Waldenøya: an island on the north side of Svalbard

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Waldenøya is a small, rocky island in the northernmost part of Svalbard, west of Sjuøyane, the northernmost part of the archipelago. Waldenøya may count as the westernmost outlier of Sjuøyane. It is just about two kilometres long, 500 metres wide and the highest hill is at a mere 172 metres above sea level. The terrain is very rocky and pathless. There are no glaciers and no vegetation worth mentioning.

Rocky terrain in the southeastern part of Waldenøya.

There are hardly viable landing sites on the rocky, steep and exposed shores of Waldenøya. Landings can be made in very good conditions especially at the southeastern part of the island.

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Walter Wellman and Waldenøya (1894)

It is hard to imagine that people actually spent some time here, but that happened indeed when the American journalist and north pole explorer Walter Wellman stranded on the island for some time after his failed attempt to reach the north pole in 1894. The expedition lost their ship in the ice near Waldenøya but they managed to get enough equipment and provisions ashore to spend some time there without any risk of starving soon and they were found and rescued after a few weeks.

Waldenøya from a bird’s eye’s view.
A photo from Norwegens arktischer Norden (2): Aerial Arctic.

Martin Conway’s visit (1896)

The English mountaineer and explorer Martin Conway became the first one to cross Spitsbergen from west to east in 1896. After his crossing, he took the opportunity to charter a small ship to see some of the more remote parts of the archipelago. During this voyage which almost (but not quite) became the first circumnavigation of Spitsbergen in a touristic context, Conway and his group got the opportunity to make a landing on Waldenøya. Amongst the crew of the ship was a Norwegian named Tollefsen who was on board in the position of the ice master. Tollefsen had been with Wellman just two years earlier, so he knew the place well. The skeleton of the hut of the Wellman expedition were still there, and so was a lot of the equipment. Conway found a lot of strange paper-roll kind of things, which at first he tried to break in order to find out what they were, and then he threw them at some rocks. Then he asked Tollefsen, who knew that they were dynamite 🙂 Conway did not try to break or throw any more of them.

Rocky terrain on Waldenøya. It was most likely in this area that Wellman and his group spent some time during the summer of 1894.

The hut of the Wellman expedition was probably somewhere in the southeastern part of the island, the largest kind of flat (in a wider sense) area. But I can’t fully exclude the northern end either. I am not aware of any remains still existing today.