Our November 1983 trip was a pilgrimage to the site of an avalanche disaster which killed a group of our friends the previous winter. Looking back, I gotta wonder what were our own chances of joining them up in Heaven.

The disaster site was at a far NE edge of Khibiny mountains, and with the short Artcic days and fickle Kola Peninsula weather, we were desperately running out of time. So we left most of the gear at a Lake Paykun-Yarv hut, and went light on a 40-hour stamina-and-adrenaline race, a good portion of it in the fog, in freezing rain, or in the dark.

But this slide captures a rare few minutes of great visibility, near the trangulation tower atop Central Lyavochorr Plateau.