The word is Norwegian for “nagging,” and the mountain Gnålberget, in the South of Spitsbergen, the largest island in the Svalbard archipelago, is so named for the birds that nest high on its peaks—hundreds of them, kittiwakes and guillemots mostly, squawking and calling and shrieking and chattering incessantly during the summer months, a cacophony that floats down from above and covers the landscape like a noisy dew. On the ground below, the voices of individual birds blend into a monolith of vague chatter, until all that’s left is the static of busy life above you—a counterpoint to the sense of desolation that this arctic landscape can sometimes give off. I’d come back to Svalbard as part of the Arctic Circle residency—my second trip, eleven years after my first time here in 2013.
Once more I spent two weeks on the tall ship as we sailed around the western coast of the island, making regular landings amidst the glaciers and ice floes and the rocky moraines. Landing at Gnålodden, as the promontory beneath the mountain is called, is tricky; there are plenty of visible rocks out there, and even more just below the surface, making a low tide landing a particularly treacherous affair. But once on land, the ground is surprisingly lush and colorful beneath the nagging mountain, green and orange with lichen and small, dense foliage.
On shore we approached a hunter’s cabin, one that had been in use for decades, and still was. These structures dot the main island o.