The trip to the East Coast was fantastic, but shitcold. We didn't have a thermometer but suspect the temperature to have dropped below -35 on the sea ice on the East coast. Were all half-frozen, especially as the wind picked up on the way over the ice fields going back. The windchill was terrible!!! But, who cares about cold when in a place like this? Everything white, it's all about shape and light. I had this eerie feeling I was in space. Coming to think of it, the similarities between Svalbard in the winter and space are greater than the similarities between Svalbard in the winter and downtown Oslo.

The next day Sigmund (another guide) and I got to do another trip to check out conditions, a really long one. The highlight was when we drove up along the Fridtjov-glacier, a spectacular glacier who had a surge a few years ago and is totally crevasse-ridden. The scenery is absolutely fantastic and the drive was an easy one, apart from us having to dig and sweat for an hour in a steep snowfilled hill for getting the sledge with the emergency equipment up. We tried everything we'd been tought to do in such situations but nothing worked (we have new scooters now who simply are not as powerful as the ones we had before, but they are 4-stroke (like a car engine) so they are much better for the environment, and for your ears!), until Sigmund used his mountain-climbing skills and rigged a lever-system... very clever indeed! I'm always learning something new up here, almost every day.