The ferry from Breivikeidet to Svensby takes twenty minutes, which is enough time to read the whole peninsula if the cloud lifts. It lifted, briefly, on the morning of the ninth. I stood on the car deck with the map folded to quarter size and matched summits to contours — Jiehkkevárri holding its plateau ice, Store Lenangstind cutting the skyline further north. The traverse runs between them, sea to sea. Arctic light in September is a long, level gold that flatters everything; the file exists to correct for it.

This was reconnaissance, not a crossing. Three days, two camps, and a list of questions from last season’s file that wanted answers on the ground. Chief among them: the condition of the glacier tongue below the 1,580-metre col, which the August photographs suggested had pulled back hard.

It has. The ice now ends perhaps eighty metres higher than the 2024 line, leaving a band of polished slab that takes a careful hour in crampons when wet. From next season the day-three descent moves to the eastern moraine — longer, but honest ground, and it keeps the rope on snow rather than glass. The route card in the file has been amended.

Water is everywhere and nowhere. The plateau streams run milky and fast until mid-afternoon, then vanish into the moraine without apology. Carry two litres out of camp and refill before 14:00; this now stands in the trip notes as an instruction rather than advice.

Weather remains the whole game. Lyngen sits in the sea and takes what the sea sends. Of my four days, one was perfect, two were workable, and one was spent flat in the tent listening to the fly try to resign. The seven-day itinerary carries two reserve days for exactly this reason. I would not trim them, and I wrote the itinerary.

The grade stays at PD. Nothing on the traverse is hard, but everything is committing — the mid-route exits are long, and rescue here means a boat before it means a helicopter. Arrive comfortable in crampons on 35-degree snow, and make peace with wet feet early. Filed from Tromsø, with sand still in the tent zips.