Nordaustland: Langgrunnodden

Panorama of a polar desert and an old trappers' hut

The peninsula Langgrunnodden is the northwest point of Nordaustlandet.

Langgrunnodden is the westernmost point of the large peninsula Storsteinhalvøya, the northwest part of Nordaustland, far north in Hinlopen Strait. This is a very barren polar desert type of landscape. The scenery is very wide-open, with low hills stretching between Murchisonfjord in the south and Franklinsund in the north. We start our little tour of Langgrunnodden on ihe north side of this low-lying peninsula.

Copy URL
pano anchor link: #170806e_Langgrunnodden_20HDR

There are some lagoons, including Claravågen, one of Svalbard’s largest lagoons. The carbonate-bearing bedrock is shattered by frost into countless small, sharp rocks, often arranged in fascinating patterns by freezing-thawing-cycles over centuries and millenia.

Copy URL
pano anchor link: #170806d_Detterbukta_120HDR

It is just about one kilometre across Langgrunnodden, and the terrain is largely flat and easy to walk until we have reached Detterbukta, the bay on the south side.

Copy URL
pano anchor link: #170806e_Langgrunnodden_01HDR

There is a ruin of a trappers’ hut in this barren landscape. The hut was built in 1908 by a group of wintering hunters led by Anders Larsen. The area was rarely used by winterers. During the few winterings in the area, the main huts were either in Murchisonfjord or in Brennevinsfjord and on Lågøya.

Copy URL
pano anchor link: #170806d_Detterbukta_101HDR

In 2020, the historic monument protection authority “discovered” this hut and found it to be something special, because of a series of long, narrow wooden pins that were attached to the wall above the bunk bed in a vertical position, close and parallel to each other. You can see these pins above the remains of the bed in the following panorama (photographed in 2017):

Copy URL
pano anchor link: #170806d_Detterbukta_043HDR

The use of these pins is not fully understood. It was suggested that they were meant to keep the clothes of a person in the bed from freezing to the walls in the cold winter. The walls of this hut, as of most huts built during the trapper period, were thin and hardly isolated. But it remains a matter of speculation if these pins were actually suited to serve this purpose. Because of these “freezing pins” (Norwegian: frysepinner), this hut was occasionally referred to as “frysepinnehytte”.

Copy URL
pano anchor link: #170806d_Detterbukta_079HDR

Because of this “architectural peculiarity”, it was decided to make a major effort to renovate the hut at Langgrunnodden substantially, so it would survive for another long time to come. But when the official craftsmen came to do the job in the summer of 2021, they were in for a surprise: the hut was gone and away, most likely completely destroyed by a heavy winter storm that blew most of the remains out onto the drift ice where it was then lost. After more than a century, the historic monument protection authority came a couple of months too late, according to Svalbardposten.