Austrian painter Christiane Ritter reluctantly followed her hunter husband to Svalbard in 1933, a time when much less was known about the far north than today. Five years later, her memoir, A Woman in the Polar Night, did the same job of informing people about the realities of arctic life that Marco Polo did for the Silk Road and Mongolia. Located at the mouth of the Liefdefd Fjord, Gråhuken Mountain plays a starring role in the novel as the location for the couple’s tarpaulin-covered hut, more than 97 kilometers (60 miles) away from the next human—and the place where Ritter gradually learns to love the isolation and harsh yet inspiring environment.
