This travel update is part six of our week in Longyearbyen, Norway. It covers July 31. “Any text in quotes and Italics has been copied and pasted from some informational website like Wikipedia.”

July 31, 2023 – Monday: Another Hike

Today’s hike was approximately 7 hours, beginning at 11am and ending around 5:45pm. We hike 8 miles, and climbed 601 feet, with the highest altitude being 2,734 feet and the lowest altitude being 2,133 feet.

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Patti copied the following information from the tour company’s website about this hike:

Svalbard Wildlife Expeditions AS / Foxfonna sommer | Svalbard Wildlife

Foxfonna: Start from the summit and explore glaciers and mountains. Historic drive: The trip is moderately demanding as we drive up Gruve 7 mountain before the hike further up the mountainside starts.

On the way to our starting point for the hike, we drive through Adventdalen, which has a lot of interesting history from Longyearbyen’s urban community to the present day. For example, our original airport where the Norwegian airline Braathens SAFE landed directly on the tundra when it was frozen, the water dam where we get our drinking water from, several disused coal mines and more.

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Martin was our guide this morning and he was about 20 minutes late picking us up. Elena, from Finland, was already in the van. Then we picked up Eva, from Poland. Martin drove us to his company’s building down at the waterfront and showed us a map of the hike and gave us some orientation. We all picked out our meal for the day, from the dehydrated meals available, and we each got a thermos of hot water. Today I chose Reindeer Stew. Then we all got back in the van.

We drove a few miles east of town to get to the trailhead. On the way we passed people who were on a 4X4 adventure.

And we passed people who were on a dogsled adventure. These are the summer sleds with wheels instead of skids.

That was fun to see. We had read about these adventures but decided we’d rather do hiking than riding.

Martin stopped at Mine #6 so we could get a picture of it. It’s not being used anymore. They used to use a bucket conveyor system, like a cable car, to get the coal to the power generating plant in town, but now they’re using trucks.

We drove on to Mine #7 which is the only coal mine currently active in Longyearbyen. Here we are in the parking lot. Patti had on all black today. Martin is in the yellow coat with the rifle, and he brought Tequila, a white Alaskan Husky (dog).

We walked up the mining company road a short way and passed these radio telescopes. Martin told us that they use them to help track rockets that are shot up from Ny Ålesund, which is not too far north of here. That sounds unlikely to me, but it’s what I was told.

Then we passed the Northern Lights Observatory.

This is from the website of the observatory: “The Kjell Henriksen Observatory (KHO) in Svalbard is an optical observatory located at the archipelago Svalbard 1000 km north of mainland Norway. Here more than 29 optical instruments as well as other non-optical instruments, are employed for research on the middle and upper atmosphere.”

A reindeer family was walking nearby.

When we left the road we walked up a rock field. I don’t really like walking on rock fields, the footing feels uncertain and I’m afraid I’ll turn my ankle. But, everybody was doing it as though it was a perfectly normal thing to do.

Here’s Patti hiking uphill through the rocks.

There were all kinds of different lichens on the rocks and Martin brought our attention to some of them.

That was interesting, you could probably spend quite a while here just learning all the different kinds of lichens. Martin said the reindeer eat some of the lichens here.

In case you’ve forgotten your basic lichen knowledge:

“A lichen is a composite organism that arises from algae or cyanobacteria living among filaments of multiple fungi species in a mutualistic relationship. Lichens are important actors in nutrient cycling and act as producers which many higher trophic feeders feed on, such as reindeer, gastropods, nematodes, mites, and springtails. Lichens have properties different from those of their component organisms. They come in many colors, sizes, and forms and are sometimes plant-like, but are not plants. They may have tiny, leafless branches (fruticose); flat leaf-like structures (foliose); grow crust-like, adhering tightly to a surface (substrate) like a thick coat of paint (crustose); have a powder-like appearance (leprose); or other growth forms.”

Here’s Patti discussing it with Martin while Tequila, the dog, looks for something to eat.

The sun was about the same height above the horizon as it has always been here.

When we got to the edge of the glacier we took a quick break.

About halfway up the glacier we stopped for lunch at this place where there were old pallettes, other pieces of wood, and a bunch of rocky core samples. Martin said they used to drill core samples at different places in the glacier. He also said we were directly above the coal mine at this point.

There were a lot of these fossils in the rocks today, I’m not sure what they are, possibly a terrestrial plant, or maybe an aquatic animal.

The clouds blew in so it got foggy. Here’s a picture of Patti walking downhill through a rock field in the clouds.

We got to a wet place where there was green and red moss. Martin said that the red color was actually caused by a parasite of the moss.

When we got close to the Minehead I took this picture of the parking lot with the mountains across the fjord as a backdrop. It looks like maybe they use shipping containers for storage.

When we got back to the van Martin dropped us off near our apartment. The hike today was not as grueling as yesterday’s, but we could still feel it in our joints.

Future Plans

• We are currently staying at an Airbnb in Longyearbyen.
• August 2: We fly SAS Airlines from Longyearbyen to Tromsø.
• August 2 – 10: We reserved an Airbnb in Tomsø.
• After Tromsø, we may head south down the coast of Norway, making reservations as we travel along.
• October 17 – December 3: No plans yet.
• December 3 – 9: I will be participating in research in Durham, North Carolina, at the Med-El facilities there. Med-El is the company that made my Cochlear Implant. I’ll spend 9am to 4pm for five days being a lab rat. They say they will test various new programming options for my cochlear implant with the goal of improving their systems. It should be fun. I’m looking forward to it.
• December 9: We drive to Bradenton, Florida
• December 9 – 31: We reserved a cabin at Horseshoe Cove RV Park in Bradenton, Florida, where we stayed last year for two months (November and December). We look forward to singing in the Christmas Choir again.

2024

• January through April: We plan to travel through Belize, Costa Rica, and Panama. We don’t have reservations yet.
• May and June: We reserved a cabin at Horseshoe Cove RV Park in Bradenton, Florida. We’ll spend these two months getting our yearly medical stuff done and visiting with family and friends. May and June are “off-season” in the Sarasota / Bradenton area, and the rate is $56 per night for these 61 days, which is pretty good for a place like this in this location. In season, January through March, the price doubles.
• After June 30, we have no plans, but we are entertaining options about where to travel next summer. Maybe Germany/Austria/Switzerland.