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Svalbard

The fragile Arctic environment in this remote corner of the North is still largely untouched

It's been called one of the most hostile places on earth. Svalbard, an island archipelago about the size of Ireland is located midway between mainland Norway and the North Pole. Sixty per cent of its surface is covered by glaciers, the permafrost is half a kilometre thick, and polar bears outnumber its human inhabitants. But its sinuous valley glaciers, sharp-crested mountains and ice-filled fjords possess a stark, primordial beauty that can only be found in the earth's most remote corners where man has not yet interfered with nature. Many people may see it as a lonely, hostile place but our week on Svalbard was definitely the highlight of our Norwegian adventure.

A few intrepid Scandinavian fishermen and hunters may have visited the archipelago as early as the 12th century but it was not officially "discovered" until 1596 when the Dutchman Willem Barentsz stumbled across it while searching for a northern water route to the Orient. He never found a Northeast Passage but Svalbard became a lucrative base for fishing, hunting and whaling that continued to thrive until the 1830s.

From Tromso in northern Norway our ship, the M/S Expedition, took two full days to reach the southern tip of Spitsbergen, the largest and only inhabited of Svalbard's islands. Near the end of our first day we passed tiny Bear Island, a precipitous pimple of basalt inhabited by thousands of nesting sea birds and nine people who tend one of the world's most remote weather stations and give ships like ours up-to-the-minute reports on sea and ice conditions.

After a second day at sea we saw the mountains of Svalbard looming against the northern horizon and an hour later our ship pushed her way through a band of ice flows and slipped into an open lead in Hornsund. The Expedition is not an icebreaker, but her hull is "ice reinforced," allowing us to push through fairly heavy pack ice and giving us the freedom to explore beyond the open water.

We spent most of our first day in Hornsund, working our way slowly through the pack ice in a futile search for polar bears. But, though no one saw a bear, there were plenty of other equally fascinating animals — ring seals and a variety of birds on the ice, an arctic fox and several small groups of reindeer on shore and — at the head of the inlet where the sea ends abruptly against the precipitous cliffs of a massive glacier — a pod of beluga whales appeared to be romping in the shallow water at the toe of the glacier. "They're rubbing themselves on the rocks," explained Tom, a zodiac driver with a Ph.D. in marine biology, "getting rid of their old winter skin."

The next morning we moved north and dropped anchor in Bellsund, a sprawling complex of fjords and inlets on the mountainous west coast of Spitsbergen Island, where we spent the next few days exploring on foot. Our small fleet of zodiacs, those stable little workhorses of the sea, was able to put us ashore almost anywhere along the coast. But hiking on Svalbard involves more than just lacing on a pair of boots. Polar bears, which have no fear of humans, are a real and constant threat throughout the islands. While hunting them is banned, people who wander through their territory are required to be armed for their own protection.

Before setting out on each hike the shoreline was scanned with binoculars and the first zodiac ashore carried three guards, each armed with binoculars, two-way radio and a high-powered rifle. They were stationed on heights of land along our route and until they gave the all clear we were not allowed on shore. At the time it seemed like an overreaction but a week after our return to Whistler the Globe and Mail reported an unprovoked polar bear attack on a group of thirteen British students who were camped on Spitsbergen Island. One teen was killed and four others injured.

For many years after Barentsz' discovery the Svalbard archipelago was uninhabited. The early whalers and hunters came and went with the summer sun, but in 1630 the British set up a base in Bellsund and became the first group known to overwinter on the islands. They survived but others were not so fortunate. The caretakers at a Dutch camp all perished the next winter and over the years scurvy and bitter cold took its toll, forcing most of the early settlements to be abandoned. But the island's rich wildlife resources continued to attract a few hardy individuals and small groups. Russian Pomors set up bases for hunting walruses, seals and beluga and Norwegian trappers came for polar bear and fox pelts.

Not much remains of this early human activity. In a treeless country, where rocks are the only available building material, every scrap of wood or metal is either recycled or burned as fuel. On one of our hikes we visited the site of a 1830s whaling camp where all that remains are the bleached bones of hundreds of belugas. Some of the camp's building material was probably scavenged to build and heat a nearby trapper's cabin. The tiny structure is still more or less intact and I tried to imagine what life must have been like for its occupant during the bitter cold and perpetual darkness of the Arctic winter. We also stumbled across some of his fox traps. These ingenious live traps were designed to hold rather than kill their victims. The trapper's motives were practical rather than humane — a freshly killed fox could be skinned and its carcass discarded on the spot — a frozen one would have to be lugged back to camp and thawed before removing its pelt.

Centuries of intensive hunting and whaling took many species to the brink of extinction. But Norway has now established seven national parks and twenty-three nature reserves on Svalbard. Together these provide protection for wildlife on two thirds of the Archipelago where even the most threatened species are now making a comeback.

This article is a part of a travel series that took Jack from Scotland to the Norweigan arctic. You can find the others in the series in the Pique on Feb.16, March 1, March 12, April 26, May 24 and June 21 of this year.