Tromso - 69° North
Inside the Arctic Circle in February. The hard kind of beautiful.
The snow lied
I grew up in a country where snow was rare enough to feel special. Something to walk through, photograph, enjoy briefly.
Tromso corrected that idea without effort. We were visitors trying to understand a place that had never treated winter as unusual.
We landed in Tromso in the middle of a heavy snowfall. The kind where everything is white and nothing has edges and you can’t tell where the pavement ends and the ditch begins. We dragged our suitcases through knee-deep snow, wheels completely useless. Every step downhill on frozen slush was a risk.
It didn't get easier when we arrived. We had the wrong Airbnb address. Everything looked the same. Every road, every house, every signpost buried under the same white. The snow had soaked through our clothes and waterproof shoes. We sheltered under a stranger’s porch while arguing over Google Maps with numb fingers. The right address was very close.
Snow is beautiful from a window. Living inside it is something else entirely.
It never stays clean for long. A day of footfall turns it grey and heavy, pushed into ridges at the edges of pavements. People track it into buses without thinking. It melts slowly on the floors, leaving a damp smell you eventually stop noticing.
The city doesn’t stop for snow. It just sends a bulldozer. Watching this thing work through a buried street at 8am, I genuinely reconsidered my career choices
The city, from above
Next morning the snow stopped. Turns out Tromso had been hiding something. We took the Fjellheisen cable car up the mountain.
From the top, the city looks like a model. A bridge stretched across frozen water, an island suspended in a fjord, mountains holding everything in place. The Arctic light sits low and blue on all of it.
The whole city spreads out in a panorama from up here.
The Arctic sun in February never really warms you. But the light makes everything look like the last scene of a film.
Two of the four days were like this. Clean and cold, but bright.
The the view across the water tells this story better than anything. One day we photographed it in full sun. Another day, the cathedral half swallowed by weather. Same spot. Completely different city.
A place shaped by winter
Winter rewired our sense of normal. One afternoon, we waited at a bus stop while people skied downhill along the road as casually as people back home ride bicycles.
Nearby, parents pulled their kids uphill on small sledges, the children laughing the whole way.
We saw a man clearing snow from his lawn when we left for lunch. He was still at it when we returned hours later. It was just part of the rhythm of winter here.
Arctic expeditions
Tromso is where the Arctic expeditions left from.
The polar museum tells the story of the explorers like Roald Amundsen, the first to reach the South Pole. I had watched a film about Nansen before the trip. Standing in front of his actual equipment, his maps, his logs, had a different weight because of that.
It also tells the darker story of what was hunted here before that, the animals that were hunted here, and the industry built around them.
Outside, snow-covered boats sat idle along the waterfront. A few moved slowly across the water.
After reading the stories in the museum, you stand there looking at these boats thinking about the expeditions that left from here.
Arctic cathedral at night
Built in 1965, the cathedral was designed to resemble icebergs, glaciers and Sami tents all at once. It shows up in almost every photo from this trip whether we planned it or not. Visible from across the harbour, from the cable car, from the bus. It has a way of appearing in the frame.
It was minus 11. I couldn’t take my gloves off to adjust the camera settings. I shot what I could with numb fingers and hoped the image would hold. It did. Barely.
There is a mosaic arch nearby called the Gateway to the Arctic, built to frame the cathedral perfectly across the water. The “Instagram queue” to photograph it was surprisingly short.
The Sami
On the last day, we drove out to a Sami camp in the snow. Only the Sami people are legally permitted to own reindeer.
Inside the lavvu (a traditional Sami tent, built to withstand temperatures down to minus 50) it was warm and low-lit, reindeer skins covering the ground.
A Sami man explained the Joik, songs that belong to a person, an animal, or a place. He sang one and the whole tent went quiet.
Outside, the reindeer were waiting.
BOOP.
My partner initially stood at a careful distance while the rest of us fed them, watching. Then one came close enough to take food from her hand. Then another. Within ten minutes she had a bucket and was completely absorbed.
You raise the bucket above your head when it is empty, the trick to stop them following you.
Both males and females grow antlers, unique among deer. The males shed theirs in winter, which means Santa's reindeer are actually all female.
One of the dogs at the camp, Keyser, had settled into a corner of the lavvu and was asleep on a reindeer skin. If I am honest, I spent more time with the dog than the reindeer. I am not going to apologise for that.
One more thing
We had a bigger reason for being in Tromso, the northern lights.
That part of the trip deserves its own story. Coming soon.
"Snow is beautiful from a window. Living inside it is something else entirely."
Thanks for the reality check!
Totally prefer this over just Instagram stories / posts.