Olga Strait, Svalbard Archipelago

A picture is worth a thousand words and today has been a picture-perfect day aboard the National Geographic Endeavour. Our day began at 12:15AM with our first polar bear sighting in Olga Strait between Edgeøya and Kong Karls Land in the Svalbard Archipelago. In the land of the midnight sun the golden hour for photography is a gift that seems to last and last and last. Low angle light on reflected ice cream colored floes make the perfect subject matter for our entire group of photography students.

Throw in a young and curious polar bear that literally walked across the ice floe to come and sniff the bow of the ship and our entire group, photographers and staff alike, felt as if they had died and entered Valhalla.

Cameras clicked and whirred as our curious bear inspected the ship from stem to stern and back again. An hour and a half flew by as if it were only moments as this curious bear inspected us. Just who was watching whom? In the end our bear decided there was nothing here to hold his curiosity and simply went back to sleep on the hummock of ice where we first sighted him, but not before many gigabytes of photographic images were taken of our encounter.

And that was all before 2:00AM! During the morning and the rest of the day we sighted seven more polar bears as the ship slowly navigated between the leads in ice floes. A mother and her yearling cub, four more young bears, and an old and very weary male all working the edge of the ice floes in search of seals for a meal made this a most amazing day indeed. It has been such a privilege for us to watch these animals in their extremely harsh and barren environment walk, swim, and jump from floe to floe seemingly effortlessly.

With the specter of global warming and the possible loss of habitat here in the Arctic a real threat for polar bears, this will be a day that will remind us all of just how magical and yet fragile the high Arctic truly is.