Jessica and I were apart for 7 weeks this summer, travelling on different continents for 5 of them. She went to Canada for family fun, drinking and warm weather, I travelled to Spain to hang out with my family and went sailing for a week with my best buddy Henning. Great summer for the both of us !
After only a short time back in the arctic, we were heading out on a "beach cleaning project" with the governor. Every year, for the past 14 years, locals from Longyearbyen enter a raffle to hopefully be chosen for this 4 day trip to the northern part of our island. Out of 300 or so people applying this year, we were 2 of the 20 people picked. Talk about lucky. The purpose of the trip is to clean up some of the most remote beaches in the world. You could likely be thinking: "Ya, ok beach cleaning in northern Svalbard with the governor, a boat ride up north, a helicopter trip, this is all just a gimmick and ya ok you'll pick some garbage up, sure. This is what I was thinking anyway before going; however, the boat was amazing, the helicopter flight was awesome, but I honestly have never seen so much garbage in one place other than at a dump. And we're talking remote beaches here!
We headed out on the governors ship "Nordsyssel" around noon on saturday, found our room, met with the others and had a great night all of being very excited to get to go up north on the island.
Once there, we were divided into 2 smaller groups, each with one police officer as our designated driver of the zodiac boats we would use to get to shore, to pick as much garbage as we could find.
Sure enough there was pretty quickly a competition between the two groups to collect the most. We would walk the beach (5 people) filling up garbage bags, before handing them over to the zodiac boat to fill 1 cubic meter bags, which, after filling 2 or 3 of them would then be taken to the bigger ship.
For the next three days, we picked and cleaned several kilometres of coastline, picking up a total of 78 cubic meters of garbage (around 27300kg). All sorts of garbage. For some weird reason we found a ton of shoes (!) (mainly left shoes...) There must have been tens of kilometres of fishing nets, ropes and plastic package ribbons (like the ones that are around newspaper stacks). There were lightbulbs, ketchup bottles, dead birds and reindeers tangled up in ropes, gloves, jackets, kids toys, plastic bags, coke bottles, And everything else you can imagine. I cannot stress how much plastic there was, just kilometers of plastic.
Currents have it so that garbage from all over the northern hemisphere finds it way to Svalbard, so there was quite the variety. You would find packages with Russian writing on them.
We also got to see great wildlife (walrus swimming and showing off), icebergs (I'm talking real icebergs up close and personal), old trapping stations, and yes, never ending glaciers on our helicopter flight back to Longyearbyen. It was an hour and a half in a helicopter, in the most beautiful bluebird weather.
For those who are interested (Øyvind), our ship took us from Longyearbyen up the western coast and right up to Verlegenhuken over night. This was the first area of beaches that we cleaned. We then went over to Kinnvika where we visited the old trappers station and went for a short hike up Kinnberget. We then sailed to the northern part of Lågøy and cleaned some beaches there. That night we sailed to Himmelbukta in Rijpfjorden and cleaned the beaches in there. We were well over 80 degrees north the entire time, so I was pretty pumped about that as it was my first time.
Use this link to find these places if you want, it's a really good map.
http://toposvalbard.npolar.no/
Hauling garbage back to the boat.
Jessica got to see a bunch of icebergs, and was really stoked. This was the first one.
Fun little blackboard in an old geology station built in the 50's, left in the late 60's.
Same station, seen from the outside.
Roof decorations in an old trapper station.
One of the stations had an old band wagon.
Remains of an old polar bear skeleton.
It's nice, and a bit creepy to see that once there were normal people living here...
Lunch break; in the background the small boat we would use to transport garbage, and our selves to and from shore.
This guy popped up one day and gave us quite the show.
A trapper station from 1908. 5 guys lived in it for 3 years hunting and gathering.
We were part of an art project, that focuses on portraying the painting "the scream" out of garbage. It will be an exhibition in Oslo. This garbage was found within 50 meters of where we took the picture... plus a little drift wood.
Got super tired of hauling huge fishing nets like this into the boat. This one was 2 meters wide and 40 meters long...
Jessica had never been in a helicopter. The trip we had back was just beautiful, great weather over beautiful landscape.
The ship "Nordsyssel" were we stayed for 3 nights, as we were leaving by helicopter.
A glacier covering Nordauslandet; the biggest glacier on Svalbard. It took us 15 minutes to fly across it, doing 280 kilometers an hour.
Still stoked, after 50 minutes of flying.
Glad to be back, after a meaningful journey.
