Svalbard
From the bow of our steel sailboat, I watch as the midnight sun reflects off the still fjord. The sky is heavy with salt and light as we move closer to our destination. Skins dry on the railing while local gin is poured over glacial ice. Dominoes click across the wooden table in the galley. The ocean is still, unbothered, and calm. Beluga whales sleep on the surface, and reindeer graze the tundra brush on shore. Straight out of one of my grandpa's old National Geographic magazines (without all of the boobs), we are visitors in this land of big mountains and harsh conditions.
A remote archipelago deep in the Arctic, Svalbard sits between Norway and the North Pole. Home to more polar bears than people, the chain of islands has seen a boom of whaling, coal mining, and research. Before 1920, Svalbard was terra nullius (no state's territory) and has since been granted to Norway, where they store the "seed vault": The world's last-ditch effort to replant in case of catastrophe.
I'm here with a crew of world-class skiers, seeking the ends of the earth to do what we love most - climb mountains and make some scary turns. Jagged peaks jut out from the ocean, blanketed by glaciers and wisping white plumes of snow from the summits. A playground for the obsessed
We are motoring north from Longyearbyen, the only town in Svalbard. Our luggage was lost somewhere in Los Angeles, or Amsterdam, or Oslo. Either way, I'm down to one pair of underwear and a borrowed down jacket. The skis arrived, though. And that's all that matters. Arriving in our first fjord, we drop a hook and take the dinghy to shore. Taking turns spotting the shore for polar bears with an old Soviet rifle and putting on our ski boots, we gear up to go up — straight out of the ocean. The place is just ours, free of tracks even though it hadn't snowed in a few days. This trailhead is a bit harder to access.
Skinning through the barren landscape, my legs get comfortable and warm again. This is what they are used to. Harnesses on, we travel across the glaciers and into the high mountains, scoured by the wind. The landscape is so foreign, yet oddly familiar at the same time. We know the mountains, and we know the ocean, but we don't know them together. Summiting, we transition to ski a couloir down to the boat. The snow is bulletproof, edges skittering across the first few turns. The further we descend, the softer it gets, and we drop back to the boat. Skins back on, we point our noses toward the neighboring peak. There is beauty in the simplicity: skiing, eating, playing, drinking. Some days I think that is my highest and best use.
The days blend together as the sun never disappears. It floats around the horizon line, casting shadows on all sides of the boat. Polar bears swim through the fjords, and we carry on, falling into a rhythm. The best rhythm.
