Uphill Struggles
We started the day with an enormous climb. Ten minutes after we'd set off, the incline of the glacier we're on changed from flat to slightly uphill. Ten minutes further on, we were struggling up a surface so steep that (if it weren't for the fact we were actually doing it) I'd have said it was impossible to drag sledges heavier than we are up it on skis. We climbed 500 feet in 45 minutes. 'I've never done that before', I said to Tony as we rested briefly, slumped in our sledge harnesses, at the top.
A little later on, we had to contend with something else I hadn't tried before; skiing downhill with heavy sledges (I've spent nearly two percent of my entire life on skis, dragging sledges, but the Arctic Ocean doesn't really have any long, smooth slopes.)
We sat at the top of the slope, chewing on energy bars and weighing up the options. As we saw it, there were three. One, to ski down, still harnessed to the sledge and hoping against hope that it wasn't going to a) overtake you or b) run you over. The second was to strap our skis and poles to the sledges, lie on top of them and bomb down at high speed. We finally went for option three, 'launching' the sledges from the top and following them down, practising our telemark turns en route. It worked rather well, apart from one heart-stopping moment when my sledge caught an impressive but unexpected amount of air as it careered over the lip of a snowed-in crevasse.
Speaking of crevasses, Tony came up with the theory today that some of them actually extend all the way through the planet, emerging as 'mirror' crevasses in the opposite hemisphere. We skied along for a while in fits of giggles, half-expecting some disgruntled Australian to come firing out of one of the nearby chasms, eyebrows still smouldering from his passage through the Earth's core…
The highlight of the day came after we'd put the tent up this evening – I had the chance to talk over the satphone to the launch of a sponsored walk (in California!) in
aid of the Friedrich's Ataxia Research Alliance.
Humbling stuff indeed, and I felt privileged to be involved, all the way from the other side of the planet…
— Filed under Greenland