Skiing Svalbard, Where the Polar Bear Still Rules

There he was, out on the pack ice, maybe a kilometre off. A cream smudge against the white, dead still, then a slow shift along an edge of ice. From the deck of the Noorderlicht, a mug of coffee going cold in my hands, nobody said a word for a full minute. We weren't hunting that moment — it was given to us. The polar bear, at home, at his own distance, entirely uninterested in our schooner. That's the first thing I want to say to anyone who asks me whether Svalbard is dangerous: the first time you see the bear, danger isn't what comes to mind. What comes to mind is how lucky you are to be skiing here.

A bear spotted from the deck, well off — the only way we ever want to meet him.

I'm Boris Malesset. I've made my living from off-piste skiing since 2001, and I led this ski-and-sail expedition to Svalbard. The bear question comes up every single time, often before anyone asks about the level or the snow. It's a fair question. It deserves an honest answer — neither buried nor dramatised. So here's how it actually works, day after day, when you ski the one white desert in Europe where the great white predator still lives free.

A white desert he still owns

Svalbard is Spitsbergen and its islands, north of the 78th parallel. An archipelago the map almost forgets, you climb so high up the page to find it. In late May the sun no longer sets: it swings low along the horizon, the light stays raking all night, and you ski under this midnight sun that turns the snow gold and rose for hours on end.

Up here, man never really took over. A handful of inhabited specks — Longyearbyen, Ny-Ålesund — and beyond them, fjords, glaciers, slopes that drop straight into a black sea. The polar bear moves through it wild, on the pack ice and along the coasts. He isn't an attraction and he isn't scenery: he owns the place. And that is exactly what makes skiing Svalbard unlike anywhere else. You aren't skiing a resort, or even a range: you're the guest of a territory still intact, where you take the measure of your own smallness. The Norwegian Polar Institute, which follows this wildlife closely, puts the rarity of that balance into perspective better than I can.

Late May, and the sun stops setting: the light swings low along the horizon for hours.

The boat picks the route, the sea gives the orders

Everything turns on the Noorderlicht. A two-masted schooner built in 1910, re-rigged in 1991, a steel hull with an ice-strengthened bow. She takes twelve skiers, maximum — not one more. That number isn't a comfort detail: it's what keeps us mobile, discreet, and quick to decide.

Because in Svalbard the route is not fixed in advance on a plan. It gets chosen from the sea, day after day, reading the ice, the weather and the terrain. Every morning we weigh up where the pack has opened, where the wind has loaded or scoured the snow, where the slopes are holding. We land at the foot of the slopes, by zodiac, on a spot we've assessed before a single boot touches the shore. This isn't improvisation — it's the opposite. We commit only to landings chosen with full knowledge of what's around. And the first thing that goes into that choice, before the snow itself, is what the crew has been watching along the shore.

That freedom of the boat is also where the calm of the whole thing comes from. The base camp floats, moves, pulls away from a bay we don't like the look of. You're never boxed in.

The Noorderlicht is a floating base camp; the foot of the slopes is a zodiac ride away.

The quiet watch, while you clip in

Outside the settlements, Svalbard's rules — set by the Sysselmesteren, the Governor of the archipelago — require you to take precautions against the bear and to carry a means of deterrence. That's the law of the place, and it's a sound one. It doesn't say "this is dangerous, stay home"; it says "you are entering a wild animal's ground, behave accordingly."

In practice it looks like very little, and that's precisely why it reassures. When we land, an experienced polar-terrain professional keeps watch while we clip in and sort ourselves out. His eyes sweep the horizon, the ridgelines, the ice edges. He knows the signs, he knows the distances, and he carries the deterrent the rules require. I make no heroics of it: in truth, that equipment exists only never to be used. The whole skill lies in seeing the bear long before he ever becomes a subject — and in adjusting the day, the bay, the timing, upstream of the problem.

That's where the real safety lives: in anticipation, in reading the terrain, in knowing the animal's habits. AECO's safety guidelines, which frame expedition operations across the Arctic, point in exactly the same direction: distance, observation, prevention. We never go looking for the bear. We ski knowing he's present, and that awareness doesn't weigh on you — it shapes the day, calmly.

At the landing, the watch is kept while the group gears up — an eye on the horizon, no tension.

And so the day belongs entirely to the terrain

Once those reflexes are in place, all that's left is the skiing. And the skiing, in Svalbard, is worth the journey.

Days run four to six hours of touring, skins under the skis, for vertical gains of 800 to nearly 1,000 metres. You climb on skins along spines that overlook the fjords, pause at the top facing a horizon that belongs to nobody, then tip over towards the sea. From Isfjorden to the reaches of Ny-Ålesund, every descent all but finishes in the water. The late-May snow, transformed by the low sun, gives up those long, even turns you keep in memory for a long time.

What strikes you most, in the end, is the silence. No lift, no other party on the ridge, not a single engine. Just the hiss of the skins, your own breathing, and now and then, far off, the crack of a block of ice breaking free. Your head is entirely on the terrain, on the skin track, on the line you're about to take. The bear you hold in the landscape; he doesn't occupy your mind. That's exactly what I mean when I say his presence makes the skiing calmer, not more anxious: because it was thought through beforehand, it frees your attention for what matters — the sliding.

Skinning above the fjords: four to six hours of effort, from deck to summit, then back down to the sea.

Evening, the great silence and the freezing water

Back aboard, the Arctic ritual sets in. Some plunge into the freezing fjord water — a few screaming seconds, a scramble back onto the deck, and the grin that goes with it. The chef starts on dinner, the light doesn't fade, and the Noorderlicht drifts gently towards tomorrow's ski bay. From the deck, you're still watching: a walrus stretched on a slab of pack ice, a pale silhouette far off, the blow of a whale that tears the quiet for an instant. You observe at a distance, from the safety of the boat. That's how we want to meet this wildlife — never any other way.

Evening aboard: a careful dinner, the great polar silence, and light that never goes out.

This is an expedition, in the full sense of the word. You commit to it with clear eyes, and you find a wildness that barely exists anywhere else. The bear here is not a risk to ward off: he is the signature of a world still wild — the very one you came to ski.

For the wider picture of this crossing, the Noorderlicht and the full arc of it, read the portrait of our ski-and-sail expedition to Spitsbergen. And to feel the rhythm of a typical day, from the deck to the summit and back down to the sea, our account of a week aboard tells it from the inside.

At other latitudes, the same floating-base-camp philosophy takes us along the coasts of Greenland and among the peaks of the Lofoten.

If the idea of skiing Svalbard has already taken hold, look at the ski-and-sail trip to Spitsbergen, then write to us: we'll pencil in an option together and look at the dates.