Unsurprisingly, Barneo has canceled its 2022 season. Citing lingering COVID regulations but mainly the restriction on Russian planes in European airspace, they made their official decision yesterday.
The floating ice station is built every spring about 100km from the North Pole to host Last Degree skiers, marathon runners, and champagne tourists. Full-length North Pole expeditions also used its aircraft for pickup at the end of their journeys in recent years.
This marks the fourth year in a row that Barneo has not run. In 2019, a dispute around allowing a Ukrainian plane to land at the Russian ice station led to a last-minute cancelation. Then in 2020-21, it was the pandemic. Now in 2022, repercussions from Russia’s invasion of Ukraine made this decision inevitable.
