Seasick

"I don't like skiing enough for this," I mumbled after three hours at sea. I would soon be too seasick to talk, eat, drink, or move, and we were still days from our destination: the volcanic, Norwegian island of Jan Mayen, alone in the Arctic Ocean. "I want this boat to sink, ending my misery faster." The motion sickness was debilitating, a small remedy patch behind my ear offering no respite from the continuous nausea and headache. And with the Arctic summer's constant sunlight shining through the two hand-sized windows in our cabin, the boat ride felt like one, endless, miserable day from hell. Two weeks prior, I didn't know the island existed.

While skiing in Iceland, I was invited to sail to, climb, and ski Beerenberg, the world's northernmost active volcano. I jumped aboard. During our pre-trip safety briefing, Siggi, the expedition sailboat's sturdy captain who spends seven months of each year aboard it, informed our group that his previous record of slowness to reach Jan Mayen was 77 hours. I spent 83 of our record-breaking 84 hours in a half-meter-wide bunk, drinking water and eating a bite of food only when Alyssa kindly brought it to my bunk. Headwinds and six-meter waves were too much for my stomach to handle. If the boat wasn't severely heeled to one side, it was rocking fore and aft, side to side, or a combination.

After rushing to the bathroom door one afternoon, I dropped to hands and knees with my head barely above sloshing toilet water. I gave up on vomiting; I had nothing in my stomach. But when photographer Alyssa Larson and I finally landed the inflatable zodiac on Jan Mayen on Friday, I was finally able to eat my first meal of the week. Discovered in the 17th century, Jan Mayen didn't become part of Norway until 1930, which declared it an official Nature Reserve 80 years later. With this national designation came a siege of restrictions, incidentally bringing tourism to a point of logistical near-impossibility.

Iceland-born Sigurður Jónsson's 60-foot sailboat, Aurora Arktika, has been, at time of writing, the only vessel in four years to receive permission to anchor on the island's coast for more than a few hours. While the Norwegian government allows a few small cruise ships to bring tourists ashore for a brief visit to the military base a few kilometers away, no one except Siggi's groups has received further permission. Approaching the mountain with a small team of climbers operating in a different style, we coalesced to their wishes and bivouacked at the base of the glacier, about 700 meters above sea level. For our entire 36-hour climb, the sun shone brightly. In our sleeping bags at 7 pm and not planning to climb until midnight, we didn't sleep.

We wore sunglasses while we rested, occasionally peaking out to see all of the other climbers wide-awake on that summer solstice evening. The experience of strong midnight sunshine was otherworldly, and Alyssa and I laughed about it in our unzipped sleeping bags perched atop a mossy rock. At midnight, we started to skin across a very long, low-angle glacier. The mountain, beckoning from above, didn't seem to get closer for hours. When it did, the steep summit pyramid rose sharply in front of us, and, climbing far in front of the other climbers and without an established route to the summit, Alyssa and I were on our own to navigate the gaping crevasses and unknown avalanche danger on a mountain virtually unfamiliar to climbers.

Roped together and climbing in the summit's shadow, I was more cautious than ever, staying safe and time-conscious as Alyssa and I neared the skyline. The top of Beerenberg is a kilometer-wide circle of subpeaks, the summit of which is on the southwest side, surrounding a volcanic crater. The crater's interior glacier escapes the enclosed depression through a chunk of mountain cut from the circumference on its western side, lowering the glacier from the summit to the frigid ocean, 2,277 meters below. Standing together on the summit after less than an hour of ridge walking, rationality couldn't hide logic; Alyssa and I wanted to leave the summit almost immediately, even though we looked out onto a sea of clouds beneath us with almost no chance of storms, and the sun literally wouldn't set for over a month.

Our habit of climbing to and immediately skiing from summits was not about to be interrupted, but we were elated. We were atop a volcano that, two weeks earlier, didn't exist in my realm of knowledge. Everywhere but below us, the sky was a bright, uninterrupted blue. No wind obscured our discussion. If the clouds below us parted, we wouldn't see anything but water beyond the island in any direction. The summits of smaller mountains on Jan Mayen's southern end were the only features barely visible through the heavy cloud layer, which consistently rested around snowline. We began descending, passing the other climbers as they reached the summit ridge.

Negotiating crevasses on the upper mountain was done largely by GPS, trying to safely navigate warming glacial snow bridges, the risk of seracs falling from above, and a convoluted series of steep turns to reach the safe, lower glacier leading back to our bivouac and, eventually, to base camp, halfway across the island. Our ascent route was technical, but mild modifications made it a safe descent. After twenty more minutes of non-stop, low-angle ski turns, Alyssa and I loaded our bivouac gear into our packs, skied into the clouds by GPS track, and began the long walk across the island, completing our 36-hour, 25-mile day. Within two days of arriving on Jan Mayen, we'd accomplished our far-fetched goal.

A couple days later, we tore down our base camp, ferried equipment to the Aurora parked offshore, and began our 70+-hour journey back to Iceland. Seasickness returned to me faster than I returned to Iceland. But knowing that three weeks prior, we didn't even know that Jan Mayen or its volcano, Beerenberg, existed, I could be content in my sickness.