To use the lingo of the internet: I think I just won teh Svalbardz.
It was a nice evening: The sun was shining, and the air was still. So i decided to take an evening walk and climb up Sukkertoppen, maybe look at some of the old mine entrances there.
Sukkertoppen is smooth and grassy the first 50-100 meters of elevation of so, and then transitions into a pile of rock slabs. It neither looks nor feels safe, but it was possible to walk up without injury, if not entirely without worry. When I got to the mine entrance I looked around a bit, took some pictures, and looked for the best way to the plateau. It’s possible to walk along the side, if you don’t need to climb the ridge. The plateau is nice and smooth, covered with pebbles.
The night stayed nice, so I decided to walk a bit on the plateau. I found some snow there, more as I got higher, suprisingly. When the air is warm, there might be water underneath the snow. The way to find out this is to step in it. One might imagine I got a bit better at reading the terrain and guessing where there is the most water under the snow as the trip went ahead.
Alongside Larsbreen, I found this very peculiar formation. I don’t know if it has a name, so I will henceforth refer to it as the ski jump.
I don’t recommend climbing down or up to it. The plateau edge which I was standing two meters away from was gravel-covered like everything else up there, the incline over the edge was somewhere between π/4 and π/3 (45° to 60°), and I heard one snowfall and three rockfalls along the slope in the fifteen minutes I stood there.
With more snow came more water, and more difficult crossings. Luckily my home-repaired boots were still fairly waterproof. Still, finding a route across deep wet snow was tricky and slow. Heading uphill is a good piece of general advice, unless you’ve stuck yourself in a drainage area. But I got past, somehow, and managed to climb up to drier snow and eventually up to the ridge of Lars Hiertha-fjellet.
As the rigde rises and sharpens, it gets more wind-blown, so there was no snow on the last bit, making it a lot easier to walk on. The ridge is full of broken sedimentary rock, and Trollsteinen is a particularly stubborn bit, around three to six meters tall, and possible to climb (carefully).
At first glance it looks like it’s going to fall at any moment, but at second glance you’ll notice that a lot of it already has. Still, I don’t recommend rockslide surfing. The view from the top of it was spectacular. Not a breath of wind, and the warmest day I’ve felt here. I sat there for a while, feeling my T-shirt dry, and watching low clouds float into Adventdalen from Isfjorden. I had hoped to go down Larsbreen, but the meltwater channel I’d have to cross looked scary, and I wasn’t going to cross the snowbridge1 without company. So, sadly, I couldn’t get a side view of the ski jump or hat-trick with a visit to Sarkofagen on my way home. So I went back nearly the way I had come, and learned not to walk directly below melting patches of snow, no matter how solid and dry the ground looks.
Easily the best night I’ve had in Longyearbyen so far this year. It was supposed to be only a two-hour evening walk, but with weather that good it’d have been sinful to give up that early. So instead it was seven hours, plus half an hour getting the mud off the boots.
A+++ would walk again
- Clearly artificial: somebody had built them [↩]
Kingdom of Loathing