East coast: Mark­ham­breen & Kval­vå­gen – 08th July 2019

Mon
8 Jul
2019

Final­ly we have left the west coast behind – as beau­tiful as it is the­re! But now on to some­thing dif­fe­rent. Wild and rough, somehow more arc­tic. It is not a gent­le land­scape here in the east. Almost hosti­le, this coast of steep rock cliffs and gla­ciers.

But now the wea­ther is on our side, at least for today. The south cape was calm last night, and now it is calm here in Storfjord. We make use of the rare oppor­tu­ni­ty to have a clo­se look at Mark­ham­breen. One of tho­se gla­ciers on the east coast that has retrea­ted in recent years to give way to a beach and a litt­le bay. Just as Croll­breen and Emil’janovbreen fur­ther north. But to our sur­pri­se we found that even more recent­ly Mark­ham­breen has advan­ced again, so the­re is no bay any­mo­re! Lucki­ly it was calm enough to land on the outer, expo­sed side of the beach. The ice cliff that is now res­t­ing on the land­ward side of that beach is pret­ty wild and crev­as­sed, with a litt­le push end morai­ne towards the beach.

Gal­lery – East coast: Mark­ham­breen & Kval­vå­gen – 08th July 2019

Click on thumb­nail to open an enlar­ged ver­si­on of the spe­ci­fic pho­to.

A few hours later we went ashore at Bol­tod­den in the lar­ge bay of Kval­vå­gen. A fasci­na­ting coas­tal land­scape with huge blocks of quar­zi­tic sand­stone, and of cour­se the geo­lo­gi­cal high­light, the dino­saur foot­prints!

We made some walks along the coast, into a silent val­ley and up to some moun­tain peaks with stun­ning views to dive deeper into this ama­zing, high-arc­tic envi­ron­ment. Din­ner just had to wait a while today …

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