Curling its head neck backwards over its shoulder, craning to make sure we weren't polar bears, the walrus was just waiting for us there.
Sitting out on the edge of the fast ice (ice secured to shore vs floating around) a ton of muscle was only really concerned with its main predator, not these pow hunters skinning back aboard Ulla.
If you've been quietly window-shopping a once-in-a-lifetime trip in the height of ski-mo season - done the way it should be done, from the bridge with binoculars, moving with the tides, under the never setting sun, then this is the adventure for you.
Getting there: closer than you'd think
Here's the part that surprises people. For somewhere this remote, Svalbard is startlingly easy to reach. You fly through mainland Norway and land in Longyearbyen, the northernmost settlement on Earth. Its a industrial revolution era mining town turned arctic exploration hub of colored houses at 78 degrees north, where the rules of normal life quietly stop applying. No wandering outside town limits without a rifle. Polar bear crossing signs that are not a joke.
From the plane window on the way in, you can already read the place: microclimates spiraling out across the ice like spokes on a wheel, glaciers pouring off the interior toward the sea. You haven't even landed and the terrain is already talking to you.
In Longyearbyen you meet the boat. Ours was the MV Ulla Rinman, a decommissioned Arctic rescue vessel given a second life as a well-appointed expedition ship. Forget any picture you have of cramped-sailboat, elbows-in-your-oatmeal ski touring. The Ulla has multiple decks, warm lounges, and berths shared two to a room. You ski all day and come home to real comfort food and the ability to get cozy. That matters more than you'd guess when the wind is howling outside and there's still daylight at midnight.
The place: a home that moves with the tide
This is what makes a boat-based expedition different from anything you've done on land. There's no basecamp. There's no set itinerary tacked to a lodge wall. The crew reads conditions from the bridge each morning and picks the fjord. Weather, tide, snow, ice. The whole plan gets run at dinner the night before, and then again during breakfast with 4-6 hours of travel time by boat each day, and the mountains you ski that day are self proclaimed snow snobs that have been storm-chasing the globe for decades and know a thing or 2 about worldwide mountain weather.
Most of the terrain out here is genuinely undocumented. No guidebook, no beta, no line-by-line internet report telling you exactly where to skin. You climb what looks good and drop what goes. For a rider who's spent years chasing named objectives, that skill has been honed to find the best terrain and best snow and making it look smooth and executed. Nobody's ticking off a list out here. You climb what looks good and see what you find.
Sailing with the tides, keeps the motion sickness to a minimum, the scenery always changing, and turning over in your bunk and the chain anchor sets in tomorrow's fjord. You'll wake up in a new fjord, ringed by peaks you didn't fall asleep next to. Tidewater glaciers grind right down into the water, calving seracs the size of office buildings into the sea with a crack you feel in your chest. With a polar bear rifle shouldered and ready we skin away from the shoreline, across the frozen fjord, corn softening under your board and skis, crevasse fields glittering below. Best commute I've ever skinned to.
The riding: sea level to summit, every day
The skiing and splitboarding is better than any social media post, pro skier story of hardship, better than the easy to deliver Japow experience.
You start at sea level, step off Ulla and aboard a Zodiac, an armed rifle in hand standing guard as the crew unloads the ski gear onto cobblestone shorelines, and skin up from there. Plan on a minimum of around 3,000 feet of vert a day, more when the weather gives you a window. The terrain menu is broad: mellow glacier cruisers for the days you want to breathe it all in, and steeper, more committing lines for when conditions line up and you want to earn the view.
This is a spring expedition, so you're riding variable snow. That's the honest truth of any big Arctic trip. Corn, wind-affected chalk, and, on the good days, real pockets of pow that make the whole crew whoop loud enough that even the crew of the Ulla can hear while anchored in the bay below. A solid intermediate who's comfortable moving on variable snow will have the time of their life here. You don't need to be a hero. You need to love the true adventure, exploring the unknown and discovering the best a place has to offer on a given day. Because on a trip like this all the memories you take home start with a skin track to the summit.
These are ski and splitboard days in equal measure. The line doesn't care what's on your feet. Summit-to-sea goes the same whether you drop in on two planks or one. On one of our descents my co guide kicked a ski and we all watched it ghost ride down the mtn, no sweat he just ripped 1 footed down to recover it as we all ripped turns, just then the sun had hit its perfect equilibrium with the snow, slope, and the perfect sidecut and edgehold of my Weston Gnarnia. Locked in on the heel edge like a train on rails, like a roller coaster on a banked turn pulling a "G" then back toe side so far over we drag knees, then snap pop back to the heels as the sun lit slope was glowing bright.
The wildlife: the real reason you'll never shut up about it
You'll come home with ski stories. The animals are what you'll actually lead with.
Svalbard is one of the most polar-bear-dense places on Earth. Somewhere around 300 bears live in the archipelago, closer to 900 across the broader region. That's not trivia. It's the reason your guides step off the Zodiac first and stand watch with rifles slung while you skin, eyes on the ridgelines the whole time you're ashore. You tour inside a bubble of vigilance you mostly don't notice, which is exactly how good guiding is supposed to feel.
And the rest of it pours in around the edges. Walrus stacked on the ice like driftwood. Whales surfacing off the bow. Dolphins running the wake. Seals, Arctic fox tracks stitched across the snow, reindeer picking along the shoreline, and sea cliffs loud with migratory birds coming back to nest. None of it's staged or scheduled. It's just handed to you by a place that owes you nothing. After a few days you stop reaching for your phone and just watch.
The food: comfort, at the top of the world
Skiing at sea level in the Arctic burns an absurd number of calories, and the boat knows it. Expect hearty, crew-cooked comfort food: pasta, chicken and rice, pizza nights that hit different when the relentless sun, open sea breeze, drift ice floating by. Breakfast is a proper European-style spread to send you off. Dietary needs get handled with a little notice (vegetarian and high-veg are very doable; full vegan is a tougher ask this far from a grocery store). Nobody's calling it fine food. Its comfort food, satisfying, filling, and delicious at the table cares. Warm food, a warm room, and a crew who spent the day doing the same ridiculous thing you did. That's the whole ask. What was your favorite part of the day?
Why go guided out here
Some trips you can piece together yourself. This is not one of them.
Everything that made our week work was guiding: the fjord chosen from the bridge at breakfast, the rifle on the beach, the read on which glacier was safe and which was calving, the knack for finding good snow in undocumented terrain day after day. It's invisible when it's done right, and it's the whole difference between a dream trip and a cautionary tale in a place with 300 polar bears and no cell service.
The crew that runs this expedition is the same AMGA / IFMGA-certified team that guides the backcountry around Mt. Baker in the North Cascades. They live this year-round, and they've been close with Weston a long time. So if living aboard the Ulla Rinman and skinning into undocumented Arctic lines just lit something up in you, the people who make it happen are Guided Exposure. No hard sell. If it's calling you, now you know who to call.
The season that matters is spring, when the light stretches toward 24 hours and the snow is still holding. Go find out what the walrus already knows.
See you out there.
Words by Jere Burrell, AMGA Mountain Guide, Guided Exposure. Photos by Guided Exposure and Jere Burrell. Guided Exposure is Weston's guide partner; these expeditions are run by their AMGA/IFMGA-certified team out of Glacier, WA.