The snowplough takes off suddenly, shooting forward into the gathering gloom at what seems like rally car speed. It’s a big thing – based on a classic- cab truck, with a huge offset blade dangling menacingly in front and I’m supposed to follow tight in its wheel tracks.
Grabbing first gear, I follow as closely as I can manage in the Mazda CX-3.
It is dark outside, albeit with a faint orange-gold glow on the western horizon, which lends a royal blue tinge to the edge of the atmosphere. We're at 71-degrees north, the North Cape in Norway, or Nordkapp as it is more properly known.
0 of 4
The farthest north reach of the European continent – only Spitzbergen, accessible only by air or boat, lies between us, the pack ice and the North Pole. And I’m about to skid off the edge of a vertiginous Norwegian cliff-face because the snowplough driver fancies himself as the reincarnation of Colin McRae.
It had all started so much more calmly. Ten hours earlier, as a grey, snowy dawn broke over the Baltic Sea, we were in Lulea, a town in eastern Sweden that mixes old steel and new Facebook as its primary industries and which, in the Swedish tradition, lies low and neat and clean along the coast.
Outside the town's main hotel, our cars awaited – and they were not the sort of car you'd usually associate with anything remotely linke to the Arctic Circle. No Land-Rover Defenders or Toyota Land Cruisers for this trip – we would be travelling across some of the most rugged and inhospitable landscape in Europe in a small Japanese hatchback, a Mazda CX-3.
Crossover SUV
Now, the CX-3 is of course supposed to be an SUV, or at least a crossover, but really, such a definition is more artifice than fact. It’s a Mazda 2 – a small hatch – with a bigger engine, a slightly larger body and a modest increase in ride height.
Still, the Mazda boffins assured us it would do the trip (although quite the purpose of the trip, other than the classic mountaineer’s “because it is there”, seemed rather vague).
With tyres studded with small aluminium spikes and a couple of spare Jerry-cans of petrol in the boot, off we set in loose convoy.
Petrol? Yup, my car for the day was the 150hp 2.0-litre petrol all-wheel-drive version of the CX-3, a model which I have previously suggested was actually a better all-rounder than the more common diesel version. The journey was to prove me right.
At first, we trundled along pretty gently. Even south of the Arctic Circle as we were in the early miles, there was plenty of snow and ice on the roads. The conditions were sufficient that some kind of national emergency would be declared in Ireland were they to strike – closed public buildings, the Army carrying stranded grannies out of snowed-in front doors, that sort of thing.
Studded tyres
For the Swedes, of course, it was merely Tuesday, and we soon realised that the studded tyres would grip almost regardless of the surface or speed.
Better still, a few experiments on ice-and-snow-bound lay-bys confirmed that even when provoked with utter idiocy, the CX-3’s all-wheel-drive system, which can kick as much as half the engine’s power to the rear wheels, would gather things up nicely and bring everything back into line.
Thus heartened, we pressed on, almost missing the sign informing us that we had crossed the Arctic Circle because someone had unhelpfully parked a truck in front of it. In fact, those trucks and the very occasional local were mostly our only companions on the road.
The locals were fine, never troubled by nor troubling us, but the trucks were another matter, careering along at what seemed like kamikaze speed in the snow, halfway into our side of the road so as to avoid the drifts encroaching on the roadside.
You've watched Ice Road Truckers on TV; well in reality these things are twice as ominous and three times as frightening when they are approaching you in your little beefed-up hatchback. It was hardly surprising that we saw more than one felled reindeer at the side of the road, as these big beasties wander pretty freely up here, the more so once we crossed in to Finland.
By now we were knocking off the miles pretty handily and I was glad of the petrol engine. With the constantly whirring drone from the studded tyres, it was significantly quieter than would have been the case with the diesel and it never budged all day long from a steady average of 39mpg.
Over 900km of tundra-bashing, that’s not bad at all and proves once again that our collective dedication to diesel is more than a little foolish.
That does raise one awkward question though – should we have been whizzing around in the Arctic at all? After all, this is one of the most fragile environments on the planet, in spite of its apparent monolithic whiteness.
Warmest Arctic
Recent data from
Nasa
indicates that not only was this past January there warmest yet recorded, but that temperatures in the Arctic were proportionally highest of all. It’s all a bit depressing when you start to think that the very cars we were driving, and their millions of worldwide fellows, are all contributing to the destruction of the terrain we were exploring.
The temperature gauge, which we had expected to see plummet past minus 10 degrees never got lower than minus 4 degrees. You could find that kind of reading in Cork, Dublin or Galway on some nights in March.
Perhaps that was the point of the trip – a demonstration that a small, frugal, low-emissions hatchback can, with the right equipment, drive to within 2,000km of the North Pole. This throws into rather sharp relief the statements of those who say they require anything bigger or more wasteful to do the school run on a frosty morning.
As we crossed into Norway though, the terrain became infinitely more rugged. Sweden and Finland had been snowbound, yes, but low-lying and generously studded with birch trees.
Now, as we came towards the coast, the landscape began to rear up into steep crags and deep fjords. The ambient temperature looked relatively benign but any expeditions outside the car revealed a wind- chill which would strip the warmth from your bones and, it seemed, paint from steel.
We climbed high over broad plateaus, before diving down in long swoops to the coast, and then lower still into the network of deep, long tunnels which connect the island home of the North Cape with the mainland. This is the northern tip of Europe, the farthest you can go without wings or flippers and finally, we were there – waiting for the mandated escort of the snowplough to reach the final cliff overlooking the northern seas.
Near pitch blackness
Bloody hell, he was ambitious. The night had turned to near pitch blackness and the icy road over the last few mountains was in the manner of a classic rally stage.
In daylight it would have been terrifyingly good fun. At night, with a lunatic snow- blower in front, occasionally sending up blinding sprays of white as he slammed into creeping drifts on the road, it was just terrifying.
Here at last we finally triggered the CX-3’s day-long-dormant stability control, as the car trimmed a bungled cornering line and I slithered across the ice at the apex.
And then we were there. All before us was frigid water, the distant line of the pack ice and eventually the top of the world. It was a humbling sight, especially with the sky showing its first green twinkles of Aurora Borealis.
The wind and darkness cut short our reverie, but there was time at least to appreciate the sheer untrammelled remoteness of the place, a place where human habitation depends on grit and determination as much as on studded tyres and trick 4WD systems.
Should we have been up there? Maybe not, but it was at least a sober reminder of what we might lose if we cannot prevent runaway climate change.
It proved at least that when it comes to SUVs, the little ones can achieve as much as the behemoths and smaller SUVs would at least seem like a step in the right direction.
