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June 13, 2024 - In-Svalbard
Today I’ve scheduled an early hike up near the Svalbard Global Seed Vault. I wake up and spend a bit of time on repacking my bag - it’s a bit wet outside, with low hanging clouds and a fine mist in the air. I grab breakfast and swing by the front desk to snag a sandwich and a water bottle for the hike - it’s still early and none of the stores are open yet. I go outside and find a bench out by the antler-ornamented property gate, tucked in between a few Christmas trees. Here I sit, gazing past a few cargo containers out across the fjord to the mountains beyond. I had to book this hike with an activity provider here on Svalbard, since I’m not licensed to carry a rifle here; my current spot sitting in the pines is a bus stop, and my ride should be here any minute.
While I sit waiting, a group of four other people come out and wait at the bus stop as well. One of them introduces herself as Reina, and mentions the whole group is from the Netherlands. She asks if I’m waiting to go on the same hike as them, up to a mountain peak at the far end of Adventdalen called Trollsteinen. I am not, and inform them my hike is a shorter one going up Blomsterdalen and back around to the Seed Vault. They mention they did that hike yesterday, and that it’s really windy at the top. The four of them get picked up by a van before me, and I’m told by the driver that my own guide would be around shortly. In accordance with their promise, five more minutes pass and another van pulls up the drive to the gate. A tall man dressed head to toe in lightweight waterproof garb hops out and shakes my hand, telling me his name is Jonas and he’d be my guide for the morning. Two others accompany us on the hike, a man by the name of Harold from New York and a woman from Germany named Lina. One is a corporate finance lawyer, the other distributes financial aide to university students through an academic exchange service; both are here on vacation escaping solo to the arctic. We drive over to a warehouse on the fjord, the headquarters for this activity provider. Inside we duck into a side room as I see the group of four I met earlier, along with a few additional people, being briefed on their full-day excursion into the mountains. Jonas gives our smaller group a quick run down of the hike and after signing a waiver we head back out to the van and are on our way.
On the drive to the trailhead Jonas tells us he’s been in Svalbard since 2020, around the beginning of covid. He’s originally from Sweden, just outside of Stockholm - he doesn’t care for the city much, and really loves the quiet and isolation of Svalbard. He got his degree in outdoor studies, and has been working for this particular activity provider as a guide for a while now. We wind our way up the road, past the airport, onto a dirt path and into the hills - we stop at a nondescript patch of earth and hop out of the van. Jonas pulls a pack out of the back, followed by a bolt-action rifle that he cycles and slots vertically into the hiking pack. He looks around while explaining why the rifle is needed, though we are all well aware of the firearm requirement outside of the city limits. We’re soon on our way up the mountain, stopping a few times to take a look at reindeer trotting past and shrub-like purple flowers that are beginning to spring up out of the muddy earth. The terrain quickly turns from muddy slush to rocky soil. Patches of snow begin to appear, and the cloud cover drops ever lower the further up the mountain we climb. There’s an excellent view out over the fjord, looking back towards the airport. We reach several portions of the hike completely covered in snow, and I carefully place my steps in the footprints of the person in front of me. The wind picks up now, and by the time we reach a false peak with four stone cairns erected as a marker, sleet is pelting our faces at a nearly perfectly horizontal angle. The wind howls and is whipped up from Blomsterdalen on our right, the valley dropping away from the path at a sharp vertical angle. The view of the fjord is obscured in a gray haze.
Jonas checks on everyone in the party and the drops his pack next to one of the cairns. He points uphill towards one final cairn at the actual summit, not much further. Once we traverse the final bit of the hike, we find a metal container bolted to the rock - inside is a waterproof dry-bag. Inside of the dry-bag is a journal, and inside of the journal is a pencil for us to add our names to a list of those who also visited this place. I regret not getting a photo of my own name, but you’ll have to forgive me: I’m clutching the journal in a death grip as I sign it and hold it for others as they do the same, making sure the pages don’t rip away in one of the gusts that continue to batter us. Jonas jokes that he’d normally have us take a break and eat a snack here but today it doesn’t seem like the right place. We all turn and pick our way back down to the false peak. On the way back to the van our guide points out the black soil under foot - it’s coal, exposed and laying on the ground all around us. There’s an old abandoned mine entrance collapsed and covered by snow drifts, marked with a piece of wood sticking up out of the ground; it lies hidden right next to the path we took up the mountain. The mine was apparently a short-lived single-man operation, a remnant from a bygone era.
Back down at the van we have black currant tea and some snacks, then head towards the Seed Vault, which isn’t so far from the original trailhead. On the way up I mention my own interests in the vault. Jonas tells me he came up to the vault during the winter with Dyveke, the artist who’s responsible for the artwork installation ‘Perpetual Repercussion’ that shimmers on the front of the vault - at the time the art’s fiber optic cables needed to be installed, replacing bulbs that previously backlit the piece, and Jonas served guard duty while Dyveke ducked in and out of the vault taking care of the work. He mentions that the artist told him explicitly that the artwork does not represent the northern lights (a common misperception), which she found impossible to replicate in phenomenon and beauty. Instead, she used prisms and glass to reflect light during the midnight sun of the summer and amplify the fiber optic light source in the 24 hour darkness of the winter, speaking to the self-reflection that the very nature of the vault’s presence evokes in those that visit it. Jonas suggests a literal interpretation of seeing lights far away in a fog, knowing they’re coming from a non-natural source but not quite being able to make out what it is. Dyveke herself talks about the artwork more in this interview: https://www.dyvekesanne.com/www.dyvekesanne.com/text_Believer.html
There are three information signs at a visitor’s lot for the seed vault. Anyone can drive up here if they have the means, and the area isn’t cordoned off or restricted. Up ahead we see several pickup trucks outside the vault entrance, sitting between the tessellated structure of the vault’s field office and the adjacent stark gray triangle of concrete of the vault itself rising up out of the mountain. This is unusual, according to the guide - there’s normally no one ever up here. We can see people walking in and out of the vault itself. Several weeks ago, I reached out to CropTrust and NordGen (the joint organizations responsible for the seed vault’s operation) letting them know about my travel plans and asking if there was any chance I could visit the field office and maybe step inside the vault. At the time, they said it wouldn’t be possible because they only have employees there two or three times a year to process and store seeds when they’re shipped to Svalbard - seeing the activity up ahead, I become highly suspicious. As we draw closer, it is evident that the activity is neither CropTrust nor NordGen; instead, vehicles are marked with the insignia of Avinor and Statsbygg. Jonas points them out, telling us that Avinor is the security and aviation company on the island, and Statsbygg is a nationalized real estate and logistics company. Based on this, they must be maintaining the alarms or IT systems. We stay out of the employees’ way as they duck in and out of the vault door, quickly tapping their credentials at the card reader and disappearing inside. Jonas tells us that Statsbygg owns 30% of Svalbard’s land, and I later learn they own the land the vault is located on, holding the keys and managing credentials for facility access. During the course of this discussion I also learn that any publicly-commissioned Norwegian building must have a budget allotted for artwork.
I’m a bit staggered by the percentage of land ownership our guide quoted, especially because I’d learned just prior to beginning travel that Store Norske (also nationalized) owns another 40% of all properties in and around Longyearbyen. I mention this to Jonas, and he nods in a way that signals this isn’t hidden knowledge on the island. On the way back down from the vault and on the drive back to Longyearbyen, we talk about housing and jobs in Svalbard. Svalbardmelding comes up - the report expresses a desire for a higher percentage of Norwegian citizens on the island without allowing for expansion, thus implying but not explicitly stating the supplanting of non-Norwegians is a goal of the state. The nation isn’t allowed to restrict visas, or regulate who travels in and out of Svalbard, but they’re finding ways to enforce the aforementioned goal all the same. Jonas is Swedish, working on his Norwegian citizenship - any Norwegian company that employs him here has to pay an additional enterprise tax to the Norwegian government because they are allowing a non-citizen to work in a Norway-administered zone, wherein emergency, civic, and legislative services are paid for by the tax-base in the mainland. Our guide talks about all of this in a very matter-of-fact tone, though an obvious air of skepticism begins to emerge when we discuss the tourism industry - a majority of hotel and hospitality jobs are currently staffed by Thai and Filipino people who have lived here for years and call this place home. He points this out blatantly, followed by “…it doesn’t make much sense. They [referring to the mainland Parliment] sort of just pass laws here, and don’t really think about them, what it actually means”.
It feels important to mention that Svalbard’s local government is only advisory to national leadership; they have limited agency despite living here. To make matters worse, voting laws were recently changed in Longyearbyen; the qualifications shifted away from a vesting period of permanent residency, now requiring one to have lived for a minimum of three years in mainland Norway before they’re able to vote here on the island (reasoning that one should have a Norwegian understanding of conservation and environmental consciousness before being eligible to weigh in on matters in Svalbard). This immediately disqualifies a large portion of the 2,000 permanent residents here from voting for their local leadership, even if they’ve lived in Longyearbyen for years. It also reduces the chance that Longyearbyen councilmembers will ever be comprised of anything other than Norwegians.
We continue the discussion, circling back to Store Norske and Statsbygg - Jonas explains that getting housing is really difficult in Longyearbyen. The company you work for basically has to supply it - this is a point I didn’t understand until later: because nationalized companies own the housing stock, they supply certain allowances to companies they’ve permitted to operate in the area. The company is then responsible for distributing housing to their own employees. This is another reason Norwegian operators must pay an additional tax for any non-Norwegian citizens sheltered via their services. In Jonas’ words, “if you have a job, you’re almost guaranteed housing. And if you have housing, you probably already have a job here.” Equally concerning is the fact that up to 800 tourists can be accommodated in Longyearbyen at one time (in a town with 2,000 ‘permanent’ residents). Assuming the private ownership of the hotels is occupying some portion of the remaining 30% of properties, you begin to realize the magnitude of this housing conundrum. Recall that Svalbardmelding forbids additional housing construction (including hotels), emphasizing instead the renovation and remediation of existing stock.
Just before we get back to Mary Ann’s we pass a troup of trailers branded ‘Polar X’. Jonas points them out and mentions they’re a film production company that specializes in arctic action scenes. They’ve filmed scenes for the new Superman movie up here, and the most recent Mission Impossible. I hop out at the gates to my hotel, shake Jonas’ hand, and say goodbye to Lina and Harold. The former is going on a dog sledding trip tomorrow for her birthday, and the latter boards a ship this evening for an 8-day photography cruise into the waters on the north side of the island.
After a shower and food, my path leads me back into town. On the way out of the hotel, I get this odd feeling that someone has placed more Christmas trees out in the yard and rearranged them since I left this morning. I pick my way through the maze of amber pines and cross the bridge over the stream. There’s another reindeer grazing in an apartment building’s backyard. In town I visit the post office and a few smaller stores in the area. I make it a point to go to the grocery store, ‘Co-op’. Inside, you could never tell you were in a place with shipping constraints and logistic challenges. Fresh produce sits on shelves, entire walls of freezer coolers are fully stocked, and the place is seriously just shy of an American supermarket. The department store half of ‘Co-op’ has a section of home furnishings, furniture, and rugs; electronics, batteries, cookware, everything you’d expect to find are all, organized into rows and rows of aisles. I’m struck by the sheer range of products and goods offered. I buy some sandwich materials, a package of cookies, and at the last minute I snag a copy of the Svalbardposten (the local newspaper) and drop them all back off at my room.
Hurrying back outside, I march up the valley for about 20 minutes to a building called Svalbardhallen. On the way I see the remnants of the oldest mine, Gruve 1, on the hillside up above the town’s only church building; children are out on bikes and there’s many individuals jogging around the hillsides. When I arrive at the sportshall about halfway up Adventdalen, a group of people are gathering outside - this is the volunteer clean up that Trina mentioned to me yesterday. My email to the community organization Aktiv i Friluft last night was returned by Lene, the org leader and organizer of today’s event. She now stands on a stack of pallets in front of roughly 35 people, handing out maps, gloves, and trash bags while assigning groups to go pick up litter around different Longyearbyen neighborhoods. I join a group of five younger individuals led by a woman named Jessica, and we all introduce ourselves to each other. We pile into a yellow pickup truck and drive over to Blåmyra, a cluster of residential buildings where several of these individuals live. We spend the next two hours combing through Blåmyra, filling several 50-gallon trashbags each with plastic, paper, and metal waste that’s collected in the rocks and drainage culverts underneath the buildings. I pick my way underneath several of the buildings themselves, huge concrete pylons suspending the base of each apartment complex about 6’ off of the ground with conduits, piping, and insulation peeking out every now and then. Sometimes a raised wooden path meanders its way under the buildings, and other times there’s a bike rack or two tucked away. We eventually reach an open yard filled with snowmobiles parked for the summer and proceed to collect about 50 wooden pallets out of the yard that don’t have a vehicle parked on top of them, platforms that are otherwise decaying in the soggy grass. This is actually pretty exhausting work, and I’m sweating in the cool afternoon air by the time Jessica tells us it’s time to wrap things up and head down to the beach on the fjord. At the next location, Lene has set up a barbecue, and I sit enjoying pølse with the group I’d just worked with for the past several hours. It’s only at this point they learn I’m just visiting, and I describe my interest with Svalbard - they seem to think the place is pretty mundane, especially the architecture, but are grateful and a bit surprised I joined the group today.
As everyone is leaving the barbecue, I’m invited to dinner the next day by one of the people I was working with earlier, Sander. He says some friends are grabbing gyros at a local spot tomorrow, and I should join if I’d like to meet some more people that live and work here. The beach is not very far from my hotel, so I walk back and change clothes before going back to Svalbar for a bit more food - the pølse was good but it hadn’t quite done enough after the intensity of today’s activities. It happens to be trivia night at Svalbar, and the place is packed compared to yesterday. Because I’m sitting alone, I’m invited by a group of three people to join their team. They all work for the Svalbard Hotel across the street from this particular establishment, and over the course of the evening we’re slowly joined by others working at the same hotel. We get nearly every question wrong, but somehow don’t come in last place. Afterwards, we go to a spot called Karlsberger Pub that’s a bit of a local spot paying heritage to mining history in Longyearbyen - here I meet even more people working in the myriad hospitality jobs available here. One of them sports a Michigan Wolverines sweater and shows it off after learning where I’m from, though he concedes he doesn’t have any ties or connections to the University.
Back at Mary Ann’s a bit later, I grab a cup of tea from the living room and briefly meet two Americans here on vacation. Also in the lounge is the group of four hikers that I’d met at the beginning of the day - we talk about our respective hikes and I learn that two of them are getting married the next day. After congratulating them I take my tea back to my room and drift off after a long, long day.
location: Longyearbyen (SJ)
ext air temp: 37.2 F
relative humidity: 65.1%
dew point: 27.6 F
wet bulb: 33.6 F
ground temp: --