Day 7 of the Arctic Circle Autumn 2024 expedition. Most of the day was spent sailing west from Nordaustlandet to Woodfjorden, but in the afternoon, as we entered the mouth of the fjord, the option for a landing presented itself. There was some question if we’d be able to land at all as it would be our latest in the day landing yet and it was overcast and getting darker by the minute. Just in case, I went below deck to my cabin and got ready. Warm coat, camera, life vest and muck boots, check. Back on deck I ask a guide if he thinks it’s going to happen. “I hope not,” he says, peering through binoculars at one of our zodiac boats looking for a safe beach on which to land. I don’t ask why he doesn’t want it to happen.

But the zodiac returns with good news, the tide and swell are in our favor and we land on a stony beach at the grey rocky coast of Gråhuken, meaning Grey Hook. The land was grey, the sky was grey, the hut we came to see was grey, and it was getting dark quickly. I understood now why our guide was hesitant, it was not an easy place to watch for polar bears, a difficult job in low visibility where the land and sky merged into one muted mass.

We walked along the icy shore to a trapper’s hut built in 1928 by Hilmar Nøis, a Norwegian trapper who constructed and repaired about 40 cabins and spent 35 winters in Svalbard trapping foxes and hunting polar bears and reindeer for their valuable fur. Austrian artist Christiane Ritter spent a year in Svalbard, living with her husband and another hunter in this very cabin. Her memoir of this year spent in the Arctic wilderness is the inspiration for this post about the landing site. Even though I hadn’t yet read the book when I visited (I devoured it on my flight home, and again, and again since), her prose so perfectly matched my experience of the site, strewn with the bones of mysterious animals and full of hidden spectres as the darkness surrounded us on our walk back to the zodiac boats. I wished I had packed my headlamp.