The snowmobile is soon dug out and back on track. Even so, zipped up in a hi-tech thermal suit, it is possible to be plunged into a snowdrift and feel no more than refreshingly cool. The air is a brisk -28˚C today and tears freeze solid on eyelashes. It’s like tumbling into a pile of marshmallows. Beneath the crust, though, the snow is soft and powdery – making falling into it oddly enjoyable.
Glimpses soviet ghost town arctic driver#
Occasionally that crust crumbles under the snowmobile’s tread, and both driver and vehicle tip over and are buried. The snow fills the mountain passes in meringue-like heaps, light sparkling on its smooth crust. And it’s a relatively easy matter to climb a glacier on a snowmobile. A century on, snowmobiles are a faster option – and, though they do break down occasionally, they usually need less maintenance than six dogs.
In the days of Norwegian explorers Nansen and Amundsen, ships and dogs were the only way to travel in the polar regions. That is, until the huskies wake up and start barking for breakfast. And it is, of course, silent silent in a way that only a windless place with no trees, grasses or insects can ever be. Barren mountains sheer up from the faraway edges of the fjord, their black crags softened by thick drifts of pristine white snow. For a second, a black spot appears in the distance: a seal, popping its head up through a hole to take a look around. The ship is in the middle of an enormous winter plain created by the rippled ice, which is frozen solid across the seawater. It’s a landscape on the sweeping scale of the African savannahs or the deserts of Asia, but rendered in cut crystal. This is why people come to the poles: a 360-degree sight of bizarre, ethereal beauty like nothing else on Earth. The sun will not rise over the horizon for several hours – but, in the first violet glow of morning, it is finally possible to see the whole sweeping expanse of Tempelfjorden itself. Poor Dr Frankenstein could be hammering on the cabin doors all night and nobody on board would wake up to let him in. Then, at last, the sled team collapse into their bunks inside and the huskies collapse into their kennels outside for a night of much-needed sleep. A hearty dinner is served, with spinach pastries, meatloaf and deliciously moist apple cake.
‘I planned to retire on a yacht in the Caribbean,’ he says with a wry smile, gesturing at the iced-up porthole. Ted, the laconic Dutch captain, appears briefly. In the cosy wooden interior of the Noorderlicht, thick thermal suits are peeled off and the dogsledders’ extremities slowly defrosted with hot chocolate. That’s the Noorderlicht (Northern Light), frozen for winter in Tempelfjorden on the island of Spitsbergen, in the high Arctic Norwegian archipelago of Svalbard. There is only one place in the world where it is possible to stay on an icebound ship now. Nansen later gave the Fram to Roald Amundsen, who used it to set out for the South Pole. Expeditions would sail as far as possible towards the poles in the summer, then let the waters freeze around them, creating a supply base. In real life, too, the great 19thcentury explorer Fridtjof Nansen found his way to these seas in his specially designed ship, the Fram. It echoes the beginning of Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein, in which an Arctic sea explorer gets stuck in pack ice near the North Pole and finds the exhausted Dr Victor Frankenstein pursuing his escaped monster. Travelling on a dogsled to a ship frozen in the ice is a journey with resonance.
It’s a lone sailing ship, frozen in the middle of a vast sea of ice, which promises warmth, comfort and the best hot chocolate north of Murmansk. Then, suddenly, out of the white, there is a mast. The blizzard slows and, for the first time in hours, the distant outlines of mountain ridges can be made out: just a suggestion, like the first few sketches of charcoal on an artist’s blank canvas. The sled bumps and skids over an undulating sheet of ice, frozen thick over the waters of a fjord. Related article: Drawing near to the North Pole.In this strange and unknowable land, they are not afraid. No glimpse can be seen of the sled in front, but the dogs are following the scent of their pack. Into this void, undeterred, run the six huskies pulling the little wooden sled, tongues lolling and tails flailing wildly. It is impossible to know whether the view ahead stretches for 10 yards or 10 miles. White above, white below, white in every direction. In the Arctic blizzard, there is nothing but white.
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