Svalbard: high summer in the High North

Midnight sun is a simple enough concept in theory, but it’s oddly disorientating in practice. I was almost a thousand miles north of Iceland, closer to the North Pole than to Reykjavik, and I knew the summer days would last all night. But my eyes or mind (or maybe even my soul) just wouldn’t stop waiting for dusk.

On overcast afternoons, the sky often brightened as the evening wore on, as if the world were turning in reverse. Sometimes, long after a sensible bedtime, the sun would break through the cloud for the first time that day. I took photos, but they didn’t capture the weirdness. They couldn’t, of course, because the sense of weirdness came from within – from my body clock and its sense of how the world had always worked, until that moment. Now, thrillingly, it seemed that all bets were off.

Under the skin of the Arctic

It’s a soulful place, Svalbard, all rock and ice and sky. The peaks are dark and snow-capped, the valleys deep and glacial. Sometimes photos come out black and white even when you take them in colour. The sea, rarely out of sight, has many moods: near the glaciers, it is flat and milky from the minerals released after centuries trapped in ice. Further out in the fjord, it is black, glossy and angular. Our guide steered skilfully through the swell and we pitched, rolled and occasionally crashed our way through the white-frothed waves.

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We were on our way to Isfjord Radio, a historic communications station that directed transatlantic shipping and air traffic from 1933 until GPS rendered it obsolete in 1999. The historic buildings once occupied by radio operators now house guests of Basecamp Explorer, which runs a range of Arctic adventures on Spitsbergen, the largest of Svalbard’s islands. Rugged exteriors and simply furnished rooms are warmed by the exceptional hospitality of the Basecamp crew, who conjure up sophisticated tasting menus featuring Arctic fish and game. Reindeer tartare with fig and black sesame was one of the highlights; a smoky seal yakitori was another.

I had spent the previous two nights at Nordenskiöld Lodge, the most remote of the three Basecamp Explorer properties, and indeed the world’s northernmost commercial accommodation. You are totally off-grid here, relying on solar panels and a log-fired stove (and sauna). Home-cooked meals are prepared by your hosts, whose responsibilities also include taking a dinghy out to the nearby glacier and hauling in boulder-sized chunks of ice to melt down for drinking water and cooking.

A Svalbard safari

Every visitor wants to see a polar bear, but only a few will be lucky. I almost was, which felt unluckier still: the day after I left, a mother and her two cubs wandered past Isfjord Radio. (The day before that, one member of my group had spotted a whiteish bear-shaped object, some distance away, amid a field of dark gravel and moss. “I cannot be certain it’s a rock,” our guide said, lowering her binoculars. So maybe I had been lucky after all.)

They may be hard to find but polar bears are common enough, and dangerous enough, that armed guides are compulsory anywhere outside Longyearbyen, the archipelago’s largest town (which is not that large – its population of 2,100 is outnumbered by the bears). In the town itself you may see Arctic foxes, patrolling the lower slopes of the valley, and dozens of geese. At sea, eider ducks are common, puffins slightly less so, but you will see them from time to time, flapping alongside the boat. They seem to work hard to stay in the air, unlike the elegant Arctic terns that soar high above.

We saw seals, too, lounging on little icebergs, and reindeer, both from the boat, as they meandered along the shore, and on land, as we hiked to a walrus colony. Our most memorable encounter was with a pod of minke whales. We had, in theory, finished sightseeing and were motoring back to the lodge when a gyre of gulls caught our guide’s eye. Soon we saw fins, and then a whole head lurching out of the water in front of us, its throat swollen with seawater and fish. We spent an hour with them, watching them dive and then surface again in some unexpected place. The backdrop was spectacular too: black hills in the distance under billowing clouds.

A seasonal adventure

Summer and winter deliver two different Svalbards. In one, you will cross dark, frozen seas by snowmobile and race through valleys with a pack of huskies. In the other, the dogs pull a wheeled cart rather than a sledge, and you have to stick to gravel tracks – but you can kayak in the shadow of a glacier, dodging the remnants of the pack ice.

One constant is the promise of a sauna (and an icy plunge) at the end of the day. The other, at Nordenskiöld Lodge, is the glacier. Just a few hundred metres from the cabin, it’s your constant companion – and impossible to ignore. Sometimes it was the creak or rumble of ancient ice that caught my attention, but I was drawn to it when it was quiet too. Each time I looked it seemed a little different: the packed snow deeper blue or brighter white, the ice cliff more or less forbidding.

Hiking high on to its plateau revealed previously hidden textures. Crags barely visible from the ground reared up above us, and deep crevasses fell away below. With spikes strapped to our boots and icepicks in hand, we climbed ridges, followed frozen streams and rested by an eerily blue lake.

The sun was obscured by leaden clouds, but the glare was strong. Night would not return to these slopes until the first, fleeting sunset of the autumn, six weeks later. By then the glacier would have received a fresh coating of snow, the sea temperature would be falling again and the residents of Svalbard would be readying themselves for the long polar night.

Holden Frith was a guest of Basecamp Explorer. The company’s seven-day signature summer adventure is £7,450 / $10,090 per person, based on two people sharing, including all meals, activities and boat transfers.