Hi everyone – Matt here!
The Biology courses have been a bit mundane since we met the Russians, so I’m going to tell you about two snowmobile trips I’ve done recently!
My brother stayed over Easter, so we planned a trip to Diabase cabin. My flatmate Renee is a glaciologist, so she turned the trip into a guided tour and showed us her favourite site for fossil hunting, led us over a couple of glaciers and stopped at a “pingo”. A what? Is that even a real word? Well, apparently it’s a rare occurrence wherein sediments start forming soil and land on top of glacial ice… Whatever – it made a really cool slide ;-)
As the weather was nice and we had plenty of time we drove to my favourite local viewpoints at the Fredheim promontory, the plateau above Fredheim and the frozen waterfall off Sassendalen.
The cabin was in a great location, surrounded by wildlife – lots of reindeer, a flock of ptarmigan - and an unseen Arctic fox left tracks in the snow. Diabase cabin has a wood burning stove, a gas burner and a big sofa so it was cozy and warm and we cooked a proper dinner and a fry-up in the morning. It also has a sauna - so we fired it up to 90 degrees C and tried rolling in the snow. That was easy, so we went for a dip in the fjord!
I’m not kidding – check out the video!
https://youtu.be/I-dXnwGAg44
Onwards and upwards in both latitude and altitude. The second trip enters the chart straight into my Top 10 adventures of all time. I had a 5 day weekend in April that I’d had my eye on for months as my chance to take on a serious expedition. I wanted to get to the summit of the highest mountain on Svalbard and to stay at the Overgangshytte cabin by Austfjorden. I got a GPS track from Sarah in the UNIS Logistics Team as she’d done the same route the week before and I asked my flatmate Renee to come along to navigate and teach me how to read glacier and sea-ice conditions. Since Renee’s scooter had a list of minor problems and two major problems, we spent the week before the trip fixing it with my friends Kristian and Mikkel and invited them to complete our crew.
The logistics were crazy – I had to borrow 20 jerry cans for petrol and 3 sleds to carry them plus all the safety gear for glacier and sea-ice rescue, co-ordinate emergency beacon and emergency response and plan for emergency camps and every eventuality we’d covered in the safety course back in January…
The journey to the cabin took us 12 hours, of which less than half was actually driving and we finally arrived at 5am!? It was nuts. We had to deal with whiteouts from clouds and a blizzard, torn straps and a broken sled, snowmobile breakdowns, digging scooters out of deep powder snow-drifts in moraine fields, crevasses everywhere, disappearing sea-ice and driving and hiking up a natural skating rink (a frozen river and lake). Kudos to UNIS for teaching us how to deal with all of the above and for providing the safety gear we needed for free!
The weather was stunning for our day trips and the return journey. We drove all the way up to 79°N on week-old sea ice crisscrossed with fresh polar bear tracks, made it to the frozen lake on the way up to Atomfjellet and got to the summit of Newtontoppen in pink light above a sea of cloud with the sun just at the horizon.
A. MA. ZING.
Video below. The jacket is a UNIS down jacket provided by SAMS and the clothes I took were all paid for by SAMS Arctic Bursary, so thanks and kudos to SAMS for keeping me warm!
https://youtu.be/cKVWES_w6Ho
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