My second long hike was up to the Larsbreen ice cave. The little red square is roughly where the cave was this year. As it's a melt water channel in the summer it moves and changes shape. Some years its not accessible at all and when it is it can be any size. This year it was decently sized with lots of little rooms and walkways, there were two main areas. The first part was accessible to hikers without climbing gear and had some ropes installed to help with climbing (This is the bit we stayed in). The second area needed climbing gear and experience, this area i've been told drops down another 50 metres at least, if not more.
This is a topo map of the area around the town, some of the areas people hike on foot are:
Larsbreen, Trollsteinen, Aventdalan, Sarkofagen, Longyearbreen etc.
If you wanted to go further out you really need a snowmobile.
The journey took us around 2 hours to get up to the ice cave and about 40 minutes to get back down. I'm a slow walker and we stopped a lot and it was uphill around 250 metres.
Walking up to the ice cave, the ridge at the top of the picture is the plateau where the ice cave is.
The cave is just a hole in the ground marker with red rods, we had helmets as some places in the cave had low ceilings and I banged my head quite a few times.
Some of the areas were large enough for all four of us to, but some were small where we had to go one at a time.
I tried to get lots of pictures but the camera misted over and froze and we had to put it in a hat to warm it up, I managed to get some good pictures eventually.
The cave had tonnes of formations, some were easy to photograph as they were large. But the small delicate ones were hard to photograph due to the misty/frozen camera. You can see how small some of the gaps were.
Some more pictures showing the area and the corridors of ice.
Shot of Lucy as she exited one of the thinner ice corridors (with Kieran behind her), and Jamie in one of the larger ones.
Starting back for the surface, we had climbed down quite far. Lots of the areas were down short staircases so at the bottom we were down around 30 meters or so. (The cave does go further if you want to climb with gear as explained above.)
Near the top now, Kieran and Lucy helped me a lot. Lucy held the camera and took pictures and made sure I didn't fall backwards. Kieran mostly pulled me up, especially near the top.
We can see light!, Jamie and Kieran had already gone up. My hands were numb by this point so I had trouble getting out as the last 3 meters has no rope. Jamie and Kieran pulled me out in the end.
Last picture from inside the cave that Lucy took before climbing out.
Outside the cave, we started heading down before we ran out of light.
The journey down was a lot faster than the way up.
The whole hike was amazing, the pictures do not do the ice cave justice. The formations were beautiful and it was cozy in there without being claustrophobic. All in all it was worth the 2 hours of walking, and hopefully I'll get a chance to look at some of the other caves nearby. This is the only big one within walking range but there are a lot within snowmobile range.
Tips:
- Definitely need a helmet
- Make sure the gloves you bring are warm and have good grip
- Microspikes or crampons would have been a major help for us climbing out.
- A sled for the journey down would have been great.
Thanks for reading
- Miriam
No comments:
Post a Comment