Mikel Sarasola is a whitewater kayaker who’s not afraid of a little ice—or even a lot of ice, in this case. Sarasola recently shared a video on social media showing him kayaking in a narrow river carved through ice and snow. At times, the water sweeps him into tubes of ice barely big enough for him and his kayak to get through. He always manages to stay upright, even though it looks pretty hairy at times. At the end of his run, Sarasola’s reward is plunging off a waterfall.
Sarasola doesn’t provide a ton of context about his video, but he does add the hashtag #svalbard, suggesting that’s where in the world he took on this adventure. Svalbard is a Norwegian archipelago in the high Arctic that lies between Norway’s mainland and the North Pole.
Though he makes it look pretty easy, we doubt it was easy. It also seems cold. Sarasola doesn’t seem to mind the challenge, though. He wrote in his video’s caption that the experience was “a dream come true.” (We assume he knew about that waterfall before he went over the edge.)
Watch a whitewater kayaker take on ice-river kayaking here:
Would you do this if you had the opportunity, waterfall and all?