Name: Keeping Tourists Alive: The Job of a Svalbard Travel Guide
Uploaded: 2025-07-18T16:58:10.000Z
Duration: 4 min 30 s
Description: Thousands of YouTube videos with English-Chinese subtitles! Now you can learn to understand native speakers, expand your vocabulary, and improve your pronunciation...

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At the edge of the world, snow isn't just snow, it's alive, shifting.

One wrong move and the mountain takes everything.

Welcome to Svalbard, one of Earth's harshest places.

Winter drops to minus 30, summers barely rise above freezing.

Four months of darkness smother these islands.

Outside this lone town, there are no roads, no villages, only wilderness.

This is the man who guides skiers through this frozen maze, where every choice could be his last.

Stick with us to learn how to stay safe and prepare for these dangers.

With sea ice disappearing and polar bears growing desperate, every journey beyond town limits requires more than just warm clothes and a sense of adventure.

It requires training, vigilance and a loaded rifle.

You always have to be aware of polar bears.

In town, you're just allowed to carry a rifle with an open chamber and no magazine and no bullets inside.

And if you go out for a trip, you have to leave town and then you should half-load your rifle, because if you need a rifle for a polar bear encounter, you should be ready all the time.

If you see a polar bear and you're a bigger group, you should gather together and make a lot of sounds and noises, like clapping in your hands, screaming.

The next step is you take out your flare gun and you shoot in the air.

And if the bear still wants to go for you, then you have to take the rifle.

Back home in Austria, I'm a glaciologist.

I do arctic guiding, mostly skiing, ice climbing and snowmobile driving.

Svalbard is a magnet for fans of extreme travel, drawing over 100,000 visitors each year.

A guide's job here can range from swift ski tours to brutal six-day expeditions.

You have to wear this underneath your jacket.

The responsibility here as being a guide is really, really high.

You are responsible for their life, for their safety.

You have to check the thickness of the sea ice and at the same time, you have to look around and be aware of polar bears.

As a guide, you get the training to do that, but you have to be focused all the time.

If you go out for a tour, you always have to have a plan B and C because the weather changes very quickly here on Svalbard.

So it can be sunny now and in 20 minutes, it's whiteout and it's storm and it's cold.

Here, beauty and danger live side by side.

But as the climate shifts, the threat of an avalanche grows.

We went out for skiing on a private trip.

While I was skiing down, I knew maybe I would trigger this avalanche.

I was calm because I'm in a safe position.

So the avalanche was 200 metres next to me, going down into a bowl.

But for my colleagues, they chose probably not the best spot for waiting for me.

And they had some, yeah, let's say, rush to get out of the run-up zone.

This is probably the worst place to get into an avalanche.

Even a snowmobile ride here can turn risky.

One wrong turn and you're on thin ice, literally.

We want to go to the other side of the sea ice on snowmobiles.

For that, you have to check the thickness of the sea ice every 100 metres.

You drill into the ice and you just want to know how thick it is.

You don't want to break into the sea ice because this is probably the worst thing that could happen here on Svalbard.

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Keeping Tourists Alive: The Job of a Svalbard Travel Guide

stick

trigger

desperate

journey