Creating daily audio dispatches is one way we connect with people who are following our expedition.
Date: March 24, 2009 Location: N84° 39.114' W074 35.147' Time Traveled: 8 hours Distance Traveled: 6.5 nautical miles AM Temperature: -34°F PM Temperature: -24°F stiff 10knot SW wind, overcast 321 nautical miles to the North Pole
By: Tyler Fish
Audio Transcript:
"Many people think that an expedition whether in the wilderness or out on the Arctic Ocean or in the desert somewhere that it's about severing connections, that it's about getting away from people, that it's about doing something dangerous, and escaping society. Well, this can be true from time to time; actually, I think that people often go on expeditions in order to make connections. For example, John and I are certainly connecting, getting to know each other in ways that we haven't before as we're spending a lot of time in a tent together or on the ice together. Family and friends are also connecting with us; they're following us, learning about us.
Tyler reads notes that friends wrote on his sleeping pad.
Friends got together and decided to have a North Pole Solidarity Day and sent letters along and we would all read them a number of days ago now. Well, friends, actually we did not read them all that day and instead have been saving them and reading them bit by bit for inspiration. So there are a great many people that are a part of this expedition. Also, all the sponsors, we're connected with them, and all the way to the barber who gave me a little scissors to trim my facial hair for the trip.
And old friends have found me. One old friend contacted me and asked me if I could put a nine-year-old's name on my ski. His name is Mason and he is fighting for his life and using CaringBridge, and so since we are supporting CaringBridge, my friend thought that I could put his name on my ski. So I do, and I decided if this nine-year-old can do this, then I can certainly ski all day through the cold with the wind on my left side.
I also decided that my other ski needed a name, so I thought of a man named Jim who I met and who listens to me about this expedition and helped us make some connections. So I put his name on my other ski, the left ski. So I can think of Jim and the link that I followed from his CaringBridge site about, it was a journal entry that he wrote about a very special day on a bike ride that he had. And I think of that bike ride and what he said about that bike ride as I'm skiing along and it motivates me. So there are lot connections being made and the more connections, the more the expedition means. The more powerful it is and the better it is."
Date: March 23, 2009 Location: N84° 32.676' W074 40.639' Time Traveled: 9 hours Distance Traveled: 6.1 nautical miles AM Temperature: -22°F PM Temperature: -22°F 10-13 knot SW wind, overcast 328 nautical miles to the North Pole
By: John Huston
Audio Transcript:
"So Tyler and I, we ski for 90 minutes to 2 hours at a stretch and then we pull up and take a break and I will describe what those breaks are like in this dispatch. It's not like a coffee break or anything; it's more, I'd say, cold-food-on-ice type break. And in about 10 minutes, we ski to a stop, take off our skis real quick, it's quite easy to do that, reach into our Bergans outerwear and pull out a truffle bar, which is a fudge bar, which is our favorite thing to eat on break. And we also then go into our sleds, unzip them, and pull out our lunch bag. Tyler calls his his "nasty sack" because he has all his lunch items open in one bag. And I have a bigger bag that I have individual stuff sacks of my food in. And we then sit on our sleds or just stand there or if it's windy and we've found a good spot that we crouch behind an ice hummock or big piece of ice to get out of the wind.
Hydration is vital to keeping warm.
Then we proceed to eat as quickly as possible so our hands don't get cold and the little perspiration that we have generated over the last 90 minutes doesn't start to freeze. And this is a challenge. And we eat truffles and we also eat macadamia nuts, Brazil nuts, and pecans, a mix that's salted that we really like. We really like the macadamia nuts. Those are the best. And then, of course, we also eat some butter and bacon. The butter in my mouth leaves a nice salty film of fat for the next 20 minutes or so and it feels like I have a small IV in the back of my throat of butter for the next half an hour or so and I really enjoy that feeling after a break.
And we also, during a break, most importantly hydrate and drink half a bottle of water, which is a liter in size, a half a liter to a liter of water every break. That keeps our circulation going and keeps us mentally into it and our muscles performing well. So by that time it's about 10 minutes and we can be very quick at this. Our fingers are getting cold and we proceed to the sleds, zip up our Bergans clothing, check our Victorinox watches to make sure we know when to take the next break, and we also often take a peak at the DeLorme GPS so that we know that our bearing is on track because it's quite easy to get thrown off when we're navigating around and over all these ice ridges.
And then ensues a whole bunch of arm flapping, which looks quite funny, but it's really vigorous attempts to push blood into our hands. And then we proceed to ski off, which is really the only way to get warm. It's very easy to stay motivated to ski when your hands are cold and your body is cooling down quickly and there is no tent to go into, let alone a house or anything. So that is the short synopsis of our breaks. So when you're at your coffee break at work or taking a break from classes at school, you can think of us behind some ice hummock, cramming nuts down our throat, drinking water, and flapping our hands."
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
Audio Transcript:
"This week has been a week of what I will describe as optimistic patience. We experienced feelings of success and also a little bit of frustration that comes with traveling a little bit slower than we want to be and just with the mental up-and-downs of long distance and long-term expeditions like this one is. Feelings of success happened when we crossed 84°. It took us 18 days to travel from Ward Hunt Island to 84° and that's basically right on schedule with what we thought we would be doing and the same pace as other successful unsupported expeditions. I know that seems like a long time to take 18 days to travel less than 1°, but since our sleds are heavy and the snow has so much friction and also the ice is not smooth at all, it's just full of rubble and snow waves, that makes it very slow progress. Just to reassure everybody, we hope to the last 2° of 88° to 89° and 89° to 90° at the North Pole in about a week. So, once we lighten up and the friction decreases and the ice smoothes out a bit, we can really increase the pace.
We have experienced a bit of frustration because we feel like we're traveling well, but our distances aren't as big as we thought they would be after 84°. We're still on schedule; we're not worried. But it's just a little frustrating to turn on the DeLorme GPS at the end of the day where you think you've done 7 nautical miles maybe or 6, and we only do 5. I think the big factor there is that the mornings have a lot of friction and we're still traveling through a lot of heavy snow waves that we're so used to that we don't realize how slow we're traveling possibly. This week temperatures got to the warmer side. We haven't seen 40 below in a few days or maybe a week. And with that the wind increased a bit. So, as I'll talk about later, negative 50 is a lot of friction to pull a sled over, but it can feel warmer when there's no wind compared to minus 30 and a bit of wind. But we appreciate the warmer temperatures; it makes tent life a whole lot easier and it makes pulling the sleds easier as well.
We came across a relatively fresh set of polar bear tracks yesterday, that would be the 21st of March. At noon, we saw polar bear tracks of two cubs and a mother that were headed the opposite direction of our travel and slightly across it. So we're not too worried that we will encounter them, but it's quite exciting to see signs of wildlife out here. It's only the second sign of polar bear that we have seen. The first was on day 6 or 7 and we have not seen any since then until yesterday.
We have been traveling on mostly old sea ice that's been around for a few years and this is identified by lots of rubble piled high and makes it difficult to navigate through, to go in a straight line. We're always zigzagging our way north, so our actual distance traveled on foot is probably a few miles more then our actual, then our GPS straight line distance from camp to camp. We have come across a few large frozen leads that are well-frozen and jumbled a little bit, but make for very good travel because there's very little snow on them compared to the sometimes deep snow and snow dunes on the old ice.
And the theme, I guess, is optimistic patience because this expedition is front-loaded with a lot of heavy work early on and we just have to be patient that our loads will decrease and that the friction will decrease as well and that we'll be able to travel more miles later on. And we're confident in that; we just have to keep reminding ourselves to be patient. So that's it, optimistic patience that we will be patient with ourselves and continue to improve our mileage and that each day is a new opportunity to get closer to the North Pole. Thanks for listening everybody. That is the week in review."
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."
