Mission Accomplished! Date: April 25, 2009 Location: N90° 0.0' Time Traveled: 16 hrs 15 minutes Start: 1:15am (2/25) End: 5:30pm (2/25) gentle NW winds, misty sky, sun shining through clouds 0 nautical miles to the North Pole John and Tyler are commited to raising funds and awareness for CaringBridge.
By: John Huston
Audio Transcription:
April 25th, Day 55 of the Victorinox North Pole '09 Expedition. Position: the North Pole. Miles to the North Pole: zero. At exactly 5:30pm Central Time, the Victorinox North Pole '09 Expedition reached its destination by stepping on the North Pole itself. The last four days have been an absolute blur for Tyler and I. We slept a total of 3 hours and pushed our bodies and minds to the limit in order to overcome seemingly insurmountable odds of sea ice drift and pretty much inclement weather. As you can tell from my tone of voice, we are exhausted; we are so tired we don't know how tired we are. And we are enjoying our last meal in the tent together and having special dessert treats, a tiny bit of scotch and munching on a little bit of chocolate that is left over from lunch. We have a fantastic feeling of satisfaction and of freedom from our powerful routines that propelled us to the North Pole and through some very challenging circumstances. And that freedom comes in the form of we can now relax and not just move onto the next step all the time. And that is a really good feeling to step outside of the structure of the expedition.
We'll have some more reflection in the coming days. Tyler and I are picked up by a Russian helicopter tomorrow at 10am Norwegian time. And then we fly to the archipelago of Svalbard, 78 degrees North or so that is owned by Norway and then fly to Oslo the next day where our friends, families and loved ones are waiting for us for a celebration and then homecoming back to America a week later or so. So don't go away. We have more blogs coming and we just wanted to announce that we are very pleased that the Victorinox North Pole ‘09 Expedition was successful and will continue to be so.
We'd like to thank our major sponsors, Victorinox Swiss Army, Bergans of Norway, our official performance outerwear sponsor, and Delorme, maker of the PN40 GPS which located the North Pole for us today at 5:30pm and CaringBridge, our charity partner. We would like to remind everybody to go to www.CaringBridge.org or to click on the CaringBridge link at our website www.northpole09.com to support our effort to raise money and awareness for CaringBridge, an absolutely wonderful charity that can benefit anyone in life. They provide free personalized website for individuals and families in health crisis, treatment or recovery.
Also we like to give a big warm thank you to our office staff, people who volunteer their time or who work tirelessly to put out the blogs and support us when we were on the ice. Kristin Daniels is our office manager. She is the one running the website and running all the little knick-knacks that go with the administrative side of the expedition. Julie Hignell, who lives in Northern Minnesota, was our safety and logistics coordinator. Her advice has been invaluable and so is her positive voice on the other end of the phone. Mark De Keyser, who lives in Belgium, provided us with expert weather forecast the whole expedition. Jack Klobucar, of Added Value, Inc. out of Minneapolis, is our PR and marketing consultant. Thanks. There are so many other people to thank but those people are directly working with us.
Whoa, that was a hard trip. We're going to bed and are very, very, very happy to do so. We apologize for not sending too many photos the past two weeks. Our electronic, little computer gadget kept malfunctioning so we stopped and focused on skiing instead.
Ok. Talk to you soon everybody and ‘hello' from Tyler. Bye bye.
Date: April 24, 2009 Location: N89° 31.944' W042 17.048' Start: 3:45pm (2/23) End: 3:45am (2/24) NW wind, 10-15 knots then calming to W wind, 5-8 knots visibility variable, haze 28 nautical miles to the North Pole
CaringBridge Family: Bob Reichl John and Tyler are commited to raising funds and awareness for CaringBridge.
Date: April 23, 2009 Location: N89° 20.353' W044 13.828' Travel Time: 12 hours Distance Traveled: 15 nautical miles 40 nautical miles to the North Pole
CaringBridge Family: Josh Crosby John and Tyler are commited to raising funds and awareness for CaringBridge.
By: Tyler Fish
Audio Transcript:
"John Houston and I are in a race against time to get to the North Pole. We consider ourselves on the "international speedway" to get there. Our plan is to travel 12 hours and rest for 3 or so, and then travel 12 hours and rest for 3 and travel 12 hours and rest for 3 until we make it. The skiing is fairly straight forward, mostly north. But it's the supporting the skiing that I wanted to explain. There's basically 2 ways that we do that. We have "rest stops" and what I call "pit stops".
The rest stop is like going to a rest area. You pull over. You sit down. You eat some lunch, basically some truffles, some soup, some nuts. You rest for no more than 15 minutes. Maybe you shut your eyes for 2 of those, and then you get up and you go.
Then there's "pit stops". The pit stop is where we actually set up the tent, cook water, have a meal, take a 1 hour nap, get up, pack everything up and away we go again. Sort of like the refueling. Getting everything ready like a race car pulling in to a pit stop and getting new tires and an oil change and whatever else happens at a pit stop.
We want everybody to know that we are well. We will, for sure, be very, very tired and sleep deprived and thinking strange things and a bit giddy at times for sure but we are going to do our absolute best to make it. So, expect the blogs to be short because we are busy. But we will be smart. We will be safe and we will be taking care of each other.
Today, we were skiing for Josh Crosby. He is a 12-year old. He is a leukemia patient and he really appreciates the notes on his CaringBridge website. So, we skied for you today, Josh.
Caring Bridge provides free personalized website for patients and families in health crisis, treatments and recovery. If you would like to support CaringBridge and we sure hope that you would like to do so, if you can please go to our website, www.northpole09.com or the CaringBridge.org website to find out how you can support them financially and if you can't do that, well then, please spread the word for CaringBridge which is their wonderful organization. Thank you. We'll be in touch."
Date: April 22, 2009 Location: N89° 08.131' W051 20.827' Start: 5:45pm (2/21), -2°F End: 9:45am (2/22), 0°F W wind, 15-20+knots
John and Tyler are commited to raising funds and awareness for CaringBridge.
By: John Huston
Audio Transcript:
"What a day! We really had a big mental day. Tyler and I began this day south of 89° latitude even though we camped north of 89° latitude. What's been happening is that we are drifting south at a pretty quick rate, between 4 and 6 nautical miles per 24 hours and that's really been hurting our travel schedule. And it's been frustrating to have entered 88° a few days ahead of schedule and have exited 88° a day or two behind schedule.
We have adjusted our working hours from 13 to 16½ and still have encountered quite heavy conditions, rubble with lots of wind blown snow and a few open leads that take time to swim across. Given these factors and given the drift pushing us south so quickly reaching the North Pole by early morning on April126th will be a huge push and we're ready for it.
Tyler and I knew that we would have some sort of huge push at the end and while that was a possibility all along it was something that we kind of dreaded and we worked very hard to avoid. But at this point due to the drift and due to the pretty hard weather conditions - we have 20-knot winds out of the west pretty consistently with a lot of blowing snow and that blowing snow accumulates in drifts in all the rubble fields and makes a lot of new snow waves, or sastrugi, that really slow down our progress. So, given those factors the wind and the drift, it is a very difficult path to the North Pole from where we are at 89°, 5 minutes of latitude or so, even though we camped almost 2½ miles north of here 10 or 12 hours ago.
So, that's where we're up against and we have very little food left. We have about 3½-4 days and food. We have 3 liters of fuel, which is right where we expected it to be; that is plenty to get us there. And Tyler and I are proceeding north at our own steady pace. We know that we can only ski so fast and that to try and push our bodies, which are thin by 30 pounds each and tired and don't have the normal strength that we had in the beginning of the expedition, too much would be an unwise thing to do.
So we are heading north at our steady pace. We are lightweight because we have very little left. And we plan on skiing a whole lot and sleeping very little. From this point forward, we will blog but they will be short and with our progress updates because we are going to concentrate 100% on taking a few naps, getting a few meals and continuing north. It's going to be exciting. We are extraordinarily optimistic that we will make it to the North Pole on the morning of April 26th and we hope that you enjoy the ride.
Thanks for listening. Think of us out there skiing and send us your positive thoughts and we can't wait to see you at home."
