New On Flickr: Airboats
March 9th, 2010 | By Nora Sawyer | Filed in Gear, Photographers, Sports
Archive for the ‘ACTIVITIES’ Category
Desafio Extremo: Buceo Artico
March 4th, 2010 | By Nora Sawyer | Filed in ACTIVITIES, Client Reports, Diving, Filmmakers, Films, TRIPS
Long-time readers of this blog might remember this post, where I mentioned that expedition Expedition Manager Tom Lennartz was up on the ice near Baffin Island with a then-unnamed Spanish film crew.
Well, the footage from that expedition — part of the series Desafio Extremo, or Extreme Challenge — is now online. And it’s pretty spectacular, capturing both the beauty and danger of diving beneath the Arctic ice.
Check out the videos online here, and if you read Spanish (or feel like cheating, as I did, with a free online translator) you can read Jesús Calleja’s account of the adventure on his blog, which really captures the adrenaline of piloting a snowmobile across the sea ice, as well as the combination of on-the-ice flexibility and strong infrastructure needed to pull off a filming expedition to the Arctic!
Here’s a teaser for the show. Visit the Desafino Extremo site for more photos and footage of the adventure!
This Week on Flickr: Ice Diving
March 2nd, 2010 | By Nora Sawyer | Filed in Diving
Inspired by yesterday’s post, this week’s new content on Flickr features some of our Ice Diving photos from the last few years.
Tom with the harpoon he found on a dive last year.
Divers beneath the ice.
A team prepares to dive.
Visit our Flickr page for photos of ice diving, dog sledding, ballooning and more. And if you’d like to read about how Tom found the harpoon in the top photo, that’s #8 on his Top Ten Floe Edge Moments from 2009!
Deep Below the Ice: The Thrills and Chills of Ice Diving
March 1st, 2010 | By Brian Andrews | Filed in ACTIVITIES, Current Events, Diving
To those accustomed to life below the Arctic Circle, life above the treeline can seem like a whole other world. No where is this more true than below the ice, where the sun filters through the ice into a dark world of creatures few ever see in the wild.
I was reminded of this today when I read about a recent record-breaking dive beneath a frozen lake in Slovakia. While the dive — a continuous 2120 meter dive utilizing rebreather units — is indisputably impressive, no lake dive can compare to diving beneath the Arctic ice. As evidenced by the footage below, taken on Arctic Kingdom dives:
Video by Louise Murray
Want to experience the world below the ice first hand? Start your adventure today on our Dive Adventures page, or visit our Adventure Travel page for news on the variety of expeditions we have coming up!
A Glimpse of the Arctic Through a Californian’s Eyes
February 1st, 2010 | By Nora Sawyer | Filed in Current Events, Dive Training, Diving, Expedition Training, Sports
This Sunday’s San Francisco Chronicle featured a great article by Margo Pfeiff about her trip to Baffin Island for training in polar survival. I couldn’t help but giggle at her description of her first foray into Arctic waters:
Dangling my legs off a 6-foot-thick ice floe, I slide into slushy water. My “swimsuit” ain’t no polka-dotted bikini, but a screaming red one-piece waterproof number I’ve wrestled over a half-dozen layers, including an expedition down jacket and ski boots. Air rushes out around my neck as heavy-gauge nylon hugs me. Suddenly, I’m bobbing buoyantly up to my chin in the Arctic Ocean like a cherry in somebody’s piña colada.
As I hoist myself back onto the ice sheet, the saltwater on my suit flash-freezes and drifts to my feet as snow. I had come north to immerse myself in the Arctic, but hadn’t expected the experience to be quite so literal.
This rare patch of open water in the sea ice blanketing Frobisher Bay is a polynya kept open throughout winter by strong currents. The 29-degree seawater steams into the clear, minus-18 degree March air. I dog-paddle through clinking ice chunks as if I’m doing laps in a tumbler of scotch.
The sometime absurdity of negotiating Artcic waters aside, Pfeiff manages to capture how fun the Arctic can be, how unique and enjoyable trekking across sea ice and camping on a creaking ice-locked bay.
Pfeiff’s whole article is well worth a read. You can read it in its entirety on the San Francisco Chronicle’s webpage.
Got the itch to try it yourself? Check out our trips page for more information on our expeditions to Baffin Island and beyond.
Have You Checked Out Our Flickr Page Lately?
January 27th, 2010 | By Nora Sawyer | Filed in Sports
We’ve got a huge photo archive, and we’re adding content weekly from trips going back for more than a decade! This week we’re looking at one of my favorite subjects:
Just like Flipper, but different: Befriending a leopard seal in Antarctica
December 11th, 2009 | By Nora Sawyer | Filed in Current Events, Diving, IN THE NEWS
In this video, National Geographic photographer Paul Nicklen describes his four day encounter with a giant leopard seal in the Antarctic.
Smithsonian Magazine Explores Alaska’s Great Wide Open
October 29th, 2009 | By Nora Sawyer | Filed in ACTIVITIES, Current Events, IN THE NEWS
Arctic Kingdom Team Members relax near Barrow Straight.
Smithsonian Magazine has a great cover story this month on “Alaska’s Great Wide Open.” It’s well worth a read, particularly for writer Pico Iyer’s meditiations of life out on the tundra:
A quiet place, I was coming to see, teaches you attention; stillness makes you keen-eared as a bear, as alert to sounds in the brush as I had been, a few days before, in Venice, to key changes in Vivaldi. That first Denali morning one of the cheerful young naturalists at the privately owned camp took a group of us out into the tundra. “Six million acres with almost no trails,” she exulted. She showed us how to “read” the skull of a caribou—its lost antler suggested it died before the spring—and handed me her binoculars, turned the wrong way round, so that I could see, as through a microscope, the difference between rushes and grass. She pointed out the sandhill cranes whose presence heralded the coming autumn, and she even identified the berries in bear scat, which she was ready to eat, she threatened, should our attention begin to flag.
via Alaska’s Great Wide Open | Travel | Smithsonian Magazine.
Face to Face with Belugas in Churchill, Manitoba
October 26th, 2009 | By Nora Sawyer | Filed in ACTIVITIES, Arctic Animals, Current Events, Diving, IN THE NEWS
A beluga comes face-to-face with Arctic Kingdom divers
This Sunday’s San Francisco Chronicle had a fun travel feature on beluga whales. What I like most about the article is how fascinated writer John Finn is by how expressive beluga faces are. Sometimes, it’s not exactly flattering:
Mostly they kept a short distance away, but a few curious ones came close and poked their heads out of the water for a better look, submerging before I could judge their facial expressions. But I can report that one whale, with a big, fat wrinkle across its brow, looked disturbingly like comedian Don Rickles.
But the piece really does capture the magic of seeing the whales face to face:
A mother and calf swam parallel to us. Another pair surfaced right next to our bow and nuzzled our kayak.
Then a bulbous white head poked out of the water, close enough to touch with my paddle, had I wanted to. We briefly made eye contact. Then, before I could get a good read on its facial expression, it disappeared and popped up near our bow. It made eye contact with my wife, Jeri, in the kayak’s front seat.
This time I got a better look. Its face showed, as best I could tell, curiosity tinged with apprehension. If it could read our expressions in turn, they would have been filled with wonder.
via In Churchill, Manitoba, snorkel with belugas.
Try to read a beluga’s expressions, or search for the Don Rickles look-alike whale on one of Arctic Kingdom’s many Arctic adventures!
Surviving Pond Inlet
October 21st, 2009 | By Nora Sawyer | Filed in ACTIVITIES, AK PRODUCTS & SERVICES
It's even prettier when you've got a warm tent and a hot meal waiting for you.
This episode is more than a year old, but I had fun reading about Survivorman’s stay on Pond Inlet back in 2008. It really gives you a sense of the difficulties inherent in surviving the Arctic wilderness alone:
Although the rain stopped the wind has increased and I am stuck – pinned down on an exposed point using some old crate plywood for a shelter. The polar bears are on the land now and I have to keep a sharp eye out for them. So far I have only seen arctic wolf tracks on this location, no bear tracks. For protection I have a shot gun, a bear banger pistol and bear spray. The arctic char are here along the coast and I can see them in the water. Yet even though I’m lucky enough to have fishing tackle, I am not getting any hits at all. Of course it is so windy that the lure just blows back in my face when I try to cast out into the ocean anyway.
My only supplies are a CB radio, fishing tackle and a handful of whale blubber.
I have to make up my mind on whether or not to stay where I am or relocate further inland – closer to bears but out of the wind.
We take great care to ensure that we’ve got the gear, supplies, and experts neccesary to run our expeditions at the highest level of comfort possible. As you can see, the ‘low frills’ version can get pretty hairy!
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