Spirit of Adventure blog

The last post spoke of sun and islands, and sitting in my shorts and t-shirt in a square. As you would expect, the conditions at Spirit of Adventure are not so balmy now.

We sat in Alta with temperatures descending to -15C. During our time there we offered tours to areas in the mountains adjacent to Alta to view the ski jump resort nearby, to go dogsledding, to spend time zipping around on snowmobiles (the photo is of our HGM Jan Novak doing just that) and most impressively some guests got to stay at the famous ice hotel (made completely out of ice, including the glasses in which drinks are served).

As someone who is accustomed to living with snow, I was amazed to see all of the roads adjacent to the ship and through the port were just layer after layer of ice. This is of course because as the snow falls it’s either cleared with a residual left behind, or just compacted by traffic and remains as ice. I took an evening stroll to the local airport, it’s only about ½ mile away, and had a lot of fun “dodging” the local traffic as they flew around these ice roads, their familiarity with the road conditions clearly evident. A few times I was ready to fling myself into a snow drift in case one of the drivers got closer that I’d like, but none did.

The photos of the Northern Lights were taken by our 3rd officer, Adam McCarthy, who was part of a crew tour, and snapped these amazing images of the multi-coloured event.