So this morning I went for nice hike into the mountains. My plan was to go out for about 2 hours to simply explore where I could hike on future adventures... Well it turned out to be a little longer than expected due to the fact that it is hard to stop hiking snow covered mountains, I have to say I blame you for that mom. By the time I got back to my apartment 5 hours had gone by and I all I want to do is go back out there! So to start from town this is where I was looking to go out hiking.

From walking around town before I had seen a path leading out in the mountains and so I followed it. The arrow in the above picture points to one of the spots I get to and I will tell you when I show you a picture facing down from there. Anyway even though I went out feeling as prepared as I could be there is just nothing I had done that could relate to this hike. Most of the hike was on snow and I only had biking boots, so the first problem I ran into was sinking into the snow. In hind sight I will try and find some snow shoes for my next trip because when every 10th step resulted in this it made it considerably more difficult.

I would generally sink up to a little above my knee but a few time I went almost up to my waste, and it made me remember just how deep all of the snow I was walking on was. Now the one thing that I learned about hiking up here is that you never reach the top. Every time I would tell myself that all I wanted to do was get to the top of the crest right ahead of me but on top of that was always another hill or mountain to climb. So the first crest that I reached was this.

In this you can see the valley where Longyearbyen is situated but the more impressive view from this spot were the mountains to the left of this picture.

This picture does no do the scene justice but it was just a beautiful sweeping mountain side, and the more impressive part I thought was the mix of ski trails and fallen snow boulders along the base of the mountain. Then continuing on up on my hike I then reached the place pointed out in the above picture with the arrow.

This truly blew my mind, it was such a clear day that I could even see across the bay to the mountains on the other side. Of course though when I turned around I saw this.

How could any person turn around at this point, the point of a hike is to reach the peak or the top, I had not done that yet so I continued on and I am very glad I did. My mother has told me about a hike she would like to do back home, it is called the knifes edge. As she has told me it is a hike up to a ridge that becomes very skinny therefore its name. Today I found the arctic version of this hike, and no matter how many picture I took I can not give it justice. I am looking back at the pictures now as I am posting this and none of them compare to walking this thin snow covered path along the true ridge of a mountain. This is what the path looked like as I faced back toward Longyearbyen.

The one thing that I think this picture does not show is just how much of a shear drop it was to either side, to the point of almost being vertical. What made it all worth it, besides how awesome it is, was the view. In this picture to my left was this.

Then to my right.

What makes me like the view to my right more was what I was able to see, I zoomed in such that you can see it better.

To help you see I drew in an arrow, but that small black patch is the KHO! Then down the hill from it you can see the two Sval-Sat satellites. I tried to go back through my KHO pictures to see if I would find a picture in the other direction but it was too cloudy that day. On fo the most amazing parts to me was that there were ski tracks leading down from the top of the moutain. They started a little before the wintery "knifes edge" began but still an impressive place to ski.

It is hard to see but those are all ski paths leading down off the mountain, Hunter if your reading this I got a challenge for ya.
Overall I can not wait to hike again, and you truly feel on top of the world up here.

Then on my way back down I came down a little different path and got a much better shot of Longyearbyen from high up.

This would be a much more appropriate picture to describe the peak that I pointed out from the picture I took down in town. It also shows the sweeping mountain side to the right that I was trying to show earlier as well. Finally back down at the bottom I found one of the only living plants I've seen the entire time I've been up here.