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Friday 15th of august, just after I came back to Longyearbyen after my fieldwork-week at Alkepynten, I met up with my father and younger brother who had come to visit me for the weekend. Superb! They didn’t stay for long, but we still got to do quite a lot of stuff.

After the happy reunion, we went for a car-trip. My father had rented a car and I acted as the tourist guide. We went everywhere you can go with a car without getting into problems with the sysselmann - and possibly some places where you could as well. We saw the new northernlights observatory, we saw Eindalen and in the other far end of the road, Bjørndalen and Svalsat and - of course - everything on the way there. Still, having been living in a wet tent for a few days, I was eager to get a warm shower and a proper night’s sleep without rocks in my back.

However, my father is an early riser. At 8:30, he was up and at 9:00, it was time for breakfast. Those 10 hours+ of sleep would have to wait! They had already bought lots of food, so after a lovely breakfast, we decided to go to the Longyear glacier to look for fossils and, of course, for the trip. With my local knowledge, we soon found a nice piece of moraine with fossils a bit further up on the glacier away from the fossil-scavenging hordes of tourists. Feeling satisfied with rocks in our pockets, we felt it might be a nice idea to get up on Sarkofagen, the mountain between the Longyear and Lars-glaciers. My father was particularly ambitious and found the shortest route up the mountain, climbing straight up the mountainside instead of following the tracks like less hardened tourists might do. After a lot of sweating and being slightly worried that some of us might get seriously hurt from rolling down the mountainside, our efforts were rewarded by us getting up on the part of Sarkofagen which is also part of the moraine from the Lars-glacier. It’s a lovely plateau with lots of Svalbard poppies. After a trip to the summit, we wrote our names in the Svalbard-turn book and continued down the Lars-glacier back to Nybyen. Excellent trip!

Later that day, my father bought us all dinner down at Huset. I had a 4 course dinner which, among other things, consisted of squid, reindeer, duck and, for dessert, icecream and cloudberry. To drink, we had both beer and a lovely red wine and my father also treated himself to a couple of glasses of whisky. His choice was a very nice and interesting Lagavulin, a good mood-setter for the rest of the evening.

At the end of our meal, the waiter suggested we continued our enjoyment in the pub - which was exactly what we had in mind - only we didn’t want to stay at Huset. Instead, we went down to Karls-berger, a pub with an excellent selection of many things - for example whisky. My younger brother had a bruichladdie, I wanted to try a Ben Nevis and my father had an old Scots. Scots buy whiskys from other distilleries, then let them mature even longer before they resell them back on the market. Thus, scots is not so much a brand in itself, but I can’t remember what distillery this bottle of Scots came from. Anyways, it was a speyside - like mine - and since none of us are true fans of Speyside whisky, we eventually left Karls-Berger and went to Svalbar instead where we knew they had a bottle of 14 year old Scapa. Filled up with squid, reindeer, duck, ice-cream, cloud-berries, wine, beer and a fine island-whisky, I felt satisfied with the day. It was time to go back to the barrack and get a proper night’s sleep ..

And then I was woken up just after 8 in the morning. It was already sunday and time for our trip to mine 3. We drove the rental up to the mine and arrived just in time for the guide’s talkthrough on the history of mining on Svalbard. It was an interesting lecture although it lacked enthusiasm, but were all eager and happy to get into our mining gear. Finally time to see the mine! Since I’d already been in mine 7 the previous year, I thought I had already seen coal-mining. I was wrong! Except for being cold, dark holes, mine 3 and mine 7 are quite different. In mine 7, the coal is dug out with a digger - a powerful vehicle you drive into the coal-seam. In mine 3, which was closed in 1996, the methods for extracting coal were a lot more old-fashioned and a lot more dangerous than work in mine 7. It included drilling out coal manually, crawling through dark holes and various dangerous tasks such as removing support pillars. The romantic idea of the miner as a tough man doing hard work in a dangerous and dark environment seems to relate more to the way things were run in mine 3 than in mine 7. Luckily, those days are largely over.

After the trip to the mine, we went on our own trip up to mine 2 on the slope between Longyear- and Nybyen. It was also a nice trip, but with so much getting around and doing stuff, I started feeling the need to relax a bit after a long week. My wish was granted and much of the rest of the evening was spent inside watching the latest Hellboy movie .. Well, except for a dinner in the pub at Huset where I had Flesk & Duppe - a traditional course I’ve never had before. It was excellent and if anyone reading this wants to eat at the pub there, then I heartily recommend it and also the hamburger.

This post doesn’t describe everything we did that weekend, but it sums up the highlights. All in all it was an excellent weekend and, spending a lot of time away from my family, I really appreciated it. Thanks pappa and Tormod for a lovely weekend! :-)

Here are some pictures :