Polar Voyages

by Gray, Gordon

  Open floe.

  With two aircraft operating, the back log was cleared fairly quickly and Eugenie and his team arrived on the last flight of the day. They collected their gear then went straight to a helicopter that took off into the gloom and vanished across the wastes. They did not even stop for a coffee in the mess tent.

  Day 8, Sunday 22nd April 2007

  Up early again, I saw Victor in the mess tent having a coffee. I got one from the urn and joined him. We chatted about the bad weather and the ski trips. He was happier now that he had managed to get everyone who had been stuck on the ice back to Barneo and today the last would go back to Longyearbyen.

  ‘It is always worrying, Gordon, with people out on the ice. It is very easy for things to get bad here and for a few days things were bad. It is easy to lose people in that sort of weather.’ He said he was very sorry about not being able to get back to Longyearbyen and missing the training and the ski trip itself, but it had been impossible for him to leave and he was going to be unable to leave for some time yet while the rest of the backlog was sorted out. I told him that I understood, and anyway I was not too bothered about missing the skiing trip as Eugenie’s new team seemed very professional. However, had it worked out according to the original idea we had on the Kapitan Dranitsyn, it would have been a fantastic experience. I was happy though, as I had got to the North Pole as he had promised me. He told me that later in the day, in addition to the Longyearbyen flights, there were some VIP flights due from Moscow and that we would not be able to use the mess tent while they were here. I gave Victor a bottle of vodka I had brought for him. He smiled. ‘Thank you, thank you’ he said, then tucked it safely into his parka pocket.

  Later that morning a flight came into Barneo from Moscow. I walked out to the runway to watch it arrive. There were about a dozen VIPs who were all smartly dressed in military greatcoats or big civilian coats and fur hats. They stepped sheepishly onto the ice and each one was warmly welcomed by Victor. It was clear that he knew a good number of them very well. I assumed that they must be the power behind the ice station. Victor then led them all to the mess tent. Unfortunately this visit ran across lunch time so we missed out on lunch while the VIPs enjoyed their vodkas and snacks. At about 4 p.m. they walked happily out of the mess tent and back to their Antanov 74 and took off, back to Moscow. Victor said he could not tell us who they were, ‘Just VIPs’ was all he would say.

  I dashed into the mess tent and grabbed a few left-over biscuits and a few chunks of cheese as it was still a long time until dinner. Just after the VIPs’ flight disappeared, a second one came in. This was a military flight with security and Russian Special Forces people on it. The Special Forces flight made a very steep descent and landed with a thump on the ice and stopped at the end of the runway. A number of troops in thick heavy hooded military parkas got out and walked around. Then they too all vanished into the mess tent. They spent about an hour-and-a-half there then all took off again.

  In addition to the main camp with the skiers and dog-team people passing through, there were different groups of scientists working in their own areas nearby. They were mostly Russian. They had their own small tents, or huts, close by to the main camp area. Some of the scientists slept in Barneo, some slept in their own camps. One French group had two divers and spent their days making holes in the ice floe so they could let the divers go down. It was a safer way than letting the diver go down in one of the open leads, because if the floes moved together then the diver had no way of getting back up through the ice. Another team from Moscow spent their time drilling small holes in the ice, which immediately froze up before they could get the next hole drilled. I never did discover what they were trying to do as the scientist spoke little English.

  During a break in the day Victor called me over.

  ‘I have arranged for you to go on the flight back to Longyearbyen later tonight. Is that OK?’ ‘That is great Victor, Many thanks.’ If I had left it until the next day then there was an increased chance of getting stuck if the weather changed again.

  ‘Good. Let’s have a drink.’ We went back into the mess tent and he produced the export vodka I had given him. With Nostrovias all round, we each had a couple of large ones and enjoyed the rare moment of peace in Barneo. I thanked him for getting me to the pole, especially after all the problems he had had. ‘No problem, my friend, but the weather is forecast to get bad again soon, so it is better you go tonight.’

  A ten-man sledging team arrived last night from further south on the ice. It was leaving for the pole. They spent the morning repacking their pulks before heading off towards the north and the high ridges that ran along that side of the camp. They struggled hard just to get the pulks moving, even over the flat ice surrounding the camp, and I watched as the pulks skidded around on the ice, banging into their skis and getting stuck on protruding ice ridges as though they had minds of their own. In the late afternoon a dog team of eight dogs and four people arrived. They stopped for a meal, quickly reorganised their sledge and headed off again towards the pole.

  That night, after a long delay, the last incoming flight arrived and was turned round by the crew. I got my rucksack and walked out to the plane with Victor. The rest of the passengers consisted of a ten-man sledge team, who had been stuck out in the storm and had only got back to Barneo that afternoon, and one of Victor’s people. I shook Victor’s hand and climbed into the Antonov. The engines powered up and the plane thundered down the ice strip. Suddenly it lifted off and turned away to the south and Spitsbergen. The ski party were, naturally enough, in high spirits after their close encounter. Some of the guys had frostbite on their cheeks. These guys were all obviously serious skiers and were comparing their trip to ones they had done in the Canadian Arctic. This had been their final target, to ski to the pole.

  We landed back at Longyearbyen at approximately 11 p.m., where Alexei met me and took me back to the guesthouse. I had no hotel booking for tonight, as the original plan meant that I would come back tomorrow, so I arrived knowing that I did not have a bed waiting. However, Alexei had said he thought I should be OK at the guesthouse if the reception building was still open. As I had left my suitcase with all my clothes at the guesthouse, it was the only place I could try. As we drew up outside we could not see any lights on in reception. The door was locked. I was too late. What to do now? At -15 degrees Celsius I was not about to sleep outside. I had an idea. Maybe there was someone still up at the Polarrigg hotel, as they seemed to have late night parties and I had met the owner, Mary Ann, so she might take pity on me. Maybe they had a spare bed or a mattress somewhere. Alexei drove me back to the Polarrigg hotel. Mary Ann was still up.

  ‘Gordon I am so sorry, no. I have no spare beds at all. In fact I have one crowd sleeping on the floor over in the annexe’. I was about to turn away when she called me back.

  ‘Maybe, if you don’t mind, you could sleep with the Malaysians. They have taken over the meeting room over there’. Did I hear her right? Malaysians? She continued, ‘You can sleep in their room if you can find some room on the floor.’

  What are Malaysians doing in Longyearbyen? I wondered. ‘That’s fine Mary Ann, thanks. Where is their room?’ She waved her arm at the front door, ‘Just across the road in the annexe.’ I picked up my bag and went back outside.

  The snow was now falling heavily and it was difficult to make out what was hotel and what is not. I could just about make out three buildings through the snow. I looked around, but Alexei had gone. I climbed over the snow banks and headed for the nearest building. The door was locked. The next one looked like a garage or warehouse of some kind and its big double doors were also locked. So, I headed up the road for the third building. This was a wooden, single storey hut that looked more like a storage area than a hotel annexe. I tried the door. It opened. I went in. It was quiet. I found myself in a small corridor with doors opening off it. The first door I opened was the laundry and washing area with a toilet in the corner. I opened the secon
d door and there were a number of bodies sleeping on the floor on mattresses. There were mattresses lying all around the floor, all with piles of clothes and rucksacks on them. Clearly there were lots more people from this room somewhere out there in the snow. Two big, noisy, blower heaters, in the middle of the room, were running at full power, and had turned the room into a hot house.

  One of the bodies turned over and an oriental face smiled up at me from the floor and nodded as I indicated that I just wanted to sleep on their floor. I took off my parka and tried to decide where to lie. However, with the blowers on full blast, this was far too hot for me, so I decided to explore a bit more. I went out into the corridor again. It was pleasantly cool after the Malaysian room. I started opening the other doors. The first room was crammed with sleeping bodies. Like the Malaysian room, there were rucksacks, sleeping bags and boots lying everywhere. I quietly closed the door and moved on. The next door was small broom cupboard. Looks like I will have to sleep in the Malaysian sauna after all. I opened the last door. It looked like a small bedding and cleaning store room. It was freezing cold as it clearly did not have any heating, but it did have a single bed, with a mattress on it! The bed was covered with big boxes of linen and piles of clean towels. On a shelf on the wall there were even some duvets and pillows. The small window was quickly becoming snowed over as the storm outside increased and the snow started to drift against the hut. I had no intention of going out in that again so this must be home tonight. A shower and a change of clothes will have to wait until I got back up to the guesthouse in the morning, I shifted the boxes off the bed, kicked my boots off, pulled two duvets over my parka and fell sound asleep.

  Day 9, Monday 23rd April 2007

  In the morning, I woke to the sound of running water next door in the laundry area. I stretched out. I had slept well even if it was a bit cold. I got up and went back across to the main building. The first person I saw was Malena. ‘Are you here too?’ She asked. ‘Yes, I slept in your bedding store!’ She laughed, ‘We had to turn away lots of people last night. There are absolutely no beds in town’.

  ‘There’s a good one in there’ I said, waving at the store room. ‘Can I get any breakfast here please? I am starving.’ I realised that the last food I had was yesterday lunch and that was crackers and cheese in Barneo. Malena got me a table and then organised a good cooked breakfast. While she served my breakfast I asked her about the Malaysians. It turned out that they were part of a team of Malaysian skydivers who flew up to Barneo last night. They had commandeered the small meeting hall as there was nowhere else to go. The few bodies I saw were the support team guys. Their plan was to fly to Barneo, change into their sky diving gear and parachutes, then get straight into a helicopter and jump out from 6000 feet over the pole. Then when, and if, they all landed safely, they would be collected and flown straight back to Spitsbergen and so back to Malaysia.

  I thanked Malena, bought some bread rolls in town and headed back up the road to the guesthouse, where I was hopefully booked in for the next two nights. I checked in, got my bag from the store and by 11 a.m. I was enjoying a hot shower and a shave.

  Day 10, Tuesday 24th April 2007

  A pure arctic day with blue sky and sunshine. I spent it walking around the town, shopping for odds and ends. I bought a present for Doreen from the supermarket-cum-gift-shop-cum-expedition-outfitters. I revisited the Arctic Museum and in the evening walked to the Spitsbergen hotel for a meal.

  Day 11, Wednesday 25th April 2007

  Malena rang me to say that Eugenie and his team had returned to Longyearbyen late last night; they just made it to the pole in three days and had been flown straight out from Barneo on the last flight. I met up with them for a coffee and chatted to the Canadian, Bill, and the Russian, Sasha, who went with Eugenie. Sasha was from St Petersburg, he knew Victor and Eugenie very well and did a lot of arctic skiing. He said that he was in Siberia in a tent earlier in the year in -54 degrees Celsius! Bill was from Toronto and spent his winters skiing in Quebec and northern Ontario. He had a cabin up by a lake that he used through the winter.

  After they were dropped off on the ice by the helicopter from Barneo, the ice ridging was so bad it took them two-and-a-half hours to cover less than 2 kms. The ice drifted in the night and in the morning they found that they were 2 kms further south than the night before. On their second day they skied over 32 kms just to get round the ridges and hummocks, and actually only went north 3 kms. ‘Well, the ice was drifting against us so it was a bit tiring’ was Bill’s laid back comment. On the last day they finally found some flattish ice and skied non-stop, for over fourteen hours, in order to get to the pole.

  Eugenie told us that Victor had called to tell him that the steep landing by the Special Forces flight on Sunday had damaged the runway. It had cracked the ice and this had now split. The runway was out of commission again.

  I left Longyearbyen and headed for home on the afternoon flight. I retraced my steps through Oslo and arrived back in Edinburgh on Thursday morning. Wow, what an adventure! I was lucky to leave Barneo when I did as I later learnt that the runway took 5 days to refreeze before it could be used again.

  Was it all worth it? You bet it was.

  CHAPTER 10

  MV Stockholm – Spitzbergen – In Search of Polar Bears

  Glaciers

  There had been rumblings and cracking sounds coming from deep inside the ‘July 14th Glacier’ for ten minutes or more, echoing around the mountains at the head of the fjord. Derek and I were leaning on the rail of the ship, savouring the smells from the galley and letting the afternoon drift toward dinnertime. We had heard noises from the glacier when we had been ashore earlier, but after one small icefall it had all gone quiet again. Now it had restarted. We watched fascinated, but all was still, the water flat and the glacier face remained intact. These noises seemed to go on forever without any ice chunks or small ice bergs calving off. The noises subsided again. Then, silently and without any indication that it was about to happen, a number of large pieces of ice, each the size of a small house, together with hundreds of smaller lumps of solid ice, detached themselves from the glacier face and slid and fell towards the water. Some slid straight in and others tumbled and tripped on the lower edges of the glacier before falling into the fjord. The slapping sound of the ice hitting the water reached us and the scene changed. Birds took flight, and the ice wall became a blur of action as the ice fell and the water splashed up before it all fell calm again. Then we saw the wave. It was at least 10 or 12 feet high and rising. We watched and wondered what would happen when the wave, which was already radiating and racing out from the glacier, reached our small ship with its 8-foot freeboard?

  The ‘Stockholm Plan’

  It was over a coffee at The Scott Polar Research Institute (SPRI) in Cambridge that the plan had been formed. We were attending a Polar Quest reunion, kindly hosted by the SPRI, for the UK clients of Per Magnus’s company. Some of the expeditions that Per Magnus runs in Spitzbergen are on a small expedition ship called Stockholm. Over coffee, a couple of the ladies, Jill and Angela, who I had met earlier in the year in Spitzbergen on another trip, said that they wanted to get a group of twelve together and sub-charter the Stockholm from Per Magnus for a private expedition around Spitzbergen and would Doreen and I like to join the party? The plan was to go early in the season and take the ship from Longyearbyen and see how far we could get round the top of the islands and look for wildlife and scenery on the way. The trip had to take place at the very beginning of the season as the ship was fully committed after that. In spite of the short notice we said yes.

  MV Stockholm. A former Swedish Government vessel now converted for expedition work.

  Svalbard was first mentioned in old Icelandic texts and means ‘Land of cold coasts’. It is the official name of the Island group. Spitzbergen was the name given by the Dutch explorer Barents when he discovered the island in 1596 and Spitzbergen means ‘pointed mountains’. Technically ‘Spitzbergen’
is the name of the largest island in the group of ‘Svalbard Islands’. Longyearbyen, on Spitzbergen Island, was set up as a coal-mining settlement by an American called, strangely enough, Mr Longyear. The relics of the old mines remain and one of the mines is still in operation. The Russians also operate a bigger mine further down Isafjord at Barentsburg, which is a totally Russian settlement. Today, during the summer months, Longyearbyen is a busy starting point for expeditions all over Spitzbergen and further afield. It retains a strong frontier-town feeling with most of the shops selling rations, boots, supplies, spades and big parkas.

  The main saloon on Stockholm is a warm and welcoming area with polished wood and brass.

  The main mess has a real feel of polar voyaging with old charts on the bulkheads and cabins opening off the mess and galley area.

  Doreen and I arrive in Longyearbyen from Edinburgh after an overnight stop in Oslo. The others travelled up from London later that day and arrive well after midnight. The hotel we have been booked into seems to be a theme hotel. It was, we thought, meant to resemble an old coal miner’s hostel. The rough wooden top bunk bed I have is so designed that only a small and very flexible monkey can climb up to get into it, as I certainly can’t. I am certain that the designer chappy has never tested the access himself and in the end I give up and drag the mattress off the bunk and put it on the floor.