Dressing Up for The Arctic Winter

Referring to my previous post „Chasing Aurora in Tromsø„, here are my suggestions for having a dry and warm butt while you’re chasing aurora in the polar circle! 🙂

– Invest in some good merino wool underclothing garments. I know, that they are rather pricey. But believe me, it’s worth it. And these clothings are also wearable for any „normal“ winter days in Germany & surrounding area. You don’t need a lot of these underclothing garments. As you don’t sweat much during winter, you can wear them repeatedly. Just hang them for some minutes in the fresh air every evening after you put them on.. They won’t stink.. And this material (merino wool) has a special trait, which can regulate the body temperature. So you won’t get overheated if the weather gets a bit warmer.

– Always wear your clothings in layers! This onion-principle is necessary in cold weather countries. You can always take off or put on layer as needed.

Here’s how I „layered“ myself:
– A cotton underwear and a cotton bra/tanktop

Upper part:
– a merino wool undershirt
– a fleece pullover or a down pullover (I got mine from Uniqlo).
– a proper winter coat with a down layering (I got mine from Woolrich).

Lower part:
– a merino wool longjohn
– softshell (wind and water resistant) function/ski pants
– merino socks
– Shoes: I have a pair of winter boots from Panama Jack with a thick lamb-skin sole. These are good enough for temperatures between -5 – 0 degrees of Celcius. But if you’re doing husky sledding, you need another kind of shoes (usually available for free, provided by the tour group). The Norwegians like wearing seal-skin boots for even warmer footings. You definitely need a good sole profile, as the roads are extremely slippery. If the roads are very icy, you would need spikes for your shoes. You can buy these spikes in Tromsø. Luckily we didn’t need ones for our trip. But you really need to watch your step and do the penguin walks!
– Hand gloves: I wore two layers of hand gloves. The first layer is my thin jogging hand gloves with a touch screen-function. The upper layer is my ski hand gloves (mines are from Roeckl). It’s best this way, so that when you want to take pictures you can take off your upper layer hand glove (which is usually very thick and grob) and still wear another (thinner) hand glove. Otherwise it can get very painful…

I hope, that this post can help you in preparing your icy trip to the polar circle!

Love,
Andina

p.s.: Photo credit by Medirtle 🙂