To the Fjords!

During the first half of November, a friend and I ventured to northern Norway on a mission to swim with orcas. The orcas, alas, failed to show up, and though it was frustrating to be thwarted in our primary goal, the trip was more than worth it. The area around Tysfjord and Lofoten, north of the Arctic Circle, is a fantastic landscape of craggy mountains crashing down into the icy swells of the fjords, all of it stretching on to an incomprehensible distance, to the point where you can see the curvature of the earth and feel the reality of your own smallness. Bobbing in the swells in a drysuit in Tysfjord, with an air temperature below zero and a water temperature a few degrees above freezing was disorienting and invigorating. And meeting the folks who live way up there all winter long, with little daylight and long, dark, booze- and karaoke-filled nights, was an education. Seeing the Northern Lights wasn't bad either. But in the end, we had traveled all that way to see whales, and not seeing them was a tremendous disappointment. And while it's possible some magazine will want a story about not finding whales ("Looking for orcas in all the wrong places?"), it's definitely a tough sell. Click over to the photos page or check this flickr set to see what it looked like.