8
Braving a snowstorm. Srinagar, Jammu and Kashmir, India, January 2021.
The ship lifted its anchor and moved out to sea, pointing north, toward the top of the world. HMS Hecla was a British Royal Navy vessel, 105 feet long, with three masts and a dozen sails when fully rigged. She had seen wartime action in 1816, joining the Anglo-Dutch fleet that bombarded the Barbary pirate stronghold of Algiers. Two years later, the Hecla was given a new mission: Arctic exploration. Her hull was reinforced and clad in iron, to withstand the battering of floating pack ice. Between 1819 and 1825, the Hecla undertook three expeditions in search of the Northwest Passage. Now, on April 27, 1827, she was setting out from the mouth of the Thames Estuary on a voyage to the North Pole. The ship carried captain William Parry, a crew of twenty-eight, and, lashed to the deck, a pair of twenty-foot-long “sledge-boats,” hybrid craft with iron runners and sails to catch the wind. Parry’s plan was to steer the Hecla six hundred miles north of the European mainland to Spitsbergen, an island bounded by the Arctic Ocean, the Greenland Sea, and the Norwegian Sea. There, the sailors would switch to the smaller boats, continuing the journey a further six hundred–plus miles over the water and ice.
According to a press report, Parry and his crew had an additional errand to attend to on Spitsbergen Island. Alongside vast stores of guns, ammunition, tobacco, and rum, the Hecla’s hold contained some unusual cargo: “several velocipedes.” These were to be dropped at Spitsbergen. In an item published prior to the launch of the expedition, London’s Morning Advertiser imagined the sensation the machines would cause in the frozen north: “When Peruvians first saw a Spaniard on horseback, their consternation was excessive. This no doubt will be the effect when the Esquimaux behold an Englishman on a velocipede.”
History holds no further word of these velocipedes. It is possible that the report was erroneous. It’s doubtful, in any case, that Eskimos would have laid eyes on the things. Spitsbergen at that time was an outpost under control of the United Kingdoms of Sweden and Norway. It was a whaling mecca and a destination for Norwegian trappers chasing polar bears and arctic foxes. It was also a destination for scientists and naturalists, many of them Swedish. We should imagine a different scene in Spitsbergen: the velocipedes being greeted by quizzical Scandinavians, whose descendants would be counted among the world’s most passionate practitioners of travel by two wheels. These bicycles would almost certainly have been the first to reach polar climes.
______
No cyclist can outride the weather. To travel on a bicycle is to experience the pleasure and peril of exposure to the open air, and for a certain breed of rider the pleasure is heightened by the peril of frigid temperatures and landscapes caked in ice and snow. The English cyclist R. T. Lang, writing in 1902, scoffed at the “dilettante who sends his bicycle to winter quarters directly [when] the first brown days of October have come.” Winter cycling, Lang said, was his birthright as a Briton, handed down by hardy forebears:
When…the snow [is] whirling and twisting and twirling round the spokes, as I have seen it whirl and twist and twirl in the heart of the Cheviots, over the Derbyshire tors and through the wild fastnesses of the Scottish Highlands…it is then that the old Berserker spirit rises in the race, then that it is a fight with all nature as the enemy, a hard unending battle between man and his eternal foe. The sinews strain and every muscle stands out in angry knots as the wind beats down in a wild effort to end all further progress; for a few seconds it is almost a death-struggle, the wheels barely move, the hands grip harder, every muscle of the body joins in the fierce fight; a moment and the battle halts undecided, then the wind gives way, the pedals twist in the exhilaration of victory, only to renew the struggle a few yards further, but with confidence in the power to win. It is a British sport, one in which only the sons of Vikings can revel.
Lang’s racialist mumbo-jumbo doesn’t quite square with reality: the zeal for wintertime biking is by no means restricted to descendants of Vikings, nor, for that matter, to “sons.” But he was right that a sturdy constitution and a high pain threshold are required. As a friend who considers himself an expert at it once told me, winter cycling is a fucking motherfucker. It holds difficulties greater than those posed by other kinds of adverse weather, which can be inconvenient to bicyclists but in all but the most extreme cases are not an obstacle to travel.
Bicycles do okay in rainstorms. A decent set of tires will hug the road even when wet, and a savvy cyclist can pump the brakes frequently to keep the mechanism dry and in working order. Unless you’re biking into a typhoon, you can make progress through a strong wind, slowly but surely. Well-hydrated cyclists cross deserts and push through beating tropical heat.
The cold is likewise no impediment to a determined rider. These days, bicyclists can weatherproof themselves comprehensively, sheltering already-gloved hands in mitts that sheathe the handlebars while placing inches of down quilting, neoprene, fleece, and other insulators between the skin and the elements. I saw many such bike riders when I lived in Madison, Wisconsin, a place where the snot in your nose freezes the second you step outdoors on a February morning. On State Street, downtown Madison’s main drag, cyclists in snowsuits would glide past, their beards frosted with icicles like a polar explorer’s.
The challenge of winter cycling is not low temperatures but bad roadways, which can defeat even the strongest and most skilled riders. Bicycles weren’t built to plow through snowdrifts or to navigate skating rinks. Tires with no road to grip can spin out from under you, and snow may stop you dead.
Yet you could say that wintertime is in the bicycle’s DNA. The ur-bike, Karl von Drais’s Laufmaschine, was a kind of winter vehicle, conceived in the “year without a summer” and propelled by that kick-and-glide motion adopted from ice-skating. Ever since, tinkerers have been retrofitting bikes for wintry roads and creating new bikes expressly for seasonal use. The simplest DIY modifications are those made to tires to gain greater traction, wrapping braided chains around the wheels crosswise or studding tires with nails, screws, or other spiky protuberances. There is a 1948 photograph of Joe Steinlauf, an American bike builder, riding what may be the gnarliest, most punk-rock bicycle ever made, a cruiser whose wheels have no tires, just metal rims, each ringed with three dozen three-inch-long spikes. They are the bicycle wheels a medieval inquisition would use to spear a heretic.
In the late 1860s, various species of “ice velocipedes” appeared in the United States and Europe, usually featuring a studded version of the boneshaker’s pedal-powered big front wheel, and various skate- or sled-like additions to the frame. “Ice velocipedes are the latest novelty on the Hudson,” The Brooklyn Daily Eagle reported just after the New Year in 1869. The invention of the safety bicycle brought a new wave of winterized bicycle designs: bikes with greased blades at the front or rear, bikes that approximated the form of giant skis, a bicycle outfitted with “snow shoe attachments.” In Holland—prime territory for winter cycling, with its frozen canals and bicycle-mad populace—a clever designer eliminated the front wheel and set a single chain-driven rear wheel between two sets of elegantly looped runners. An American firm, the Chicago Ice-Bicycle Apparatus Co., offered a fifteen-dollar package of add-ons that promised to transform “any style or make of modern safety bicycle” into a winter vehicle that could ride “swifter than summer speed.” The company boasted that one of its test bicycles had been clocked on frozen Lake Michigan traveling a quarter mile in twenty seconds.
______
The annus mirabilis of the turn-of-the-century bike boom, 1896, coincided with the discovery of gold in northwestern Canada. Entrepreneurs moved to capitalize on the popular sensations, marketing bicycles to fortune seekers heading north. In the summer of 1897, a New York firm began manufacturing a “Klondike Bicycle,” touted as a high-technology godsend for Yukon prospectors. The bike had solid rubber tires and a steel frame that was wrapped in rawhide to protect the rider’s hands in low temperatures. It came with an extra pair of wheels that folded down from the middle of the top tube, and there were attachments to the handlebars and seat stays for securing freight.
The idea was that the Klondike Bicycle could serve as both a passenger and a cargo vehicle, allowing riders to haul the one ton of food and equipment that Canadian officials required of each prospector to ensure his survival on the frontier. The owner of a Klondike Bicycle could unfold the machine into four-wheel mode, drag five hundred pounds to the gold fields by foot, then stow the outrigger wheels, mount his bike, and pedal back down the trail to fetch another load. The “stampeders” who carried gear on their backs and relied on pack animals would have to complete several round-trip journeys, covering perhaps twenty-five hundred miles total, before their hunt for treasure could begin. But a cyclist could transport all his supplies in just two trips, stealing a march on the competition.
So said the salesmen behind the Klondike bike. Others were skeptical. A. C. Harris, the author of Alaska and the Klondike Gold Fields: Practical Instructions for Fortune Seekers, mocked the “tenderfoot prospectors who have taken bicycles” to the Yukon, unaware of the harsh conditions that would render the machines useless. Proponents of bicycles, Harris wrote, “had overlooked the one thing necessary to country riding besides a good wheel—good roads.”
It’s true that the terrain was forbidding. To reach the Yukon River headwaters you had to travel mountain pathways like the Chilkoot Trail, with its infamous “Golden Stairs,” fifteen hundred steps carved into the snow and ice near the summit of the pass. If you made it over the mountains, you found yourself in treacherous country. Yukon weather was predictable only in its severity. Temperatures dropped to fifty degrees below zero Fahrenheit. Blizzards swept in, blinding fogs wrapped the land, avalanches struck, wind howled. Prospectors suffered frostbite, hypothermia, malnutrition, and starvation. It was rumored that men boiled their boots and drank the broth, for want of anything better to eat.
There were other hazards. When the spring thaw came, travelers could get mired in mud. Summers were brief, hot, and plagued by flies and mosquitoes. Lawlessness and violence reigned. Bandits ambushed prospectors along the trail; suicide was said to be epidemic. The commissioner of the Yukon wrote to the Canadian minister of the interior in the fall of 1897, reporting gruesome scenes: “The heartbreak and suffering which so many have undergone cannot be imagined.” Soon word began to filter south that the whole enterprise was a fool’s errand, that all the gold-rich territory had been claimed, that the only people getting wealthy in the Klondike were the early stakeholders and entrepreneurs who had established businesses catering to the gold rush hordes. One of these was Frederick Trump, Donald Trump’s grandfather, an immigrant who had dodged the draft in Germany, fled to the United States, and made a small fortune opening hotels in the Yukon riverbank towns of Bennett and Whitehorse.
Still, hopeful prospectors pilgrimaged north, and hundreds of them, perhaps thousands, brought bicycles. In 1901, the Skagway Daily Alaskan estimated that 250 cyclists were heading up the trail to Dawson City, the boomtown that had sprung up at the confluence of the Yukon and Klondike rivers, near the site where gold was first discovered. Photographs from the period capture images of men, including Inuit natives, astride bicycles that had been modified to suit the Arctic. There were handmade four-wheelers, two bicycles that had been fused into one by soldering iron crossbars to connect the frames. Many cyclists loaded cargo on sleds or toboggans, which they harnessed to their bikes and dragged behind. Occasionally, bikers brought small dog teams with them, reversing the usual equation by riding in front of the dogs rather than mushing them along from a trailing sled.
But a benefit of traveling by bicycle was that it freed a prospector from the need for draft animals, which were costly to feed and difficult to care for, and were prone to dropping dead. The White Pass Trail, the entry point to the Yukon from the Alaskan tent town of Skagway, earned the nickname Dead Horse Trail because of the thousands of horses and mules that perished there, tumbling from cliffs or lying down to die in the snow, having been driven too hard and fed too little. Dogs often fared no better. One cyclist recorded a macabre sight as he pedaled the trail along the south bank of the Yukon River: “A red short haired dog frozen hard as stone. Someone had stood him on his nose on a little snow mound, his tail straight up and his feet in a trotting position. He looked like a circus clown doing his trick.”
Klondike cyclists claimed another advantage over horses and dog teams: speed. If the weather cooperated, bicycle riders could travel faster than anyone, up to one hundred miles per day on flat stretches of trail, about twice the distance covered by prospectors with dog teams. When the trail turned steep, cyclists dismounted and humped their bikes uphill, but they made up the time on the downward slopes. The tracks left by the dog sleds, generally about eighteen to twenty-four inches wide, proved to be serviceable bike paths. A cyclist would hold his wheels in the narrow grooves and churn forward, over ice-shackled earth and frozen rivers, tracing a ribbon across a world of murky, milky white.
Of course, cycling in the Yukon came with a special set of miseries. Learning to steer in the dogsled tracks was not easy, and the trial-and-error process could be painful. A bicyclist reported that he “took about 25 headers into the snow” on his first day on the trail. When the trail ran out at the edge of a river, with no ice bridge leading to the opposite bank, riders forged the freezing water on foot, battling strong currents and dodging ice floes while carrying their bikes overhead. Often cyclists found themselves in wastes of rough ice, with no sled paths to ride. Horses were responsible for some of the rough ice: their heavy tread and weighty sled-borne tow loads chopped the trail to bits. The jagged ice would slice the hooves of the horses, and the dog teams that followed would suffer in turn, leaving toenails and flesh behind when their feet caught on the edges of the horse tracks. Cyclists were left to navigate a shattered landscape, slickened by the blood of horses and dogs.
Almost no cyclist was adequately clothed. Those who lacked protective eyewear succumbed to snow blindness. Some learned to ride one-handed, using their free hand to rub their nose in an effort to stave off frostbite. The cold wounded bicycles, too. Tires stiffened and cracked in the low temperatures; bearings froze solid. A spill could cripple or behead a bike, shattering pedals or snapping handlebar stems in two. Repair work was often called for, and those who lacked the necessary parts and tools were forced to improvise. When inner tubes punctured, cyclists stuffed tires with rope and rags. Ed Jesson had to contrive several makeshift fixes during his thousand-mile bicycle journey from Dawson City to Nome, where gold had been discovered in late 1898. While Jesson was wheeling through Rampart Canyon, in the Yukon’s Sawtooth Mountains, a strong wind picked him up and flung him onto a serrated chunk of ice. The accident skinned Jesson’s hands and badly bruised his knee; a portion of his bike’s handlebars broke clean off. Jesson limped to a campsite, where he performed surgery: “I split a nice straight grained piece of spruce and with my knife made 2 nice pieces to tape on each front fork of the wheel, letting them extend high enough to fasten a cross stick to them, to act as a handlebar. I made a real good job of it.”
______
Another cyclist who followed the stampede to Nome was Max Hirschberg, a nineteen-year-old from Youngstown, Ohio. Hirschberg had arrived in the Klondike during the first wave of the gold rush and spent a couple of years running a roadhouse outside Dawson City. Just after the New Year in 1900, he sold his share in the roadhouse, cashed in some small mining claims, and secured a dog team for the trek to Nome, where it was said that gold was so plentiful you could scoop it straight off the beach for miles along the Bering Sea coastline. On the eve of his scheduled departure, a fire broke out at the hotel where he was spending his last night in Dawson City. Hirschberg escaped the burning building, but he stepped on a rusty nail and contracted blood poisoning. By the time he recovered, it was March, and the spring thaw was setting in. Hirschberg realized he was facing a ticking clock. It was too late in the season to travel by dogsled—the dogs would go nowhere on a trail turned to slush and mud. The best route to Nome was over the frozen Yukon, but the river ice would soon start to melt. And Hirschberg knew that news of the Nome gold strike was bringing boatloads of fresh prospectors north. To beat the mob, he would have to find his way to Nome quickly. He bought a bicycle.
Hirschberg pedaled out of Dawson City on March 2. The skies were clear, and the temperature was thirty degrees below zero. He was better dressed for the weather than most, leaving little skin exposed. He wore a fur hat that covered his ears, a fur nosepiece, and fur gloves that stretched to his elbows. A robe fastened to the bike’s handlebars provided extra insulation for his arms and hands. His high-top shoes, made of felt, were laced tight over two pairs of woolen socks. He pulled a drill parka over a mackinaw coat, a pair of fleece-lined overalls, and a flannel shirt. It was a wonder that Hirschberg could move his body, with all the layers. Otherwise, he traveled light. A sack fixed to the springs of his bike seat held a change of clothes, a watch, a penknife, matches, pencils, and a diary with a waterproofed cover. Hirschberg also had a “poke,” a small bag, containing gold dust worth $1,500 and several gold and silver coins. There was another $20 in gold coins next to his skin: Hirschberg’s aunt in Youngstown had stitched them into a belt, which he’d strapped tight around his waist, beneath his overalls.
It was a difficult trip. Hirschberg was an experienced cyclist, but he took many tumbles while acclimating to the two-foot-wide paths left by sled runners. Storms blew in, dumping snow that obscured the trail. Even when the skies were clear, Hirschberg faced the danger of losing his way. The trail meandered north and west, across the frozen Yukon and alongside it, following the river’s bends; in spots, the river fractured into many channels, and Hirschberg was uncertain which path to follow. His bike took a beating. About six hundred miles into the journey, Hirschberg skidded on river ice and busted a pedal. He fashioned a wooden pedal, but it wore down quickly and had to be replaced every seventy-five miles or so. He solved the problem with the help of a Jesuit priest stationed in the trading post town of Nulato, who built a sturdy replacement out of galvanized sheet metal and copper rivets.
Hirschberg saw great sights along the way. His route took him past herds of caribou. Cycling on a crystal-clear day near the mouth of the Tanana River, he looked to the south and spied the silhouette of Mount McKinley. In an account of the trip written years later, Hirschberg recalled crossing the border from Canada into the United States near the Yukon town of Forty Mile: “A thrill shot through me as I caught sight of Old Glory waving.” Technically he was in the United States, but he was traveling through the homelands of far more ancient civilizations. Many nights, he slept in indigenous villages. When Hirschberg reached the northernmost point of the Yukon River, Fort Yukon, about a mile above the Arctic Circle, he was retracing the path taken decades earlier by the first settlers to enter the territory of the Gwich’in people. Fort Yukon had been home to Robert McDonald, an Anglican priest and missionary who married a Native woman, had nine children, and established an alphabet for the Gwich’in language. McDonald translated the Bible, the Book of Common Prayer, and various hymns into the local tongue. Just outside town, Hirschberg cycled past a cemetery holding tombstones dating to 1850 and 1860, the graves of some of the first white people to die in Alaska.
The greatest obstacles Hirschberg encountered on his ride were the literal ones, barriers and death traps formed by alternately thawing and refreezing water. When the Yukon River froze, it tossed up a gauntlet of icy walls, some standing straight up and down, others sloping across the trail. Temperatures fluctuated; creeks along the riverbanks froze, melted, and froze again. Often, the creeks overflowed their banks, creating doubly slippery conditions as water sloshed over a floor of glassy ice. The terrain could trick the eye. Once, Hirschberg pedaled from a bank of the Klondike onto what he thought was glare ice, only to find himself submerged in fast-running river water. He grew accustomed to riding with sodden socks and shoes encased in frost.
As March turned to April and the air warmed, travel over the frozen waterways grew perilous. Hirschberg could hear ice cracking beneath his wheels as he rode. Sometimes he had to brake abruptly to stop his bicycle from tumbling into a blowhole or a section of open water that had materialized in front of him. One day, while cycling across the thawing Shaktoolik River en route to the Bering Coast, Hirschberg broke through the surface and found himself trapped between a floor and a ceiling of ice, floating in frigid water beneath the surface ice and above the still frozen bottom of the Shaktoolik. He managed to break through the surface and clamber his way over the floes, bicycle in tow, to the opposite shore.
The last mishap of Hirschberg’s adventure came as he was closing in on his destination. While he was wheeling over an icy trail just east of Nome, his tires lost their hold, sending bicycle and rider flying. Hirschberg picked himself up but discovered that the bike’s chain had snapped in two. Ingenuity was called for. A stiff breeze was blowing east to west, so Hirschberg stripped off his mackinaw, pinned a stick between his back and the garment, and let the tailwind fill the coat like a spinnaker. It was by this means that Hirschberg and his chainless two-wheeler reached Nome, on May 19, 1900. He was no longer a teenager: his twentieth birthday had come and gone during the trip. It’s unclear how much gold Hirschberg found in Nome, or if he found any at all. The undertaking may well have proved a net loss: Hirschberg’s poke, holding the $1,500 in gold dust, had disappeared when he’d plunged into the Shaktoolik. But he came away with another kind of prize, his story, an epic that climaxed with that headlong final push into Nome. It was a spectacle likely never before seen, in Alaska or anywhere else: a man gusting across an ocean of ice and snow on a bicycle that had become a sailboat. “Without my chain I could not control the speed of my bicycle,” Hirschberg recalled. “At times the wind was so strong that I was forced to drive into some soft snow to stop my wild flight.”
______
The deeds of Klondike cyclists may never be matched. Nor may their particular brand of foolhardiness. But more than a century later, there is a global subculture of “extreme” winter cyclists, and their exploits, it’s fair to say, are of a magnitude more insane than Max Hirschberg’s. Their heroism is recreational, with no desperate quest for treasure driving it, no impetus behind it besides the purest pursuit of thrills and glory.
The most thrilling and glorious form of winter cycling—which is to say the most death-defying—is based on a simple calculus: if you manage to keep yourself upright, you can ride a bicycle very fast down a hill whose surface is tightly packed with ice and snow. In the Yukon, the coaster brakes of prospectors’ safety bicycles grew white hot, even in frigid weather, when riders jammed their pedals backward while braving long, steep descents. (Cyclists tossed their bikes into snowbanks to cool them down.) These days there are “downhill bikes” intricately engineered to handle the stresses of high-speed descents. And there is a class of skilled athletes who specialize in steering these machines down snow-coated mountains. In events like the Megavalanche and the Glacier Bike Downhill, riders face off in breakneck races on Alpine ski slopes. The holder of the world record for bicycle speed is a Frenchman named Éric Barone, a former skier and movie stuntman. In 2017, when he was fifty-six, Barone piloted a mountain bicycle down one of the fastest ski tracks in the world, the Chabrières slope in Vars, in the French Alps, breaking his own record by reaching a blinding top speed of 141.499 miles per hour.
There is a video of the historic ride on the internet. Barone’s bicycle has the bulk of a small motorcycle; he wears a helmet fit for an astronaut and a flame-red suit of stiff skintight rubber, designed both for aerodynamics and to “hold his body together in a crash.” You watch as Barone’s bike is tipped by assistants down the starting ramp, rolling onto the Chabrières slope at an elevation of 8,850 feet. For a second, a drone-mounted camera holds a shot just above and to the left of Barone, and you view the track more or less from the rider’s perspective: a sheer drop into a white void. It’s a terrifying sight, even for those bicyclists who will never face a descent more fearsome than the dip at the end of the driveway.
The distance between Barone’s feat and the Sunday cyclist’s leisurely spin is vast, but we fool ourselves if we imagine that they do not occupy points on a continuum. All bike rides are dangerous. Cycling advocates rightly blame alarming rates of injuries and deaths on systemic inequities, on traffic laws and infrastructure that favor cars over bikes. But even under ideal conditions, the riskiness of riding a moving vehicle is inherent, and the vulnerability of cyclists is in various respects unique. There will always be a touch of daredevil in anyone who chooses to push a bicycle out onto a road. Tricky weather raises the stakes and shifts the odds toward the possibility of a catastrophe, which may explain why certain cyclists derive such bliss from winter riding. The thrill is keener when the threat is greater.
For some, the thrill of winter riding is sensual: the blood-quickening, skin-palpating rush of a bicycle ride is intensified by the snap and bite of cold air. Then there’s the macho aspect. R. T. Lang may have been pushing it with his bluster about the Berserker spirit, but I’ve spent nearly every winter of my adult life riding bikes in New York City and can attest that a freezing February morning is the time when cyclists are, or imagine themselves to be, at their most swashbuckling. There is a particular feeling of haughtiness and power that comes over you when you’re moving swiftly across snow-dusted streets, sweating while others shiver or cower in cars. Your legs churn and you go slicing through the headwind, watching your vaporous breath billow for an instant before you vanish into it and burst out the other side, like a god gusting through clouds. The temperate seasons offer no such tonic to a cyclist’s ego, or id.
______
There are places, of course, where winter cycling is a nearly year-round activity. If you spread out a map of the world and scan its uppermost section, moving east from Alaska across the northern reaches of Canada, across Greenland, and over a number of icy seas, you eventually spot a blob marked Spitsbergen, the polar island where William Parry and his crew either did or didn’t deliver several velocipedes in 1827.
Today, Spitsbergen is the largest and only permanently populated island in the Norwegian archipelago of Svalbard. It is no longer the whaling and hunting ground it was nearly two centuries ago, although people who wander beyond Spitsbergen’s main settlement, Longyearbyen, are required to carry a gun in case of polar bear attack. A Norwegian state-owned coal-mining company operates on the island. And Spitsbergen remains a magnet for scientists. A snow-covered mountainside outside Longyearbyen is the home of the Svalbard Global Seed Vault, a climate-controlled subterranean bunker designed to house millions of seeds, from all over the world. At the University Centre in Svalbard, researchers specialize in Arctic biology, geology, geophysics, and technology. Course offerings include “Arctic Marine Zooplankton,” “Air-Ice-Sea Interaction,” and “Frozen Ground Engineering for Arctic Infrastructures.”
The university’s students and faculty make up about 20 percent of Longyearbyen’s population of twenty-one hundred. Longyearbyen is known as the world’s northernmost town, the only settlement at its latitude with a permanent population of over one thousand. The place is also a tourist destination. Visitors come to soak up the stark Arctic beauty, to hike, to go snowmobiling, to take dogsled rides, to view the northern lights. Hardier eco-tourists camp overnight in ice caves. I stayed on Spitsbergen for a week several winters ago. I arrived in mid-February, the waning period of the polar night, when the sun was beginning to appear above the horizon for the first time in months. The days weren’t dark, but they weren’t bright, either. The quality of the light was similar to dusk at lower latitudes, as if a scrim of somber deep blue had been stretched across the sky. It was beautiful and melancholy.
Certain vaguely worded emails may have given friends the impression that my Arctic trip had an Ernest Shackleton aspect to it. In fact, I stepped off a plane into the Svalbard Airport’s sleek terminal and took a taxi into Longyearbyen, where I was dropped at the Radisson Blu Polar Hotel Spitsbergen. There was seal and whale on the menu in the hotel restaurant, and picture windows that gave onto a vista of tundra ringed by snow-mantled mountains. But in terms of comforts and amenities, it might well have been a Radisson in Orlando, Florida. Longyearbyen has a small commercial area, a couple of streets where a visitor can replicate the routines of a bourgeois urban existence. There’s a café that serves espresso in the morning; there are several bars that pour cocktails in the evening. Shoppers at Longyearbyen’s supermarket are greeted in the entranceway by a taxidermied polar bear, posed on its hind legs with its teeth bared. Inside, there is fresh produce flown in from the Norwegian mainland, much of it labeled økologiske, organic.
Also, Longyearbyen is full of bicycles. Day and night, residents can be seen pedaling at a stately pace through the town center. In the mornings, a procession of parents tow their children to the elementary school on sleds hitched to bikes. There are bicycles parked in front of shops, the public library, the university. You’ll also find bikes leaning against snowbanks outside nearly all of the houses, which are scattered along the hillsides just beyond the commercial strip. When storms blow through, local newspapers remind residents to bring their bicycles inside, lest they be whipped by the wind into dangerous missiles.
Winter cycling technology has advanced in recent decades. The hotbed, so to speak, of winter biking is Alaska, which has given the world a new kind of bicycle, the fat bike, whose wide forks hold tires that spread up to four inches across, twice the width of the typical mountain bicycle tire tread. The oversized tires permit riding on both soft and rough ground, through deep snow and over slippery ice, and you can ride with far lower than normal tire pressure, allowing more rubber to squash down and grip the ground. Fat bikes look silly, like cartoon crossbreeds of a bicycle and a monster truck, but they do the job, rolling smoothly over terrain that once stymied all but the most resolute.
There are a handful of fat bikes in Longyearbyen. (One local business offers fat-bike tours of scenic spots.) Mostly you see mountain bikes, of varied makes and price points, nearly all looking worse for wear. Longyearbyen isn’t easy on bicycles. The town sits in a little valley that appears to have been dug out of the surrounding mountains by a giant ice cream scoop. Much of the year, the valley floor is slathered in snow and ice. It is very cold. Temperatures in the winter can drop to thirty degrees below zero, and even in July and August rarely reach fifty. Residents wear heavy clothing and big lumbering snow boots, hardly ideal gear for bike riding.
But Longyearbyen’s cyclists know how to handle themselves. During my stay, I saw dozens of cyclists, and witnessed just one accident. It wasn’t the cyclist’s fault or the bicycle’s; the snow and ice weren’t to blame, either. It was a mishap peculiar to the Arctic: the culprit was a reindeer. In Longyearbyen, reindeer have the run of the town, as pigeons and squirrels do in Manhattan. They wander the residential streets, and they pitch up outside the Radisson, grazing on the grasses that poke through the snow near the hotel’s driveway. Occasionally, the reindeer get in the way of automobiles and bicycles. One afternoon, as I set out for the coffee place, I saw a reindeer dart into the path of a woman who was pedaling her bike briskly past the hotel. I watched it happen as if in slow motion: the rider’s eyes widening as she jerked her handlebars hard to the left; the wheels flying out from under the bike’s frame; the cyclist’s long torso listing and then slamming down, like the mast of a sailboat whose keel has broken the surface of the sea. I jogged over to make sure that she was okay, but she waved me off wordlessly, with a look that said she was both embarrassed and annoyed. It was a minor spill, and she would have preferred that it had gone unwitnessed. So I turned away and watched the reindeer, which had bolted uphill: a grayish figure moving across a blue-and-white landscape, shrinking as it scampered farther into the distance until it disappeared altogether, swallowed up by the permanent gloaming of the polar night.