Where the plane lands at the edge of the ice, the schooner waits

The question always surfaces at the same moment, once the daydream of that first fresh line has settled. A client looks at me, eyes lit up at the thought of Spitsbergen, then the brow furrows: "But honestly, Boris — how do we actually get there? It's the end of the world, isn't it?" Yes, it's far. Beyond the 78th parallel north, on one of the last white lands left on the planet. And no, it's not complicated. Two flights from home, and the quay at Longyearbyen opens up in front of you, the schooner already moored, ready to slip her lines and head for the ice.

Maybe that's the finest sleight of hand in the whole expedition: the distance you took for a wall turns out to be the first step of the adventure.

From the air: the Arctic sea carrying its rafts of ice, a walrus stretched out on a floe — this is how far north you've come.

The last flight north

It all starts with an ordinary flight to mainland Norway. Oslo, most often. From there the journey changes character. You board a scheduled service — the Norwegian carriers fly to the archipelago year-round — and the aircraft turns hard north.

From Oslo, reckon on roughly three hours twenty of direct flying. Some services stop at Tromsø, Norway's big Arctic city; add about an hour if so. And if you set off from Tromsø itself, the hop up to Svalbard takes only an hour forty. Which is to say that reaching Spitsbergen is little more than a formality once you've grasped the shape of it: a long-haul leg to Norway, a domestic flight out to the far edge. Two tickets.

What a map can't tell you is the moment the landscape gives way. Below the wing, green and jagged Norway fades out. The sea takes over the whole frame, slate grey, then starts carrying rafts of ice. And on a May day, that last leg happens in broad daylight at hours when, back home, it would be pitch dark: you're entering the country of the midnight sun — but that's another story, the one I tell in the piece on Spitsbergen's light.

At the head of a frozen fjord, the boat has opened its channel through the pack ice — here the route is no longer read off a map.

Longyearbyen, the door to the white

The plane sets down at Svalbard Airport, five kilometres from Longyearbyen. It's the northernmost scheduled airport on the planet: the last stretch of tarmac before the pack ice. You come down the steps and the air grabs you, dry and cutting, carrying a smell of snow and sea I can only describe one way — clean cold.

Longyearbyen is the archipelago's main settlement, a handful of brightly painted houses wedged between the mountains and the fjord, the last inhabited outpost before hundreds of kilometres of nothing. This is where the expedition takes shape. You don't face the Arctic on your own: from the moment you land, everything is taken care of, right down to the quay. The transfer, the last kit checks, the walk to the harbour — the logistics are handled so that all you have to do is look up.

For those who like to check things before they go, the territory's official tourist board, Visit Svalbard, keeps the practical travel information up to date, and Avinor, which runs the airport, sets out the routes. Svalbard is a regulated territory too, under the authority of the Governor of Svalbard — and that's part of what keeps its silence intact.

Longyearbyen's harbour, the last inhabited outpost — this is where the expedition puts to sea.

The Noorderlicht's gangway

Then you see her, at the quay. The Noorderlicht, a two-masted schooner, her red steel hull built with a reinforced bow to bite into the ice. She was built in 1910, re-rigged in 1991, and she carries her age the way old boats know how to: not a scrap of show, all quiet toughness. There are never more than twelve skiers aboard. That's a choice, not a limit of space: twelve is the number that lets everyone find their own line, and lets the crew know each of us by first name within two days.

You climb the gangway, drop your bag, take possession of your bunk. The engine begins to push, low and steady, and the quay starts to slide away. The houses shrink. Longyearbyen becomes a coloured line, then a dot, then nothing. All that's left is the fjord opening ahead of the bow and a certainty that settles in your gut: from here on, it's the sea that decides the route.

This is the real turning point of the trip. You've left the plane, the town, the landmarks behind. What comes next isn't read off a flight plan but off the ice, the weather and the shape of the land that day.

The Noorderlicht at anchor beneath the glaciers — two masts, a reinforced red steel hull, twelve skiers aboard.

The sea takes over from the ski

Once the lines are slipped, the route never sets hard. The boat follows the snow. From Isfjorden to the approaches of Ny-Ålesund, we pick each anchorage by what the day offers: where the ice lets us through, where a slope runs all the way down to the sea, where the wind has dropped. That's the rare freedom of ski and sail — the base camp floats and moves with you.

Each morning you step ashore at the foot of the slopes. The skiing runs at an easy self-reliant pace: four to six hours out, skins under the skis for the climb, eight hundred to nearly a thousand metres of ascent to earn a summit that drops straight into the fjord. I won't lay out the rhythm of a full week aboard here — the account from the deck to the summit does it better than this paragraph could. Just know that the first line, in snow no one has touched, with the schooner a small black speck on the sea below, needs no commentary.

Skins under the skis, a pause above the glacial fjord — ahead, the ice runs all the way down to the sea.

In the evening you come back aboard. The chef has dinner ready, you thaw out, you go back over the day. Some give in to the Arctic ritual — the plunge into the freezing water, two seconds that rinse away every trace of tiredness. And there's that silence, vast, the like of which I've found nowhere else. From the deck you watch: a walrus stretched out on a floe, a whale you sense by its distant spout, sometimes a pale shape on the horizon you study from a distance, from the safety of the boat. Nothing you'd try to approach. Everything you're lucky enough to watch go by.

Life on deck between climbs — amid the drifting ice, crew and skiers work the lines together.

The end of the world is two flights away

That's what I tell people now, when they ask how you get "so far away." You get there the way you get anywhere: you take one plane, then another. Except that at the end there isn't one more airport, but a schooner at the quay, a fjord opening up and weeks of snow no one has signed their name to.

You live that same shift elsewhere, at other latitudes: aboard the schooner in Greenland, or facing the peaks of the Lofoten that drop into Norway's fjords. But Spitsbergen keeps something apart — the feeling of going all the way to the edge of the map.

If you want the whole picture of this expedition and of life aboard, start with the Svalbard ski and sail pillar. And when the question stops being "how do we get there" and becomes "when do we leave," discover [the Svalbard ski and sail expedition](/en/ski-sailing-svalbard) and drop us a line: we'll pencil in an option and look at the dates together.