Arctic Plans

The Northern Lights: Where, Why and How Almost everyone who travels to Finnmark or the North of Troms in Norway, is chasing the same thing, whether they say it out loud or not. A night when the sky stops being a sky and starts moving. The aurora borealis is the reason a lot of visitors (and even some locals) put up with sub-zero temperatures and long, dark drives in the first place, and it deserves a proper explanation rather than just a photo gallery — what it actually is, why it happens here specifically, and how to give yourself the best realistic shot at seeing it. What's actually happening up there 🌠 The sun isn't just a ball of light — it constantly throws off a stream of charged particles called the solar wind, and every so often, a solar flare or coronal mass ejection sends a much larger, faster burst of that material toward Earth. Most of it gets deflected by Earth's magnetic field, but the field itself funnels a portion of those particles down toward the two magn...

Vuonnamárkanat: The Sámi Market in Varangerbotn In the winter of the late 1600s, a Norwegian bailiff named Niels Knag sat down and wrote out who actually showed up to trade at a market held every January 22nd at the head of the Varangerfjord. His list reads almost like a roll call of the entire top corner of Europe: Norwegians, coastal and inland Sámi from Varanger and Tana , Sámi traders from Laksefjord, townspeople from Vadsø, Kiberg and Vardø, Swedish merchants from Torneå, Sámi from the Swedish side of the border, and traders from Russian Kola. King Christian V had ordered the market established in 1688, and for generations afterward, this stretch of fjord became the one place in the far north where half a dozen peoples who otherwise rarely crossed paths came together, once a year, to trade. That market eventually stopped happening. What exists today under the name Vuonnamárkanat — held every year on the last Saturday of August in Varangerbotn — is its modern revival, and underst...

Nuorgam: The Village at the Very Top of Finland There's a particular kind of appeal to a place that exists at an extreme, and Nuorgam trades entirely on that appeal — it is, quite simply, as far north as you can go and still be standing in Finland. Push any further and you're in the Tenojoki river, and beyond that, Norway. Roughly 200 people live here, strung out along about four kilometres of road leading to the border crossing, in a village that has spent the last 270-odd years quietly changing which country's northernmost point it happens to be. That's not a throwaway line. It's the actual, documented history of this place, and it's worth understanding before anything else about Nuorgam makes sense. A village that has changed nationality without moving Nuorgam's first known settlers arrived from Polmak, just across the river in what's now Norway, in the 18th century. When the border between Sweden and Norway–Denmark was fixed in 1751, the village foun...