The first look at our expedition sled. We talk nicely to our sleds!
Baffin Basecamp by John Huston
Tyler and I have now been away from home for a week. It has been a busy week with a lot of packing and unpacking. Living out of duffel bags and moving from place to place is a constant in an expeditioner's life. While on the ice we pack and unpack our bags everyday. As we have traveled all over the place the last year, this packing and unpacking is a ritual of the road warrior and road weary.
Right now, Tyler and I feel like a bit of both, road warrior and road weary.
On Thursday, we and our 16 pieces of checked baggage landed happily in Iqaluit (pronounced E-cal-you-it). Iqaluit is the capital of Nunavut, Canada's Inuit Province. After an emotional and stressful week of departures and a few days of
Tyler and the Arctic sunset over the Frobisher Bay.
shopping Ottawa, Ontario we are pleased to be in Iqaluit for two weeks of training, relaxing and getting everything ready for the ice.
Tyler and I trained in Iqaluit last March and this year marks my third straight year that I have been here. We have several friends here, know the town and the lay of the land. This familiarity is comforting and makes for efficient preparations. We are staying with our friend, mentor and polar veteran Matty McNair. We also reunited with our good friend Meeka Mike, a fun loving 4'9” Inuit woman, who is currently heading up a fascinating project that documents Inuit traditions and experience with climate change.
Matty's house is the perfect place to prepare for a polar journey. The 5 bedroom house is located on the Frobisher Bay beach, just a hundred yards from the hummocky sea ice. We spend most of our time in the small workshop assembling and making small modifications to our equipment. This workshop has everything one could want to work on polar equipment in preparation for
Tyler on Frobisher Bay at 5:00pm on Valentine's Day.
a long ski expedition. While working in the shop, it is fun to dream of all the expeditions that have used the same workbench.
Matty is an extraordinarily welcoming host, who loves chatting about polar dreams and gear preferences till the wee hours of the night. Like Tyler and I she has her roots in Outward Bound. Last year she hired me to guide a two month expedition to the South Pole. Tyler and I will definitely leave here with full bellies and plenty good memories of small dinner parties around her table (a staple in the McNair house).
Tyler and I have truly believe that in many ways 'the preparation is the expedition.' Throughout the past few years we've gone out of our way to humbly learn from some of the most experienced polar travelers on the planet. By working with and talking with these people and from our own testing, we've synthesized a lot of information and ideas into our own expedition model.
Today the expedition feels more tangible than ever before. Over the past week we
John, in Matty's workshop, putting together a heat exchanger, which increases stove efficiency.
our lives have simplified greatly. Now it is only Tyler and I and our expedition supplies. We deliberately left home well ahead of the expedition start date so that we could prepare calmly and with room for adjustments. By this time next week we hope to have packed 530 pounds of our food and equipment.
The closest weather station to our staring point is reporting -40°F (we'll be quite happy if it is that warm on March 1). We hit the ice in two weeks!
John says "I really hope all this stuff gets to from Ottawa to Iqaluit without a hitch."
Location: Iqualuit, Nunavat, Canada
February 12, 2009
Audio blog: Pack up gear/food, airport, delay, Canadian North flight, cold welcome, horizontal snow, glad to be here
Audio transcript:
Our first view out the door in Iqaluit, 0°F with a 50 mph wind.
"Hello, it's Tyler Fish calling in. It's February 12th. We woke up today at 5 am to pack everythng up. We packed up our gear also all the food we purchased in Canada: bacon, pemican, butter, chocolate truffles that everybody loves to hear about. We weren't sure how would it all fit or if it would fit in all the bags we had with us. And we had to get the food out of the freezer, pack the food, weigh the bags with the doctor's office type scale that usually lives in the hotel gym. We had to get out the door, load up the van shuttle, gas up the rental car, get to the airport, unload the vehicles, roll into the airport and our flight was delayed!
Well, it seemed like hurry up and wait. We quickly saw and seized the opportunity. Calmly check our 16 pieces of luggage, bought a little breakfast at Tim Horton's which is kind of like the Canadian Dunkin' Donuts and returned to our hotel room not quite sure what to do. Should we nap? Should we get on the internet? Should we watch television? A little of each? Turned out there were plenty of things to keep us busy.
John says "I am so relived that all of our equipment arrived safely!!"
It was pretty nice to slow down, actually, to be forced to do that.
I think the hotel staff was pretty glad to see us, honestly. By this time most of them knew who we were, some were pretty excited about our journey and certainly more than a little thrilled that we are staging out of their own Holiday Inn Express.
We walked out on the tarmac under dripping gray sky...eventually. And we boarded our Canadian North Airplane. The plane ride was divided between work and a little bit of napping for me. Goodbye land; we watched Ontario and Quebec disappear below us and eventually into the darkness.
The Canadian North plane is only half a passenger plane. The front part is for cargo going to Baffin Island and all points beyond. The Canadian North motto is, "Seriously Northern". Well we sat up by the door to cargo, the cargo
Tyler reads a book in Norwegian about a 2006 unsupported North Pole ski expedition. Frobisher bay is out the window.
compartment, and as we descended into Baffin our feet got colder. When we landed it was seriously northern outside. It was really windy. We could feel it as the plane tried to slow down after it landed. I felt the excitement in my body. It was really fun.
John and I walked out onto the tarmac and this time we were greeted by horizontal snow. It was really windy and felt cold. We're staying with friends tonight and we're really glad to be here, in the north!"
North Pole veteran and recent South Pole ski record setter Richard Weber, works with our skis.
By John Huston
Location: Ottawa, Canada
Audio Blog Contents: Visit with Richard Weber, polar expedition equipment, expedition knowledge, car loaded with expedition food, looking forward to hot tub, flight to Iqaluit on Thursday morning
Listen to the audio dispatch: John Huston
Audio Dispatch Transcript:
We found this posted at Richard Weber's front door. Richard has skied to the North Pole 6 times. We identify strongly with this quotation!
"Hi, this is John calling in from Ottawa. It is 8:30 EST time and Tyler and I have just returned to our hotel room near the airport after a day of driving all over Ottawa and parts of Quebec.
The highlight of the day was meeting with Richard Weber, his wife Josee and his sons Tessum and Nansen at their home about 45 minutes north of the city of Ottawa. They live in a wooded area. It's a beautiful place with cross country ski trails, a nice house and a garage/barn full of polar expedition and cross country ski equipment.
Richard has been one of our mentors. He supplies us with a lot of his knowledge about expeditions and the Arctic ocean and he also supplies us with most of our diet as far our main sustenance of pemican truffles for lunch and also bacon which we also eat for lunch. Instead of reinventing the wheel we had tried out Richard's diet and known that it's been successful on several previous trips so we decided to go with that rather than waste our time trying to pack 7000-8000 calories into about 2 1/2 pounds.
So it was fantastic to sit with Richard and talk about the expedition once again and then drive away with the car completely full of meat products and butter based foods. Tyler picked out a book today and we are both a bit run down as at least maybe a little bit road weary so we are going to hit the hot tub. And we moved our flights to Iqaluit Thursday morning so we can make sure that our sleds clear customs nice and smoothly.
Well it's going well and we feel good about everything.
We miss everybody back home and things are on track. Talk to you soon."
Alphonse Podgorski, a photographer at the Chicago Sun-Times, posted this video on YouTube. Special thanks to his son who helped him with the uploading process.
