Adventure Activities Near the North Pole

Your first thought after having read the title of this article might have been: “Where on Earth is Svalbard?”

Well. Grab your nearest world map or atlas and head north of Europe. Past the Scandinavian countries, past the Faroe Islands, even past Iceland and you’ll find Svalbard – a Norwegian archipelago 650 miles (1,050 kilometers) from the North Pole.

As you can imagine, it gets quite cold in Svalbard, all year round. This won’t stop you from having any of the outdoor adventures that the region is famous for – they’ll merely enhance them.

Dog Sledding in the Snow

This was the adventure I was most looking forward to, as I love man (and woman’s) best four-legged friend and regularly seek dogs out when I travel.

It had rained, rather than snowed the day I was scheduled to go dog sledding, so we ended up going… I want to call it dog karting, instead.

We journeyed to the doggie base camp to pick up some pups. The handlers all…