Mika Charavin

Mika supervises our snowkiting and ski-kiting expeditions in Greenland and Antarctica, and with him we offer training courses and itinerant trips in Norway every winter. Mika is a certified IPGA - International Polar Guide Association - guide.

Born in 1970, Mika has been a state certified guide since 1999, snowkite instructor, guide in the polar regions since 2003 and is part of the IPGA - International Polar Guide Association, which brings together the best polar guides in world. He has been snowkiting in boreal and arctic regions for 20 years and has traveled more than 15,000 km on expeditions in this way. He is one of the few polar guides specializing in this practice.

He is one of the very first to have crossed Greenland by snowkite from south to north-west (2,300 km in 2008) then to have completed a circumnavigation of the Greenland ice sheet (5,067 km in 2014). He becomes on this occasion the author of the longest trip ever undertaken on skis and unsupported, record broken in 2019 by Geoff Wilson. He is also innovative in his way of practicing snowkiting in the mountains (the most complex playground there is for this activity), by combining ascents of summits and crossings of massifs.

Called up in 1994, he spent fourteen months as a technical aid volunteer in the French Southern and Antarctic Lands, on the Kerguelen archipelago, where he contributed to various eco-ethological studies and the restoration of subantarctic ecosystems. Then in 1996-1997, he crossed 8,000 km by mountain bike through the highlands of southern Latin America, from the Bolivian Amazon to Tierra del Fuego, passing through the Altiplano, the deserts of Sud-Lipez and the Puna of Atacama, Patagonia...

From 1999, his taste for the wilderness, isolated, austere and cold regions, became even more refined: he turned resolutely towards the Nordic regions, and invested his energy in carrying out committed and stripped down ski expeditions: 1 800 km and four months of itinerant skiing across Scandinavia (from south to north) in 2000; various raids and several hundred kilometers in the central, western and southern regions of Spitsbergen in 2001 and 2002; attempted east-west crossing of Greenland in 2003...

Always driven by a deep passion for the great ski crossings of the polar or subpolar regions, he nevertheless modified his approach to these environments from 2006: to the rigor necessary for the logistical, technical and mental preparation of such expeditions, he now wishes add performance and technicality, key notions, according to him, in the realization of great raids, in particular in the extreme environments which are the large ice caps. It is also a way of reintroducing a playful dimension into an activity that is fundamentally devoid of it...

In total, he has supervised numerous trips, on skis, on foot or by sea kayak, to Greenland, Iceland, Norway, Spitsbergen, Alaska and the French southern lands...

Mika is undoubtedly the French specialist in expedition ski-kiting, whether in Greenland on the South-North crossing, or in Antarctica with a number of ambitious projects in the pipeline.