I have been on an adventure and I intend to blog about it over the next few weeks. My big adventure for this year was a trip to Svalbard, an Arctic archipelago and territory of Norway. The main city on Svalbard is Longyearbyen, and it is the northern most significant city (population >1000) in the world and the main place where you will find people in Svalbard. It turns out that Longyearbyen was established and named after an apparently very modest American businessman, John Munro Longyear, who owned a mining company and started mining there in 1906. There is still mining there, but these days tourism and research are also important industries. There are no known native people that have called Svalbard home like you would find in Greenland, so the first known people to go there were European explorers that discovered abundant whales and seals and eventually coal to mine. However, they didn’t find what they were looking for, which was a passage through the Arctic to the Pacific to open new trade routes.

Being well within the Arctic, there is constant daylight in Svalbard during the summer, so it was daytime the entire time I was there and thus you will be spared sunset and blue hour photos if you read these blog posts. Longyearbyen is not a very large city and I was able to walk around town from the hotel, to the shops, and down to the sea shore in an hour or two. But another odd thing about Longyearbyen is that you are not supposed to leave town unless you either have a rifle or are accompanied by a person with a rifle as Svalbard (and its surrounding waters) is home to thousands of polar bears. My plan was to mainly see polar bears through a telephoto lens or binoculars.

Why would I go to Svalbard of all places on Earth? Svalbard was not on my shortlist of places to go, but I found out about a photo trip to Svalbard focusing on nature photography led by some of the photographers that I watch on YouTube. As I read about it more than a year ago, it sounded great, so I put my deposit down and made it my major expedition for 2024. The trip originally included Greenland as well and ended up in Iceland, but was changed to a Svalbard-only trip later. But this was probably for the best as the Svalbard to Greenland to Iceland trip would have involved several days of just sea travel, where as the Svalbard-focused trip had one or two excursions every day and the ship would be moved at ‘night’. So, this trip focused on wildlife and landscapes that were completely unfamiliar to me sounded pretty good.

Getting to Svalbard was not like just booking a flight to Seattle or some other major city. I actually had to book two trips. First round-trip flights to/from Oslo with overnight stays on each end. Then within that, round-trip flights from Oslo to Longyearbyen. Flights to Longyearbyen are very limited, so I had to get to town a day early. But this gave me to the opportunity to book a guided hike to see a little bit of wildlife.

So, a hiking guide picked me up along with seven others and took us to the end of one of the roads leading out of town and then we hiked up a valley looking for wildlife. We did see a reindeer who didn’t mind a group of people staring at it as it grazed among the flowers. I also saw reindeer on the hillsides near town. In the image below I framed the reindeer with the distant glacier across the fjord in the background. Framing an animal with a glacier in the background was a new one for me.

The Rock Ptarmigans (related to grouses) also were not bothered by our presence. The male and female pair wandered nearby in their summer plumage while I knelt down to take photos. The male has the orange coloring above his eye as female ptarmigans find this feature to be irresistible. I may try this trick and see if it works with human females.

We also saw whales playing in the water offshore though they were very difficult to photograph as they are almost entirely under water. But for reference, below is a photo of some belugas I saw just offshore from the airport. A few humps sticking out of the water doesn’t really make for a great photograph, but the people on the tour boat probably had a good view.

After the fun hiking and picnicking by the seashore on an unseasonably warm day, I had to meet up with the tour company at the hotel and find out about the ship I was to sail away on. And then close the curtains tight and pretend it was night time so I could get some sleep. Below is the 11:00 PM sky as seen from the sea shore in town. It’s OK if you think I over-processed this image as I probably did.

On my trip to Patagonia in 2023, I had a moment while hiking in Torres del Paine in which I found myself alone as the group had spread out quite a bit on the trail. The clouds cleared revealing the mountain towers to me for the first time. At that moment, with tears in my eyes, I knew why I had traveled there. This moment got me a bit addicted to major journeys and I hoped to have another such moment on this adventure. I’ll let you know in a future blog what happened. I will give away part of the trip’s ending though. As my adventure is now over and I am writing this blog in an Oslo hotel room, you can safely assume that I was not killed and eaten by a polar bear.