Mid-October
Yesterday, I was in the Holocene. That is our epoch, the historical epoch, the thousands of years after the last ice age which we refer to as recorded history.
But I’ve left it. I’ve landed where ice still rules.
Svalbard: “cold coast” in old Norse. This is an a cappella of wilderness – just the raw beats of nature, no trees higher than a human thumb, no raging riot of colour save when lichens and purple saxifrage defy the snow. It is quiet, finely-whittled, and artistic. It is cold, clean and stern. It is terrifying, grand and magical. It is an emissary of the North Pole, which lies on its frozen ocean only a few hundred miles beyond Svalbard’s icecaps and shallow braided rivers.
You cannot see the pole from Svalbard, obviously, but you are always aware of it, for its weather breathes on you, and on the mountains.
Svalbard is the edge of everything. At nearly 80° north, Longyearbyen is above all of Alaska and most of Greenland and Canada, and far remote from the European mainland. This community of 2000 souls is not only the most northerly town in the world, but holder of a fistful of ‘most northern’ records: of a community church, of a commercial airport, museum, university – and of sunlight, too, in this season, for in autumn the polar night marches south from the pole.
I’ve seen the quickfire twilight of the tropics. The High Arctic styles it instead with careful slowness; you can watch the glow for 45 minutes and see little change. But the sun sets on 26th October, and then does not rise at all until mid-February. Polar Night is the Arctic’s price for Midnight Sun.
Under sun or northern lights, ice is everything. Glaciers here are not ornaments on distant mountains – they are neighbours which share the valley.
Huge areas of Svalbard are under icecaps and glaciers, and even those that are not are held in permafrost’s iron grip. Some areas are frozen down to over 400 metres. It is no country for putting infrastructure underground, so water pipes snake around the town wrapped up with insulation.
So remote is this island that the global seed vault shelters on it, guarding a backup supply of the world’s crop samples against all disasters.
Life dormant inside the vault; life leaving footprints in the snow outside it. This island hosts some very special wild things. I’ve travelled north with aspirations of finding them.
A Walk with Wildlife 
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