- We have now been away from civilization for more than one month, chasing our dreams here on Ellesmere Island. The dream about finding some historical letters and hopefully, photographing the Arctic wolf. We now use a small cabin as our base camp, and I decided to set up my tent and use it as a photo blind. My hope was to get a glimpse of this arctic ghost, and my patient paid off. A lonely wolf came walking on the sea ice, and went to sleep, and I had to stay awake for 24 hours just to be ready if something happened, and something did happen. It is coming this way, it's coming this way. It was truly an amazing feeling watching this beautiful animal, but unfortunately, it disappeared just as fast as it arrived, and I didn't see it again. I decided to go on a 30 kilometer scouting trip. And even though I didn't see any wildlife, I had an awesome trip. I found a skull from a musk oxen, and enjoyed the beautiful landscape here in the high Arctic. With only one week left of the expedition, we decided to make our last attempt to find a pack of wolves. - It's so good to see you. - Our guides came from Grise Fiord to take us on a five days trip up north. This would be my last chance to find and photograph some of these animals I still haven't seen on the expedition. Let's see what the next few days we'll bring. We've just seen some tracks going from the cape and out, and now we're going to see what that is. Think it was. Yeah, maybe polar bear, but they... Maybe Wolf, let's see. - A couple of day old polar bear tracks, but four or five quarter. - Polar bear? - Yes, a small one. Looks like it could be his first year alone without the mother, looking at the size. - Look compared to my hand. - It never came. - What'd you see? It tried to run to it. I guess the seal went down then he waited here. - Here. - The polar bear has been walking in a circle, it has been standing there, maybe two meters away from the hole waiting for the seals to come up and then it could grab it. But there's no there's not a lot of blood, so it hasn't got it. But they are nice to see anyway. I hope to get a photo of one of the seals. - And the seal just popped up right in front of him. - No! - Twice. Okay so, we have found wolf tracks here. First Wolf's tracks today. I don't know how old they are. What do you think. - You can tell by the density of the snow on the track. They're from... They're pretty recent, yesterday probably. Cause it's fresh snowfall on top of the tracks. It's like they come through here often and check on these pee rocks. They leave messages with their Pee . - Let's see what Terry makes, he's a terrific chef. What are we having? - Yeah snow soup with meat and spices. - Anders has just emptied about half a kilo of sugar into his. Time for nice little soup. Look at this. - Is it good? It's very beautiful up here, but unfortunately, we don't see many tracks, actually, no tracks at all. We have been driving for a while in this beautiful landscape, but no one know where the animals are and neither do we. - It looks pretty dead up here. - Yeah. - We are gonna use this little valley to go out back to the sea ice. - That was quite crazy. One thing I wonder, is if Terry Noah, is a kind of the Arctic version of Crocodile Dundee, because we have been driving in wide out for a long time and we were talking about, Anders and I like, how the hell do we know where we are? So, maybe he will say like, oh, I just looked at the wind or maybe he has a GPS, you know where the Crocodile Dundee is shaving with a knife and with a shaver. And then when the lady looks, he takes a knife, but you have to tell, did you look at the wind or did you have it a GPS? - I was using the snow. I have a GPS. - We have seen fresh Wolf tracks in the area. So we decided to camp here for the night. Maybe the Wolf will pass with the sea ice. Maybe they would even get curious and get close to the camp. The visibility was very limited because of the night snowfall, but the light was amazing for photography. Now it was just time to get the tents up, gets the camera ready, make a backup of all my video footage and to get some food. And then, yeah, just wait. To avoid condensation, I left my photo equipment outside near the slade. I mount the big lens on the tripod so that if something happened, I would be 100% ready. Ready. Okay. I thought I was going to present the awesome food Terry is making. What are we having Terry? When we woke up the next morning, everything was quiet. No visits during the night and no fresh tracks in the area. It was now time to pack down the camp and move on further north. Okay, you might think people are crazy here, but look at this. It is not three grown-up men who has gone into childhood it's because we have just found fossilized wood and that's many million years ago. And it looks exactly like wood But it stoned. So, yeah, we are going to see if we can find some more before we leave. So we have been driving in this crazy fog for a while now and now it looks like it's clearing up, but more important. Look at this fresh sign on musk oxen. It's incredible you can be so happy by seeing a bunch of poo from an animal, but this is just a sign that we've been looking for, for so long. Just some kind of sign from the bigger animals like a musk oxen or the caribous and all this, I don't know if you can see it, but this is all done by musk oxen. So yeah, we're going to keep going and then see if we can find them. So we have just found, or Terry just saw this. It's a kill, Wolf killed from this winter. A musk ox skull, still with a lot of the meat on. Look at this. And because there's still meat on, there are a lot of like signs of ravens. Of course we don't know exactly when it is, but it's not super fresh because there are no Wolf tracks here, but it is good signs. We've seen musk oxen and now this kill we found, we also found an antler from caribou. And yeah so at least it doesn't seem that dead anymore. We haven't seen many tracks, but it's good signs. So hopefully, I see. Now it's never a problem anymore with the heat. But like about a month ago, when we were driving up north and near the glaciers, we had down to like, below 40 degrees Celsius, minus 40 degrees Celsius, and it was easy to feel like after some hours of driving, if you didn't get any like warm thing to drink or any food, you start to get cold. It's not an issue anymore, but now we're just doing it because it's nice. And look at this. It is really cozy. As we headed further north through this beautiful valley, it started to clear up and visibility got a lot better. It was a truly amazing view and just fantastic to be surrounded by this magnificent landscape. Then suddenly, we spotted a large group of musk oxen and camped immediately. Keeping all the equipment with power was always a chance. So there was no time to waste. When the sun finally was shining from a clear sky After getting the solar panel up, I got my camera gear ready. And hopefully, this was the time for me to make my first photos of these incredible animals. Okay so, I didn't have the time to vlog before I actually got here with my Nikon D850 and the 600 millimeter, little Tamron here, 150-600 on the Nikon Z7 And the reason why I'm bringing all this gear and my photo backpack, is that finally, I have a group of musk oxen down here in the snow, everything is beautiful. And on the way to here, we saw our fresh Wolf tracks, not from a pack, but from a single Wolf. But I mean, we are going to camp here a little further up there. The other guys are setting up the camp while I am sneaking in on the musk oxen. Hopefully, hopefully, hopefully they will not run away. I am desperate. Desperate, to get just a few photos that I look at and think, oh, thank God I got them. And I hope that it happened now. Usually, I never have expectations and I don't have expectations now either, but I have hope. So they're just out there behind the hills. You probably can't see them but they are there. Yeah. Right, some of them are sleeping. Some of them are grazing. I think it's time to see if we can get a little further and maybe a little to the left to get a more hazy background. So yeah. Oh, this is really, really nice. Oh, this is what I've been hoping and dreaming and waiting for. It's not a Wolf, but it's a musk ox and they are in the
most beautiful scenery. Finally. I feel I can breathe again now. Really, really nice. Oh, I love this. I know I've said it many times before, but it's good. It's such a good feeling. First of all, because the last few weeks, I've just, kind of like, I've been fighting against the feeling of like, I've said not giving up, but losing hope. Like in the beginning, I was like very skeptic, but then we saw all the tracks and a few sightings, and then I was very optimistic. But then, I mean, it has been really, really hard, but I feel now I'm sitting here surrounded by silence, black, and white landscape with a blue horizon. And these musk oxen are in front of me. I feel that was just what I needed right now. It doesn't matter what happen to the next two days. What matters is what happens right now in front of me with like a group of musk oxen. I have almost giving up on that, but now I got it, right here. It doesn't get better. When you can sit here in a good distance observing these musk oxen how they are relaxing, sleeping the calf are walking to the mom. And it's just such a peaceful atmosphere. And then I can sit here, make my photos, make a little video clips without disturbing these beautiful musk oxen. And I am tempted to go closer because I could just go closer and closer until they would like, get away. But that would be a shame that'll be, for me It'll be destroying the moment. The moment doesn't get better for me. And when I get in, get some good photos and get away again. And then on a good distance with my binoculars, I can see how they are still relaxing. Unaffected of me coming and getting my photos. That's the goal for me. If I get my good photo and they disappear running panic, the photo is worth nothing, but this is beautiful. This is amazing Time for me to pack my gear and go back to the base camp and get some food. And then, thank you, Ellesmere for this beautiful experience. We had seen fresh Wolf tracks. And with such a large group of musk oxen. There had to be Wolf in this area. I had a feeling that we would have visitors during the night. Therefore, I did not want to be in the tent with a very limited view. I decided to sleep outside this night because it would be much easier for me to watch and hear if some creatures would be sneaking around out there. Camera was ready, coffee was ready. And I was ready. just in case of a polar bear coming a bit too close, I prepared my bear bangers. It's morning now. And the weather has changed completely. It's a clearing up actually, but I had an interesting sleep here because when I went to bed, it was all perfect. Maybe minus six, seven degrees. And I was in my sleeping bag, looking up at the sky and thought, it's the best place to sleep in the world. Then I woke up by snowflakes hitting my face, heavy, like not heavy, but soft, huge snowflakes melting in my face. And I covered myself and I looked at the tent and they were both covered in snow. So was my sleeping bag, but because it has such
a wind stopper membrane, I thought, okay, it's fine. And its still frost. So the body heat will not come up to the surface and the snow will just peel off. When I woke up the next time, I looked at the tents, they were without snow, everything was melting, gripping. And so was my sleeping bag. It was soaked and yeah, just covered with this and went back to sleep. And now it's drying over there. You can see. So, yeah, that's awesome. Cheers! A cup of coffee now is absolutely brilliant instant coffee though, but still wonderful. We are about to take down the base camp now. We have been around in the area here and there's no sign of like a Wolf pack, maybe a single wolf running around up there in the mountains but not really fresh and not a pack that we want because a pack has a convent to maybe come and look at the camp. And that is where I can get close. A single Wolf would be way too shy. Just like the one we have seen near the little cabin. With only one day left, time to pack down the camp, get back to cabin one our last day. We think there might be a chance there because there has been some meat from seal slaughtering outside and maybe the fox, maybe even the wolf. So yeah, I'm going to give a hand. They have done most of it without me now, so yeah. So we are back at the cabin after leaving the musk oxen and the other island behind I hoped, we hoped there would be fresh wolf tracks around this cabin because there are some leftovers from an old seal and stuff. But no, nothing has been here, no fresh tracks. So tomorrow we are heading back to Grise Fiord and that'll be like the end of the expedition. But for now, I'm just going to get the things into the cabin and write my diary about what has happened the last days and what's going to happen tomorrow and then I think it's time to call that a day. It was time to leave the cabin and to say goodbye to this beautiful land we had called our home for the past six weeks. The expedition was now packed down and we headed towards Grise Fiord. It was a strange feeling watching small cabin, slowly disappearing in horizon, as we headed south through the beautiful valleys and all the glacier. On the sea ice on the other side, I got my last photo on the expedition. A seal was lying on the sea ice surrounded by the snow cover landscape, a clear sign of spring in the Arctic. There is one moment I haven't shared with you though. It is one of the most emotional, if not the most emotional moment I've ever had in nature with my camera. But before I show you what happened on this second day of the expedition, let's get back to Grise Fiord - A little bit sweaty and probably a bit stinky. Of the one and half month, a shower would be so nice - Three years ago, we started planning the expedition and it has been in my mind every single day since then. And now it's all over. But then again, it's not over, not at all. All the great experiences, the friendship and the unforgettable moments in this adventure will be stored as memories in my mind for the rest of my life. It's a strange feeling sitting here in the airplane on the way home, seeing it all from above. This is a trip where I've spent the most time and at the same time seeing the fewest animals. But it's also the trip where I've learned the most about my photography and about myself. Just being surrounded by wild nature regardless where it is, feeling the greatness, the solitude, and being present. This is what really makes my heartbeat and what I love the most. And then the final story I still haven't told you, not because I didn't want to, but just because I did manage to. On our second day, a pack of five wolves appeared in front of the snowmobiles. As they came closer, I struggled to get the cameras to work. It was simply too cold and the batteries has died except from the one I always keep in my glove. I only had a few minutes with the wolves but this is the most emotional moment I have ever experienced when photographing, I followed one of the Wolf through my telephoto lens. And when it suddenly stopped and looked at me, a strange feeling rushed through my body. It was like looking into a long forgotten time. I lost my breath and the emotions took over. I simply couldn't photograph. I wasn't able to tell the story afterwards either, but anyway, I want to share this unforgettable moment with you. This is unbelievable. I don't know what to say. I just got my first picture of a white Arctic wolf. It was running. Running out to the ice. Everything went bad. The camera battery died. The camera's like, but I got one camera to work this is at six, and a single battery. And I got my pictures and...
