In the 1970s and 1980s, the writer made numerous extended trips to a site deep in the interior of northern Norway where, unlike the BRIDGE site on Andoya, it could be extremely cold. Those who live in the far north have a saying: (quote) With the return of the light comes the cold. (end quote). Although I never saw anything colder than minus 35F, in January 1999, about a week after the return of the sun, it reached minus 60F officially and minus 65F unofficially at that location. Water pipes at a depth of five meters (16-feet) froze.
When I first arrived at this site in October 1972, I asked how often the aurora was visible. About once a week I was told; however, upon using the roof of the building were I worked and lived as an observation point, I found the aurora was visible almost every night but most often as a weak trace distinguishable from clouds only because it did not move with the clouds.
Unwilling to alter my exercise regimen of running five miles a day, I would run away from “town” - and all habitation - on a road that followed a river. My temperature limit was minus 15F unless there was wind which, at that temperature, could be very bad news. One night, at my turn around point more than three miles from the town, where the road dipped to a level only a few feet above the river, I stopped to observe a brilliant auroral burst in the northern sky which lit up the snow-covered landscape and turned everything a pale green. (Colors other than green – free oxygen excitation - were unusual.)
At that time, I could hear people talking even though the nearest population was more than three miles away. It appeared the frozen, snow-covered surface of the river acted like the deep sound channel axis funneling their voices along the surface so clearly that, had I been a native-speaker, I could have understood what they were saying.
The snow usually came to stay in Oct or early Nov and continued to pile up until late April or early May by which time it might reach a depth of three feet. Most of it was gone by about 20 May which also was about the date the ice on the river broke up. One year it snowed the first four days of June and then turned hot with temperatures as high as 88F for three days.
Unable to open the windows because of mosquitos, the building began to “cook” under the 24-hour sunlight. I sent a message to the Embassy in Oslo requesting an air-conditioner be sent north. Two days after I left on 13 June the temperature dropped to 34F and never exceeded 60F for the rest of the summer. The AC was never sent.
Spring lasted about three days. One year all the birch trees went from bare limbs to fully foliated in three days (10-13 June). In the fall, all the leaves were lost in another three days – no later than mid-September. The locals planted potatoes every year but harvested them only once in every five years; mid-summer frosts usually got them.
The site was on the southern side of the river valley and about 150 feet above the river. It was surrounded by 30-foot conifers, some of which may have been as old as 300 years. While there I collected a short section of one such tree that was eight inches in diameter and 135 years old. A section of a birch tree from a slightly higher and more exposed area had a diameter of two inches and an age of 50 years. The tree-line was at an altitude of about 1000 feet above the valley floor.
The living room in the housing end of the building had a very large, triple-thermopane window that looked directly north and from which you could see the sun from late May to mid-July swing through the low point of its midnight arc. I put a small black paper disk on the window and marked the position of the shadow it cast at half-hourly intervals against the opposite wall: a sun-clock. The 0130 mark was at the entrance to the kitchen. It was a different perspective that took some getting used to. When, as occurred several times, I left the site in November, I felt guilty because I was “escaping” while those who remained would experience the depression that came with the extreme cold and the dark.
One year, E-III (Ernie Castillo) and I had to leave the site on very short notice in late November. We were driven at night through the remote interior to a costal town where we could catch a southbound SAS flight the next day. On the way – in an area where no lights from any source were visible - the driver stopped so he could smoke outside the car; the temperature was minus 35F. Talk about an addiction!
Upon arriving in the town, the driver regaled us with a story that put reality into that old joke: “Look, in the road, a head.” Several weeks earlier, a head had been found on the road in the snow. It appeared a “love triangle” had been “resolved” when one of the men decapitated the other and left his head in the road.
Would I recommend visiting northern Norway as a tourist? Certainly, if the weather could be guaranteed; however, there are few areas as uninviting if the weather is cold and cloudy as it was in 1999 when I arrived at Andoya on 18 July and left on 6 Sep after experiencing no more than four days of clear weather with temperatures in the 60s to low 70s.
When flying north on 18 July, I sat next to an American woman who was to spend two weeks on one of the Vesteralen islands SW of Andoya. Since the weather was similar at both locations, I kept an eye to the sky for those two weeks and saw nearly continuous low cloud cover that obscured anything above about 1000 feet; temperatures were never higher than 55F, a somber vacation for the woman; however, this is not always the case; summers can be warm and sunny but there is no way to predict that in time to accommodate vacation plans.
Tourist traffic reminds me of one of the greatest tourist traps in Europe: Nordcapp (North Cape), generally believed to be the most northern point on the continent, and for that reason, it has become a magnet for visitors, especially those from southern Europe - especially from Italy - who drive enormous distances to arrive at what must be one of the bleakest perspective in Europe.
The North Cape experience is such a draw that the government paid to have a tunnel built under a two mile wide stretch of water that separates the mainland from the island on which North Cape is located. “Some 200,000 tourists visit Nordkapp annually during the two to three months of summer.” (Wikipedia)
The kicker that essentially zero tourists know about is that North Cape is NOT the most northern point on the continent. On days as clear as the one when I was driven there by my host, you can see Knivskjelloden (Razor Clam), a point of land that is about a mile further north than North Cape (71-11-09.57 vs 71-10-14.88). When asked about this deception, the response was: “They couldn't build a road to Knivskjelloden,” and so the money-making deception continues. Another note: one year a record snow storm (4.5 feet) buried North Cape on 21 June, the solstice and the first day of summer.
As I said earlier: it was a great ride, even when there was the risk of a head in the road.
Thanks for the very interesting tales Bruce. Until someone experiences that level of cold it’s hard to get a grasp on just what minus 35 can do to man, machine, and human spirit when you live and work in it.
After retiring from active duty in 2000, I was invited to take part in a population survey of bowhead whales on the north slope of Alaska. I flew from Virginia Beach on a late winter day with 60F degree weather to Anchorage, Fairbanks, and my final destination to Point Barrow, the northern most point in the US. A few days later I was sleeping in an Arctic tent on the shorefast ice off the point with scientists, technicians, and some local indigenous folks. My first night on the ice was minus 35F with a fierce wind and blowing snow. I didn’t sleep much that night.
I remember getting up the next morning and I wanted to brush my teeth. Before I could do that I had to thaw my solidly frozen toothpaste in my armpit. We deployed five hydrophones through the ice along the lead between shorefast and polar pack ice. We used five sonobuoy transmitters to relay the acoustic data to a tiny insulated hut which housed computers and other equipment which was heated to a balmy 40 degrees by a lantern to operate the equipment in that harsh climate. Our acoustic data significantly extended the range and opportunity to determine the bowhead population which had normally been done using visual survey techniques alone.
As the spring approached and the temperature climbed to near zero I found myself peeling off layers of clothing and working bare armed by the time the temperature arrived to 20F degrees. We’d see the northern lights frequently at night as well as sundogs in the day. We were usually armed with shotguns due to the roaming polar bears following the scent of dead whales taken during the subsistence hunt by the locals. A friend and I were hunted by a polar bear one day as we conducted maintenance on the phones and transmitters. It was a very odd feeling to not be the top predator. I felt like a pork chop lunch when this bear looked at us. We finally chased it off using our snow machines and firing off a couple of rounds.
Cooking, using the bathroom, keeping warm, hydration and hygiene are all major challenges at that latitude (71+N). Once the ice started to break down due to the longer hours of sunlight we evacuated our camp and went ashore. The fun was over and the statistical work started to determine the population and growth trend of the bowheads.
Cheers
Growing up in NE Iowa I experienced several -35F mornings - but only for hours, not days like Bruce and Chuck experienced. After getting out of the Navy in the Spring of 1975 I started graduate school at Rutgers (NJ) that fall. However, that summer I went to Alaska with a group of graduate students and professors from Rutgers that were doing research on the salt marshes near Valdez and Homer, Alaska. We were locating permanent sampling plots and identifying/counting the marsh plants within them with the goal of being able to return and resample them following an oil spill. The group in Homer had great weather as Homer is known as the “banana belt” of Alaska. Unfortunately I was in Valdez.
Being graduate students, we were running around Valdez bay in a 14 foot ski boat and camping in tents since we couldn’t afford the inflated hotel prices in Valdez at the time the Alaskan pipeline was being constructed. Camping in Alaska may sound great but Shoup glacier was on the mountain side above us and it definitely got colder at night. Our goal one day was to go out the mouth of the bay, around a spit of land, to a marsh on the other side. There were 4 of us in the boat and as we started out of the bay we realized there was a rip tide (tide coming in, wind blowing out). We took a wave over the bow of the boat which instantly filled it half full of water. The chairman of the botany department was driving the boat and had the heaviest one of us lay on the bow to keep it down, two of us bailed water for all we were worth, and he somehow kept the motor going. In the excitement he took a 6 gallon gas can and tossed it over the side like a feather to lighten the load. Somehow we made it to land to assess our situation. Had we sunk, our life expectancy was less than 2 minutes and we definitely wouldn’t have been able to swim to shore with multiple layers of clothes, parkas, and hip boots on! We got the boat bailed out the rest of the way and started back - realizing we had tossed out our spare can of gas. We never did see it on the way back but since I am here to write this - obviously we made it. Definitely gives you a new perspective really fast on working in cold climates and needing to taking extra precautions to stay safe.
Of course there was the night when a black bear came into our campsite. But that’s another story.
Well, when I checked into NOPF Ford Is. in Jan 1994 it was 71 degrees. I had to think about changing my shorts for pants.
Randy:
One August in the early 70s, I came from Adak where the temperatures had been no higher than 55-60 and I had been running seven miles a day from the base to the FAC and back via the road that skirted Mt Moffet to COSP where I nearly died trying to run three miles on a golf course with temps close to 90, and then to San Francisco where it was 54 when I arrived.
Given a choice of Oahu or Andpya year round, I think I'd take Andoya. The older I get, the more I like winter and the less I like summer. My perspective from living most of my life in Virginia and Kentucky: go north in the winter; go further north in the summer.
Bruce
Bruce,
I lived in Norway from 1990 to 1994. I remember getting up one morning in December just before Christmas and looking outside to see the air sparkling with ice crystals and all the trees frosted over. It seems we had a inversion overnight and the temperature had dropped some 20 degrees in the night hours from just above freezing to well below. Any moisture in the air became frost and stuck to any surface it could find. It was on that morning that I truly came to understand what the expression 'it's a dry cold' really meant. It also brought a whole new meaning to a white Christmas.
Regards from the desert of Nevada,
Bob Ainsworth OTMCS (Ret.)