Date: March 22, 2009 Location: N84° 26.564' W074 40.361' Time Traveled: 9 hours 30 minutes Distance Traveled: 6.8 nautical miles AM Temperature: -16°F PM Temperature: -12°F stiff NE breeze (~10 knots) 334 nautical miles to the North Pole
By: Tyler Fish
Audio Transcript:
"Sometimes you wake up in the morning, and you begin going about your day and you're not really sure how it's gonna go and all of a sudden it ends up, you're half the way through the day and you realize that you're just having a good day. That's what happened to me and John; we just had a good day today.
The terrain was for some reason flatter. We were able to ski faster. It was warmer; we were in a good mood and we just went and went and went. We traveled across terrain that was very much like fields separated by low stone walls, except the fields in our cases were snow or ice and the low stone walls were low, blue, ice rubble, lines of ice rubble or maybe snow chunks. So we would have to go over those and then on to the next flat stretch of ice.
There was a wind sort of in our faces all day, but it was warm enough so we were fine with that. And I was able to wear my glasses all day and that's the first day that's been able to happen, so I was pretty happy about that. And for those of you who have been following our blog, you know that we saw polar bear tracks yesterday, it was, and those tracks where fairly fresh. We saw no polar bear tracks today.
All is well here on the ice. We are very pleased with our progress today and as I lay in my sleeping bag right now about 11:15 p.m., the sun has officially gone down for, let me check, it looks like 3 1/2 hours or a little more. But I do not need a headlamp in my tent right now, even if I wanted to read a book. So that what's going on up here on the Arctic Ocean. Thank you very much and have a good evening."
Date: March 21, 2009 Location: N84° 19.798' W074 43.714' Time Traveled: 9 hours 30 minutes Distance Traveled: 5.2 nautical miles AM Temperature: -36°F PM Temperature: -22°F low contrast, light N/NE breeze 341 nautical miles to the North Pole
By: John Huston
Audio Transcript:
"Today started out as a normal day with some heavy snow waves as we crossed old sea ice. Old sea ice features kind of small snow dunes, some two to ten feet tall with all sorts of rubble mixed in. And we dealt with that for the first few hours of the day, and actually switched over to snowshoes for the first time in a week for an hour before switching back to skis for the rest of the day.
Around noon, the ice made a transition to some newer, maybe last multi-year ice, but possibly just new one-year-old ice. And we started crossing small leads that look like they had been opened and then frozen in the past two or three weeks. On one of these leads right around noon, we saw polar bear tracks heading south-southwest, which is the opposite of our direction of travel. We looked at the tracks and it was apparent that it was a mother and two cubs. The cubs' paw prints were about the size of a baseball, three or four inches in diameter. And the mother's prints were quite large and they were eight, maybe even a little bigger, inches in diameter. And they all seem to be heading the same direction and then traveling together.
When we see polar bear tracks it's interesting and fun, but it also puts us on a little bit alert, so we travel closer together and take all necessary precautions to be safe. The chances of a polar bear encounter on this expedition route are very rare. But the tracks that we saw seem to be somewhat new, perhaps less than 48-hours old as identified by lack of snow cover on the tracks in the lead since it snowed 48-hours ago. But we feel good. We feel that the bears are going the opposite direction and we feel safe out here. So just to let you know that.
We did travel west a bit today, so perhaps we are drifting west. We will find out when we wake up in the morning, and turn on our DeLorme GPS. That's it for now. Thanks for listening. Tyler and I will have a weekly update set for you soon. Good night."
Date: March 20, 2009 Location: N84° 14.691' W074 34.747' Time Traveled: 9 hours Distance Traveled: 5.4 nautical miles AM Temperature: -36°F PM Temperature: -32°F visibility good, light E breeze 346 nautical miles to the North Pole
By: Tyler Fish
Audio Transcript:
"Today was a slower day. There were many large ridges to find our way over. We ended up taking off our skis to pull our pulks, either one at a time or both at once, over these ridges. But in the end of the day, things winded down a bit and we're able to get some good skiing and make some nautical miles.
John's and my diet is based completely an energy per weight. How many calories can we get per gram? And it's a diet that is based on advice given to us by the polar explorer veteran and very nice guy, Richard Weber.
This staple of the diet is Pemmican. Pemmican has been used by explorers, historical and current, for a long time. It's meat and fat and vegetables all compressed together and then, in our case, frozen. It was made by a restaurant in Quebec and it is very good. The Pemmican we eat in the morning and in the evening. In the morning we add Minute rice to it. And in evening we add freeze-dried pasta to it.
Our lunch consist of chocolate, nuts, bacon and butter. Now what we've been doing is taking the bacon and the butter from lunch and adding it to either breakfast and/or dinner. So it's been putting the calories there and it's very tasty. So previously we've done that. But as of Day 15 we increased our calories by adding whole milk powder and some great, really tasty dehydrated cheese, which was dehydrated for us by Midwest Freeze Dry. They donated that, and we're very, very happy with our freeze-dried cheese. We've added that. We've also added butter for breakfast.
So, we no longer add the bacon and the butter, so much, from lunch into our breakfast and dinners. We're able to eat it during the day. So, this is increased our calories from 5,700 per day to now 6,700 per day. As we are needing more calories we're burning more and eating more so everything is good. So you can imagine us every morning and every evening holding our soupy, very warm breakfast or dinner, holding it for warmth. Cradling it as we turn off the stove to save fuel. So we both sit here in the cold, holding it and eating it and both of those feel good."
Date: March 19, 2009 Location: N84° 09.479' W074 21.600' Time Traveled: 9 hours Distance Traveled: 5.8 nautical miles AM Temperature: -26°F PM Temperature: -24°F
By: John Huston
Audio Transcript:
"This is John. I am going to talk about routines. But first of all, we've learned that our friend, mentor, and Outward Bound colleague, Thor Pakosz, has been in a small plane accident and is in critical condition. He lives in northern Minnesota and we are thinking about him and sending him positive thoughts. And his family and friends have set up a CaringBridge page for Thor so that people can support him from all over. So if you want to check that out, if you know Thor, go right ahead.
So there's been a question on our website about our routines, so here is a short blog about how we go about every day. The alarm goes off at 5:00 a.m. and we wake up, pull the sleeping bags out of the tent, start the stoves, and then take a few hours sometimes doing little projects, journaling or just relaxing a little bit, have breakfast. Tyler cooks breakfast.
Out of the tent around 8:15 or so and then depart on our nine-hour travel day at 9:00am. We travel in 90-minute to 120-minute sessions or marches. And then after 90 minutes or about two hours passes, we stop for a short 10 or 15 minute break to drink a whole bunch of water and eat as much food as possible in that short time before we start to freeze.
So during the ski day, John thinks about his girlfriend, thinks about avocados, and he thinks about how much he loves to ski, and his family, of course. Tyler, he thinks about a lot of things, but primarily Ethan, his lovely wife Sarah, he thinks about conversations he's had in the past, and he skies along singing, which is nice to hear coming down the trail.
We end the travel day around 6:00pm or 6:15pm or so depending on how long it takes to select a nice spot to set the tent. Then it takes us about 45 minutes to put up the tent, empty our sleds, cut snow for snow blocks to melt into water, and organize everything inside the tent. We get in the tent, light up the stoves, and then we have some heat, and we start to take off our boots, take off all our layers, and relax for a few minutes before cooking dinner. And then it's pretty much quickly off to bed after that with a few hot water bottles in our sleeping bags and about 7 or 8 hours of sleep each night. So we're normally in bed by 9:30 or 10:00 in the evening. Then the next day it's up at 5:00am.
So our work day is very similar to anybody else's work day or school day. And so while you folks are going through your daily routines, you can think about us here on the ice of the Arctic Ocean and we'll think about you back home because we have lots of time to think as we ski. Well, thanks for listening."
Date: March 18, 2009 Location: N84° 3.749' W074 12.159' Time Traveled: 9 hours Distance Traveled: 6.9 nautical miles AM Temperature: -38°F PM Temperature: -26°F Wind: light in the AM, grew stronger Visibility: great in the AM, grew worse, light snow in PM
By: Tyler Fish
Audio Transcript:
"Hello. This is the update for March 18th. It is day 17 of the expedition. Our day began with wonderful visibility. I stood high on a mound of ice and looked to the north and I was able to see very far, which basically means that the terrain was flat. The further we could see, the flatter the terrain and we like that because it means that we'll be able to go faster. So I was able to do that and see a great distance and I watched John pull away with his two pulks.
Eventually I left and somewhere through the day we crossed 84°. There was no sign, no marker, no boundary, nobody to tell us that we had done it, but we just knew that we had been traveling fast enough and that we had done it and we were very happy about that.
But something did happen today. As I was skiing I noticed ahead of me, not sure how far ahead, I thought made a quarter mile or a half mile, there was a wide white expanse approaching or maybe I was approaching it and I was curious, what was this? Was it 1. A huge frozen lead or other ice formation, something new? 2. Was it a wall of weather coming towards us, perhaps of wind and snow? 3. Perhaps the world actually is flat and I was charging towards the end of the world? I wasn't sure.
Well without speed and also without hesitation, I continued and I got closer and closer, sort of excited and anxious to see what this would be. But then from far away, a small voice in my head sort of woke up, yawned, and said, "Clouds." And sure enough it was the clouds. The clouds and the horizon were playing with me to create an illusion. I was actually not heading towards any white expanse of anything at all. I was just skiing on the snow. So there wasn't anything. It's like when you're driving down a hill in a car and you can make the clouds appear like the ocean or a lake with islands and peninsulas, that sort of thing. Just an illusion.
Shortly thereafter, the visibility steadily decreased and eventually the sun was gone and it was very hard to make out all the ups and downs in the terrain. Even though daylight has increased by an average of, we think, about 45 minutes every day, you still need the sunlight itself for the contrasts in the terrain. So the going was much, much slower. Incidentally, according to our GPS, we now have just over 12 hours of daylight from sunrise to sunset. But because we are so far north, there's actually, if you wake up in the middle of the night, there is still a little light in the sky.
We ended our day with no illusions and we are soundly past 84 degrees, which is our first parallel, our first line of latitude, our first degree north from where we started. We hope the rest of them come quicker and quicker. That's it for now."
