Day 3 was the day we got our farthest north – 80° 3″N and change. That’s less than 600 nautical miles from the north pole.
It started with a shore excursion at Texas Bar – a whimsically named trapper’s hut on a remote beach in a fjord that runs northward to the open Arctic Ocean. Here I got to hike up to a viewpoint with a great panorama of the bleak tundra landscape, the fjord, and the many glaciers feeding into it. But what was under foot caught my attention most today – the tiny tundra plants that struggle to make their existence in this bitter land. My favorite is the mounded blooming plant, often as much as a foot wide, called moss campion.
The lichens were also of special interest, particularly the ‘sunburst’ – bright orange in color. But look carefully at this close up – it is a veritable rock-garden, with many varieties all competing for this precious little space:
A moss-campion imitator also showed itself on this day’s hike. This is actually one of the many varieties of saxifrage that specialize in high arctic ecosystems. It is the Purple saxifrage or Lapland Rosebay (alternate name), and it is the official flower of the Canadian province of Nunavut.
It was in the evening when we had set sail, that we passed by Moffen Island, just north of 80°, and got a look at our first Walrus ‘haul-out’. Moffen Island is nothing but a gravel bar with a lagoon in the middle, and its a favorite walrus hang-out.
Day 4 featured more of the same. More Walrus (at a haul-out beside a very old Danish whaling station called Smeerenburg – see the headline photo), more saxifrage (this being the Tufted Saxifrage), and more lichen – a specially interesting black and green variety. And at the island of Ytre Norskoya (North Island), I grabbed a shot proving that even this far north there are mushrooms.
We did another ambitious hike on the morning of Day 5, where I got this nice view of Richardvatnet, a huge freshwater lake that nearly splits the Bruceneset peninsula in half. This is some remote country.
In the afternoon of Day 5 we were going to visit the calving front of a glacier at a place called Hamiltonbukta, but plans changed when the spotters caught sight of not one but two polar bears. These were bears number two and three as I number them in chronological order.
The above is a clip that I left out of the main Polar Bear Video, which was published earlier. It shows both bears separately, the first was a female on the move along the coast. She raised her nose and sniffed the other bear up on the hill – a sleeping male – and immediately jumped in the water and swam away, crossing the two-mile-wide fjord. The male, who was sleeping at the very top of the hill, then got up, walked no more than ten yards, and settled in a grassy nook that seemed to have a more comfortable ‘bed’.
This fella had no interest in moving, so eventually we headed over to some nearby noisy bird cliffs. The still photo gives an example of the concentration, and with the video I tried to capture the wide view and the noise – the racket made by them all.
Finally, we just whizzed past the glacier front where we had hoped to spend the afternoon among the calving icebergs.
Not to worry – the next day we were up close to another glacier front and witnessed four consecutive calving events and got some amazing video. Stay tuned.