Report - Pyramiden and the Coal Mines of the high arctic via the Spitsbergen Icecap (abridged)

[wormster]

OK you win..

 

[FaZy_UK]

Yep. Best report I've ever read.

Maximum effort. Fucking love it!

 

[tweek]

I'd be convinced I was going to die.

 

[b3n]

No idea how I missed this when it first popped up but - out. fucking. standing. As per.

Inspirational shit.

I'm jelous, amazed and kinda a bit pissed off that you are so bloody good at this! Brilliantly written too - look forward the the next instalment of the life of FB.

 

[Hmp-Caver]

Excellent stuff, amazing photos, it was a good read

 

[Baggy trousers]

That's one top class adventure that is! Quality report that fella!

 

[kevin arnold]

don't know how i missed it first time round. absolutely amazing report and a great adventure.

 

[m9]

Cheers all! Yeah it such a mad trip. Looking at some more super cold ones maybe for 2019...

 

[johnnyb47]

We awoke pretty late and spent the next day lounging in the sun (it was an absolutely roasting -5), and set off in the evening.

We began the final crossing of the frozen fjord late that day, moving directly across the sea ice on a bee-line for the first port of call. The power station.

I had high hopes here: Dreams of 1950s era soviet turbos and untouched control rooms, and I have no idea why. Like most other things that embodied even a smidgen of value in the former soviet union, they had been stripped to within an inch of their lives, the turbine hall being nothing more than an empty shell containing the upturned housings of the long-since removed generators.

Still, I got my derp on. There was plenty of other weird and wonderful things still remaining.

Last Readout graph at the moment the gear was turned off, staining the paper with all the remaining red ink.

The basement was completely flooded with a foot of solid ice. Never seen anything like it.

Pyramiden, despite being abandoned in 1998 is still home to a few people. The company that owns it, ‘ArcticUgol’ (Arctic Coal), began to send people back there in the mid 2000s, in conjunction with the Russian arctic survey. No one really knows why. The mine is all but depleted, and even with one of the stated aims of preserving the soviet heritage, one can’t help but feeling it was more about keeping the Russian boot in the door, right up there in NATOs back garden.

Leaving the power station around 3am, we needed a place to sleep. It would have been too much of a ball ache to lift all our gear in though the tiny window we had managed to crawl though, so we needed something more suitable. On the way into town, we discovered the tracks of a giant bear, presumably a female and her two cubs around the port area of the town, and were approached not long after by two Russians on snowmobile.

Their uniforms bore the logo of the ArcticUgol company, and they were out on bear watch, probably looking out for the ones that had recently laid those tracks. They instructed us for our own safety to go to the ‘Hotel Tulip’, the latest (and only) tourist accommodation in town, providing rooms for the handful of workers and the sporadic stream of tourists that come here on their snowmobiles and boat tours in the summer. At 3am, we weren’t too sure there’d be anyone around to let us in, and besides, with all the kit we’d had to rent/buy, we’d already shelled out more Kroner than any of us were really happy with, so we hauled our shit into the most solid looking abandoned building we could find, barricaded the large steel doors and got a brew on.

The next day we stashed the gear in our new base and hit town. The first thing we passed was the famous red and blue sign by the docks, erected on the 30th or 40th anniversary of the town as a grand welcome to anyone coming into the town by boat. Now it’s kind of a headstone, with the last ton of coal extracted from the mine dumped in a cart next to it. Most of the buildings here have been ‘sealed’ to stop roving copper thieves and souvenir hunters from twocing all the cables and soviet memorabilia, but they’re only really secured against normal people. If you’ve got a decent box of tricks up your sleeve you can go where you please without having to break anything, and we set about exploring the ‘famous’ bits.

Pyramiden was supposed to be a model embodiment of the Soviet ideal. A perfect community on the edge of the world where everyone played music, stared in the community theatre and were members of the sports teams. They even flew in tones of soil from the caucuses to allow them to grow grass here to feed the hundreds of cows they needed to cultivate to get fresh milk and meat for the residents.

Only a few of the houses had kitchens. Everyone was expected to dine together in the central canteen, a huge hall emblazoned with an old soviet mural of Baba Yaga and a bunch of polar bears hanging out on the sea ice.

thats bloody amazing , top notch amazing well done all

 

[johnnyb47]

Soon though, we arrived at the personelle station. Two rows of perfectly preserved wooden benches with the last shift card still nailed to the wall.

From here, we set off into the mine.

One of the winch rooms had some kind of weird oil leak, mixing with the permafrost growing from the floor, creating some kind of crystaline orange oil stuff.

The mine went on for ever and we were in there for hours. We must have only done 10 percent of it. Tunnel after tunnel, working after working with the odd collapse and sealed off route.

The ice in some of the chambers was breathtaking. It never gets above -10ish in these tunnels, and huge crystals of ice form where ever moisture makes it into the mine and grows like flowers on the ceiling.

We left the mine at god knows what time, our body clocks by this point were totally in the bin.

We had managed to contact the boat by satellite phone and been given pickup location and a 12 noon deadline, so it was another early start for our last ski across the sea ice, meeting our ice breaker and 15 gawking tourists hanging off the side wondering why the hell they were picking up a bunch of random skiers on the sea in the middle of their arctic seal-watching excursion.

Pulks loaded and rifles unloaded and surrendered to the ships captain, we hopped on board and were transported back to civilisation, smashing through the sea ice and trying to answer ridiculous questions from the scores of confused sightseers.

What a trip.

that must of been the best story ive ever seen well done lol that was one hell of a trip lol

 

[Wevsky]

Mate you dont need to quote the whole report or section to replay ..

 

[professor frink]

That's a proper Shackleton type adventure

 

[b3n]

Looking at some more super cold ones maybe for 2019...

Maybe not but i've got a feeling we might be looking at the same places

 

[m9]

Maybe not but i've got a feeling we might be looking at the same places

haha, maybe meet ya there

 

[Jonesey]

I just read this for the 'sewage pipe turd explosion'

Sounds an ace adventure and really good read