cliffs #1, September 2011

Rijpbreen, birds on ice cliffs #2, September 2011

Faksedalen, Lomfjorden, September 2011

Krossøya, Murchisonfjorden, September 2011

Murchisonfjorden, September 2011

Skutelen, Fuglefjorden, September 2011

Svitjodbreen, Fuglefjorden, September 2011

Larusbreen, Högstadiusberget, Fuglefjorden, September 2011

Ice cave, Svitjodbreen, September 2011

Ice peaks, Svitjodbreen, September 2011

Holmiabukta, September 2011

Camp Mansfield, Krossfjorden, September 2011

Prins Karls Forland, September 2011

Billefjorden #1, September 2011

Billefjorden #2, September 2011

Pyramiden, September 2011

Pyramiden, September 2011

Pyramiden, September 2011

Pyramiden, Nordenskiöldbreen, September 2011

Kapp Thordsen, Svenskhuset, September 2011