We woke up 06:30 after our last night in the tent. The weather was as it had been most of the time in the camp, cloudy and rainy, though unusually enough it wasn’t particularly windy in Petunia Bay. We ate breakfast, which was heavy on the cheese and light on our meager remaining cracker rations, and of course we had delicious fruit soup as well. We took the tents down and got everything packed up. Everyone moved to the beach and we all went through the area to find any remnants of garbage that anyone may have left behind. We had a short discussion about the impact our relatively small camp had on the environment and how that might factor into analyses of the environmental impacts we would be discussing in our final project.

While waiting for the boat on the beach, we did our best to stay warm, dry and pass the time. After a couple hours of silly games and skipping rocks, the boat finally came. Moving everything from the beach to the zodiac to the main boat was less of a mad rush than when we arrived, which was a welcome change of pace.

Loading the Zodiac.

The boat ride gave also gave us an opportunity to speak with tourists who had visited Pyramiden in order to explore their perceptions of the town, Svalbard, climate change and their reasons for visiting the Arctic.

The boat ride back was an adventure in and of itself. The seas were quite rough and a few students didn’t take to kindly to the rocking and got quite sick. We had survived Petunia Bay and Pyramiden but the Arctic Ocean was quite the challenge. All in all we ended up back at Longyearbyen a bit dizzy but glad to be back to civilization.

We prioritized shower, food and beer and went out to Kroa, a fine pizza joint. Everyone was in high spirits and was glad to have a warm, dry bed.