600km across Spitsbergen

Spitsbergen is the largest of the Arctic islands that make up the Norwegian Svalbard. Made famous by Phillip Pullman's 'Northern Lights', the isolated outcrop is perhaps as renown for its polar bear inhabitants as it as for its midnight sun. Situated approximately halfway between Norway and the North Pole, it provided serial adventurer David Leaning and his companions with a desolate and dangerous landscape upon which to complete a 600km ski traverse. This is his story.

On returning from an expedition in 2008 where he skied the length of Norway, and after walking across Australia in 2009, 30-year-old David Leaning set about planning an adventure that would take him across 600km of Svalbard's glacial terrain. The trip was to span 28 days, taking the team of three from the settlement of Longyearbyen, situated in the middle of the island, to the northernmost tip. It would bring them within 600km of the North Pole and take them through some of the most beautiful and jagged ice forms on the planet.

Leaning, a former Royal Marine who served in Afghanistan, had lost friends to landmines  and so chose the HALO landmine charity as motivation for the Svalbard trip. He set about  recruiting a team to accompany him as, unlike his previous expeditions, he knew this one could not be tackled alone.

After training with the Norwegian Royal Marines in sub-zero temperatures and gathering specialist equipment to work in -40ºC, Leaning, along with Apostolos Alafogiannis of Greece and Anton Havas of Sweden, set off on March 24th. “We packed all the necessary equipment and more – the military taught me to always have a backup,” Leaning tells WideWorld. The three carried in their 70kg sledges an EPIRB locator beacon, satellite phone, a colossal first aid kit and all mountain rescue equipment so they were prepared for all eventualities.

After a week the trio reached the once-thriving but now deserted Soviet-era mining town of Pyramiden. After a week of sleeping in temperatures below -30ºC, an attempt to bribe the six remaining workers with cigarettes in exchange for a warm room for the night was foiled by the fact that none of the Russians apparently smoked. With morale low and only Willies World Class Hot Chocolate for comfort, Pyramiden, a site currently being developed as a tourist site, proved to be a depressing spot for the team to spend their rest day. “I am now convinced that hell is staffed by Russians,” Leaning jokes.

The following week it became clear why the men had been told to carry rifles: they stumbled across a polar bear with her cubs. Most of the time, Leaning said they were out of sight, but one day he saw a female bear walking in the opposite direction. His team were always on their guard. “I got a sense that they can see you but you can't see them,” Leaning says. “We would each have an independent feeling of being watched”. Alongside polar bears, this sparse habitat is also home to a multitude of birds, white grouse, seals and a unique species of  reindeer with shorter legs than their more famous cousins. 

After traversing the large Asgard glacier, the team reached their half way point – having so far avoided the risk of avalanches, crevasses and potentially dangerous weather conditions. Leaning describes how reaching this coastal strip was an emotional landmark in their trip and from there on, motivation was easy to find. “The landscape was vast, slow moving and ancient, the mountains seemed to fall into the sea, we were relieved to have got so far” After two weeks of closely rationed toilet paper and dehydrated foods, it was at this point that the men allowed themselves to dream of the things they were missing most: pizza, flushing toilets and civilization. “All we could think of was fast food, we craved variety and I was losing a lot of weight,” Leaning says. “The thought of reaching home motivated us to carry on”

Their return, however, did not run smoothly and as the journey progressed they were forced to divert off the huge Asard glacier earlier than expected due to a bad weather warning. The nature of the ice-age formations on Spitsbergen cuts the plateau into fjords, valleys, mountains and crevasses. The route that Leaning was directed down was treacherous. Without being roped up to his team members, he fell into a deep crevasse with only his rifle on his back somehow gripping the ice and slowing his fall. “I couldn’t see the bottom and thought ‘How am I going to get out of this?’,” he says.

Eventually, his teammates pulled him out with ropes and they continued on their journey. But their trial was not to end there. With the impending storm approaching, the men became stranded on the glacier in the middle of a deadly minefield of crevasses. The fact that they were supporting HALO – a land mine charity – on this expedition, seems only ironic in hindsight. In gale force winds and spindrift, Leaning says he spent the most terrifying night in a tent, weakly pitched against nature's forces. The wind changed direction overnight and the guy ropes snapped. “It was impossible to move the strongest aspect of the tent to face the wind when it changed direction by 90 degrees,” Leaning says, so instead the trio endured a sleepless 12 hours sitting out the storm.

After crossing three glaciers in three days and having skied 50km in 12 hours, under the fading light of the midnight sun, Leaning's team finally reached Longyearbyen, the town they had set off from 28 days previously, on April 20. As the sun disappeared fleetingly, before rising again for the last time for several months, the three men were welcomed back into civilization after 28 days of solitude. The trio found the solar display a fitting end to an emotional voyage.

On returning to the UK Leaning has slowly regained weight and has readjusted to a more varied diet. He still has no feeling in his toes but says this is to be expected. Next, he plans to tackle an expedition in warmer weather – a more cultural adventure, he says, as opposed to something more akin to 'do or die'. “Maybe I'll walk across America or go somewhere hot,” he says. Somewhere with no polar bears, perhaps.

The HALO Trust works to remove landmines from war zones. To support HALO's ongoing mission to rid the world of landmines and to make a donation visit  www.halotrust.org. To visit Leaning's expedition website and see pictures, maps, and read the online diary you can visit www.coldshores.co.uk