Svalbard

Where can you go in this world nowadays, to be completely, irrevocably alone? To utterly free your mind and feel the total stillness in the quiet like never before?

The answer lies north of Norway. Halfway to the North Pole from the mainland, somewhere in the abyss of the Atlantic Ocean, is a place called Svalbard. Deep in the barren, rugged and desolate land of majestic glaciers and frozen waterfalls, suddenly you rememeber how to breathe again. Mushing huskies in the sheer and definite middle of nowhere for days. You think of growing up skiing in the Canadian rockies in the icy cold, and finally feel exactly how you felt a lifetime ago, with snow falling peacefully on your face as you look out to the mountains. You are properly alone again. Properly, completely frozen, and alone. There is no one to misunderstand you here.

Svalbard was formerly led by whalers, trappers, and seal and walrus hunters. Now money is made from tourism, mining and research. Svalbard appropriately means 'cold edge' in Norwegian. It is the northernmost permanently inhabited area on earth, and as close as a mortal can get to the North Pole without actually seeing Santa's workshop. Longyearbyen is the largest settlement on the archipelago, and the seat of the Governor of Svalbard. The population is a mere 2, 600, while the population of polar bears is 3, 000. There's also reindeer, walruses, arctic foxes, seals and many different types of birds like artic terns.

Repeated ice ages created mountains, valleys and fjords, making all this a rugged yet fragile, breathtaking arctic wilderness with some very unique wildlife. The first signs of human life here were in the 17th century when it became a whaling base. It was then abandoned until coal mining began at the beginning of the 20th century. Our first day began down, down in the enveloping chill of a glacier. Around 60 percent of Svalbard is covered in them.

Longyearbyen experiences both the midnight sun and the polar night. The shortest day of the year is December 21, there are zero hours of daylight, while the longest day is June 20 with a full 24 hours of daylight. I arrived when the sun's rays started reaching the tops of the mountains, but was just shy of seeing the northern lights. Too bad, there is always next year.

On another day the dogs took us for a visit to a frozen waterfall.

I was reading an article, and when asked his reasoning for living here, a man said, "Well my wife left me, so I thought I might as well just come here."

A person comes to the arctic wilderness of Svalbard, not just to look at so many parts of the frozen tundra, or try to meet a polar bear, or even accidentally become more acutely aware of climate change. Most of all, a person who may or may not be in their right mind, would come to Svalbard to realize their true insignificance as a human being. And just how ultimately small a part we play on this earth.