yann in the arctic

Wednesday 11 February 2009

ice cave

The Longyearbreen ice cave has finally been found and opened. It's basically a melt water channel inside a glacier. At the moment not too many tourists have been inside and so the marvelous ice formations are still relatively intact.

This year it is found quite some way up the glacier, and so took us nearly 2 hours or so to reach by ski (last Saturday) - but it was well worth it :). We got to a part which was a bit steep, but obviously very icy and so going down would have been easy, but not going back up - so we stopped there.

And then, a few days later, a few of us decided to go back - this time with some equipment and see how far we could reach. We got to the slippery slopes which was no problem, and finally reached what can only be described as a frozen lake. The ice looked pretty solid, but we could see some water seeping through. A few meters later we were presented with a small wall of ice, which we decided to climb. Going up was quite straight forward. However, the "frozen lake" ice randomly collapse and one of us (I was still hanging on the ice wall) went right through a layer of slush. Nothing too frightening except that he got very cold feet, which wasn't very fun especially since it took me ages to climb back down. When we (finally) got out of the ice cave, there was a mini whiteout and one of the scooters stopped working (obviously) so we had to toe it down with the other scooter. Overall we had just had a mini adventure :)