Hornsund
With a northerly wind at our backs, we left Longyearbyen last night and headed south towards Spitsbergen’s southernmost fjord, Hornsund (Horn Sound in English). This picturesque fjord is quite large, extending some 18 miles into the island of Spitsbergen, with eight large glaciers emptying into the fjord itself. Oral history suggests that the fjord was named for reindeer antlers found here.
Just before lunch we spotted our first polar bear, contentedly sleeping on a snow field and seemingly oblivious to our presence. This was our ice-breaker bear (pardon the pun) and the first of the trip.
After lunch we proceeded to land at Gnälodden for an up-close and personal look at one of Svalbard’s important historical sites. This site was first used by Russian trappers dating from the 1750’s and 1760’s. The site, called Pomor (meaning ‘by the sea’) was used by the Russians primarily for walrus hunting with secondary fox trapping activities here as well. The wooden foundations of the main building still remain.
Of great interest was the hunter’s cabin at the base of the towering cliffs. This cabin was built in the 1920’s by a man named Kjellmo Wallum and was used as a satellite camp to kill both fox and polar bears by many different Norwegian hunters for the next half century. In the 1920’s a polar bear skin would fetch roughly $20 U.S., but a rare blue fox pelt would bring almost eight times that amount. This was at a time when a man working in the coal mines of Svalbard might only earn $2 U.S. a day.
In the springtime, literally hundreds of ringed seals give birth to their pups in this area and it becomes a very important feeding area for polar bears that time their arrival with newborn seal pups. Perhaps the most famous Norwegian hunter to utilize this cabin was Odd Ivar Ruud, who lived and hunted in it right up until 1971, the last year the cabin was used for hunting polar bears (polar bear hunting officially ceased in Svalbard in 1973). In his dozen or so years as a polar bear hunter, Odd Ivar Ruud killed literally hundreds of bears here in Svalbard.
Today, the hunter’s cabin makes a beautiful foreground for photos of the magnificent pre-Cambrian carbonate cliffs behind. The polar bears still come every spring to hunt ringed seal pups, but now we humans only hunt with cameras instead of rifles. With a population of more than 3,000 polar bears in the Svalbard Archipelago, the hunting can be very good indeed, and to prove the point this afternoon we spotted the second polar bear of the trip further into the northern branch of Hornsund in Burgerbukta. May the ‘hunt’ continue!
Note: This DER was written with much appreciated help from Kenneth Monsen, Norwegian hunter and Staff Member (who actually spent two nights in this very cabin with his wife on their honeymoon!).
