The ski pass was a plane ticket to Tromsø, and the hotel was a sailboat.
For seven days the boat was the base – dropping anchor in remote bays, tying up to floating piers, opening terrain that no road reaches. Skins on at the waterline, summit by lunch, back down to a boat where the first mate was also the chef.
In the eight days before we arrived, nine people had died in avalanches in the Lyngen Alps. The weather kept shifting and the snowpack that spring was unreliable, so every line got chosen rather than chanced. Our guide had raced World Cup and kept us laughing and out of trouble at the same time. The captain had four circumnavigations behind him. Asked on the first evening how it was going, one of the group said it was less a holiday than a test-your-limits expedition, in ninety-kilometre winds.
Two days were written off by weather, so we went to the world's northernmost distillery instead. There is no insulation in the building beyond snow and grass, which is deliberate – the Arctic is doing part of the work on the flavour.
Our guide's story about the hut up on the hill: six years earlier, bad weather, a fire going and sausages on. One of the group went inside and then could not get the door open again, because the wind was pushing it the wrong way. Three of them were blown over and carried most of the way back down the slope. They spent the night up there, five men in a row in front of the fire.
The best day was the peak they called Jupiter – two and a half hours up, 890 metres, and the sun waiting at the top. The last tour started in cloud and ended in sun, with a long clean run down to a fishing village where four people live and the boat tied up right there.