Let’s keep going with the winter and ice content! It’s a new year and it doesn’t look like there’s going to be much international travel in 2022 either but that’s no excuse for not writing about it. So today we’re having some really cold content: what to wear in Svalbard in winter – and literally what I wore. I admit that was in 2015 but it’s still freezing up there in the High Arctic and it’s not like I post affiliate links except occasionally for books so it doesn’t matter that a load of this isn’t for sale anymore, it’s about showing you what’s practical and affordable.
Because that’s the thing with “what to wear in [insert cold place here]” posts. They go in one of two directions. It’s either all paper-thin cashmere jumpers, leather leggings and high-heeled boots styled to look like hiking boots, with red laces, or it’s specialist expedition outfits, the sort of thing you’d wear to climb Everest which cost hundreds, if not thousands, of pounds. The former won’t keep you warm at all, I’m afraid, and the latter is within no one’s holiday budget. That said, if Rab would like to #kindlygift me their Expedition 8000 Suit, I’d wear it for the entire rest of my life. Or at least the winter portions of the rest of my life.
By November 2015, I’d been to Iceland and the Arctic Circle enough times to feel like I had plenty of suitably warm clothes but I still had to go and do a bit of shopping to top up my winter wardrobe. Activity-providers tended to give us warm suits and boots and gloves so if you’re going to do some snowmobiling and dogsledding and whatever, you might find you don’t need to take much and you may find you can hire warm gear from your hotel instead of buying it yourself.
I clearly remember some of the stuff I bought or took but some of the details I can only find in pictures, and for various reasons, there aren’t many pictures of my clothes – either because I was wearing activity suits or because photos taken outside in the dark can be a bit blurry. I really only have the one reference photo for what I took and the rest is coming either from my memory or from an old diary.
A rough guide to what’s linked in this post: nothing here is an affiliate link. I don’t make a penny from you clicking any of this. If the link is just the brand name, it’s because the item isn’t available anymore and I’m sending you to the manufacturer in case you’d like to find the closest current equivalent. If the link is the name of the item, then it means the exact item is still available and I’ve linked directly to it. Either way, no money comes to me for clicking any of it.
Base layers
On my top half I’m wearing a blue striped merino thermal top by Icebreaker. It’s the only merino thermal top I’ve ever owned and it’s great and I do still wear it but for the price, I don’t feel it’s proportionally better than the Primark ones I generally swear by, although it’s clearly and obviously at least ten times thicker.
I can see from that reference photo that I also took one of the Primark thermals with me – it’s one of the long-sleeved really thin ones and it’s in a kind of pre-faded pinky-orangey red. I still have it somewhere but I’m not going to bother digging it out, not least because it’s far too thin and see-through for me to want to take a photo wearing it with nothing over the top. I have it in black too. I wear the Icebreaker one if I’m doing something cold in winter and I wear the Primark ones on a lot of ordinary regular non-freezing days in winter.
An old diary says I wore merino thermal leggings. Funny story: when I started this post, I didn’t remember seeing them for several years and although I scoured my outdoor cupboard, I couldn’t find them. They were hanging on the radiator in the bathroom because apparently I’d worn them literally only a few days earlier and had no memory of doing so. They’re grey and a bit on the small side and nowhere near as comfortable as ordinary Primark or M&S leggings and not even noticeably warmer.
I took three pairs of socks. The warmest and comfiest were a pair of purple stripy socks by Heat Holders. I love them. These I do still wear regularly – I was wearing them the day it occurred to me to write this – and I have a second pair in black and grey stripes. Heat Holders are big socks with thick fluffy insides. Like really fluffy. They do shrink – my purple ones are now ankle socks but when I bought them, they came halfway up my calves, and the fluff gets a lot less soft after a wash or two, but a brand new pair is a really good investment for a trip to the Arctic.
Second, I had a pair of pinky-purple Bridgedale Summit socks, which I think I already owned from previous trips. I’m not big on thick hiking or skiing socks so it’s rare that I wear them out of the house but they are nice and soft and warm for winter days at home.
Finally, I took two pairs of Bridgedale Coolmax liner socks. No, I really don’t get on with liner socks. You need to go up a size bracket with your outer socks if you’re wearing another pair underneath otherwise your toes get crushed and you’ll never guess what happens if your toes are crushed. Yes, they get really cold. It can be counterproductive to wear two pairs of socks. But if liner socks work for you, these are quite nice ones.
Middle layer
I don’t know what my first middle layer is – from reference photo, it looks like I have a couple of ordinary black t-shirts.
But I know what my next mid-layer was. It’s a big thick purple Rab Classic Double Pile fleece jacket which I bought specially for the occasion. It’s far too warm for me to have ever worn since – well, I wore it to Salisbury once and I have never come so close to passing out from heat exhaustion in December in my life. Also, in case you can’t tell from the photos, I can’t get it done up anymore. It’s got a smooth windproof liner so it’s not actually soft and fluffy next to the skin but I think if it was, I might have collapsed from heat exhaustion in the High Arctic, never mind Wiltshire.
I didn’t remember what trousers I wore but an old diary says I wore my Cinamani trousers over those grey leggings. I love Cintamani but it’s way out of my price range. These trousers I bought in their bargain basement – literally, it’s a basement and there’s a slide down to it. Or there was, I’m pretty sure the Cintamani shop on Laugavegur is long-gone – and they were a size smaller than I would have liked but if one wants to buy expensive icewear on a budget, one occasionally has to buy something that’s not as ideal as they would like. I’m not sure what the fabric is called (the 66 North Vik jackets, one of which I own, somewhere, feel virtually identical and use the phrase “Polartec® Power Stretch® Pro”) but they’re sort of fleecy inside and sort of smooth, almost like really fine neoprene, on the outside. They’re basically leggings with a slight flare and they have a zip going halfway down the calf to open them out into wider trousers to fit over boots, which is also where they’re hiding the Cintamani logo. I used to love those trousers and it’s a delight to discover that they do still fit!
Outer layers
On my legs, I wore ski trousers. I bought them for Altitude in 2012 or 2013 and they’re luminous pink and far too long for me. Well, I don’t know if I actually wore them – the only reason I know I took them is that they’re hanging up in the background of that reference photo. I’m not wearing them in the city tour bear-signpost photo, which is the only one of me outside where I’m not wearing an activity suit. I think I bought them from eBay – I knew my snowboarding mania was going to be short-lived right from the beginning and I knew it wasn’t worth spending a lot on the trousers but if you already own them, a pair of ski trousers probably isn’t a terrible idea for a winter Arctic trip. I’m sure it’s pretty standard on skiwear but I don’t ski so forgive me for detailing that the legs have a kind of waterproof elastic skirt inside to stop snow getting up my legs and they have lots of pockets.
On top, I wore a ski jacket, a huge one. This was one of my special Svalbard purchases. It’s a Mountain Warehouse Brevis one in a kind of pinky-maroon. I’d rather have had the bright blue but there are fashions in ski jackets and the maroon was last season’s colour so it was half the price, and I thought that was a great price for a jacket which claims to keep you warm down to -40°.
It needed to be a bit oversized because I knew I was wearing it over a big chunky fleece that was more jacket than fleece anyway but this thing came most of the way to my knees and my hands were somewhere around the elbows. Again, snow-proof skirt inside to keep my body dry and loads of pockets including a really subtle one around my left wrist, which is meant for your ski pass so you can just bip at the ski lift gate. Useful for my room key card on Svalbard and I appreciated having inside pockets for my spare camera battery and anything else I wanted to keep warm and dry.
My last outer layer was my boots, another special Svalbard purchase. They were also from Mountain Warehouse and they were a pair of Whistler snowboots which are like rubber boots around the foot and then padded quilted fabric around the ankle. I wouldn’t have chosen white myself and nor would I have chosen a size eight, which is two sizes bigger than I normally wear but they were on sale and I’d already spent quite enough on the jacket and the fleece. Besides, if you’re planning to wear two pairs of extra-thick socks, it doesn’t hurt to get boots a bit bigger than you’d normally wear and to be fair, they were good boots. I don’t travel with them anymore, no matter where I’m going, but I do tend to pull them out if it snows at home and I want to go out and play, although I don’t pile on the socks anymore which means I kind of wish they weren’t two sizes too big.
Accessories
The accessories were all stuff I already had. I wore my Viking hat which is a fleece-lined woollen hat in the shape of a Viking helmet, which I bought from the Icewear outlet in Vik. I have a few favourite Excellent Hats and this is among them. I don’t remember exactly when I bought this hat but I was in Vik in the summer and the autumn of 2013 and I don’t think I made it back again until the summer of 2016, so I’d probably owned this hat for two years before I took it to Svalbard. It has ear flaps which are really useful in Arctic conditions.
Then I have two pairs of gloves that I bought in London the day before I went to Iceland in… I don’t know, either January or December 2013. Skin-tight merino liner gloves by Icebreaker which aren’t very warm in themselves because they’re very thin but you wear them under real gloves. My real gloves are mittens, great padded mountain mittens that have gone on many a snowmobiling or Northern Lights trip. They’re Trekmates Mountain XT Primaloft mittens. Actually, they have fingers tunnels on the inside which isn’t as comfortable as being real padded mittens but the insides are a kind of brushed polyester and there’s plenty of warm padding.
I also took a swimsuit, my goggles and perhaps a drybag and towel, although I probably took the towel from my room. They don’t advertise it particularly loudly to tourists – or apparently at all in English – but there is a swimming pool in Longyearbyen and I fancied my northernmost swim. Dry your hair before you leave; mine froze on the way back to the hotel and I could bend it into interesting shapes.
And to finish on a bit of a sad note: I also took my beloved orange Cintamani mittens, which I lost several years ago and have mourned ever since. They were real mittens, with no hidden fingers inside, they were bright orange and they were made from the same fleece/neoprene-esque fabric as my trousers. If I could find a replacement, I’d snap them up in a heartbeat. I’d even settle for a pair that wasn’t orange. But Cintamani doesn’t make them anymore! Please, Cintamani! You must have a scrap of this orange fabric in a box in the corner of your factory! Please make me a new pair!
Price
Ok, it wasn’t quite Arctic-on-a-shoestring. I don’t know what I paid for anything because it was a long time ago but the prices I’m finding today are horrifying me. Prices go up over the course of six years, right? That Rab fleece is now £80-95 and I absolutely didn’t spend that much on it. The ski jacket might have been £40-60 but I can’t see anything on the website really comparable to mine. The boots are still available, at the reduced price of £39.99. I don’t think I’d have spent £40 on a pair of boots two sizes too big. I’d have decided I can at least find something that fits for that price, so let’s say I paid no more than £20 for them, and probably only £10. What else did I buy specially? The Icebreaker merino top. Those are currently going for anywhere between £75 and £115 and again, no way would I have paid that, even for merino. And the Heat Holders are somewhere around £9-11, which I think is ok for a pair of special extra-warm thermal socks. I’m very glad I was already in the habit of going to the Arctic and already owned everything else because for today’s prices, you might as well go for that Everest gear I was denouncing earlier.
As I said at the beginning, activity providers will give you warm clothes for snowmobiling or dogsledding or whatever you want to do and you can always ask if your hotel will rent you some warm stuff for just getting around, walking down the street to the bar or supermarket. But this is a more realistic level of warmth than you’ll often find. If you see “you should buy a cashmere sweater” or high-heeled boots, run.