articles/Landscape/arctic-page3

Into the Arctic Circle - part 3 of 1 2 3

by Paul Gallagher Published 01/10/2013

The depth of the snow can be very unpredictable and this I discovered one very windy and bitterly cold afternoon at Flakstad. We parked at the roadside and waited for a blizzard to pass then we decided to head down to the edge of the fjord. Little did I realise that in places it was up to my chest and I was quite literally having to dig myself out of what was a boulder field below covered in a winter's season of accumulated snow. It took us 30 minutes to navigate 500 metres and when we arrived at our chosen spot we were exhausted and very cold. A quick check of the air temperature showed minus 8 and that was without the wind chill factor!

One day we ventured up into the northern end of the peninsular around the Bostad area and it had been snowing heavily all morning. The coverage of snow had turned the landscape entirely white apart from the trees that appeared on the hillsides. The landscape was completely silent and without the roadside poles it would have been almost impossible to judge the direction in which to steer the car. We spent hours exploring this very different landscape. Compared with the steep-sided mountains and fjords this required a minimalist approach.

Lofoten is a place that overwhelmed me at times, made me shiver with the cold and forced me to run for cover during the blizzards. If I am to be honest, it offered more photographic reward than Iceland and it will certainly be a place I return to over and over again. I am now running two workshops there next year and I am looking forward to that time already and sharing my experiences with other photographers. The journey home was as expected, and when I arrived home I was tired but I had a feeling that I had been on a real adventure, a real trip into the wilderness, into the Arctic Circle.

• Into the Arctic Circle page 1
  
• Into the Arctic Circle page 2
  
• Into the Arctic Circle page 3
  

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