Archive for May 2006
If yesterday was hell frozen over, then today was the Costa del Sol. The snowstorm died down as we were cooking dinner, and as I emptied the pee bottle* at 10pm or so, I noticed I could see the nearby mountains once again. The snow had stopped falling by the time we woke, and the last recalcitrant clouds were slowly sloping away over the horizon. An hour later, the sun was blazing.
We responded instantly, hanging our wet gear out to dry in the heat. Mittens, gloves and headgear were placed on poles and skis, and we slung our sleeping bags over the roof of the tent. I sat outside in the sun, repairing a boot (with a loose velcro strap) and a mitt (torn after getting stuck in a tent zip) by sewing them up with dental floss. Astonishingly, I spent half an hour with my top off, basking in the sun as I sewed. Sat in the same spot, dressed the same, at the same time yesterday, I'd have contracted hypothermia.
By midday, everything that was going to dry had dried and we bunged everything into our rucksacks again and set a course for the icecap. We climbed for four hours through sticky powder, but still made good speed and are now camped on the final approach to the icecap itself. Tomorrow we'll get to see how fast we can go as it flattens out.
*As it's often too cold to venture outside to answer the call of nature, we (like all polar expeditions) use a pee bottle when we're in the tent. It's a shared bottle, to save weight, so pee bottle etiquette is quite important, principally not spilling it anywhere, and making sure it's completely empty after you've used it. It's a one-litre bottle, with 100ml markings up the side, and as we're quite competitive, this makes a great alternative to scissors-paper-stone when we're trying, for example, to decide who has chicken curry (excellent), and who gets the cod and potato casserole (also-ran)…
{ Filed under Greenland on May 31st, 2006 | 2 Comments }
I woke up, blinking, to an unexpected noise. It sounded for all the world like it was raining. I lurched upright in my sleeping bag, unzipped the inner, then the outer tent, and poked my head out to see what was going on. Our tent was half-buried in snow, and a furious wind was busy trying to bury the remaining half. Almost as if it was annoyed that I'd interrupted its work, the wind paused momentarily, then spat a handful of snow in my face. Oddly, the snow was wet and sticky, very un-Arctic considering the stuff you usually encounter up here is fine and dry, almost like sand. I surveyed the scene - it was a complete whiteout; I couldn't see further than the ski poles pinning down the far side of the tent.
I popped my head back in. Tony was rubbing his eyes with two fists. "Jolly good!" he shouted up at me, beaming a manic smile. I lit the stove and we made breakfast before heading out to do battle with the storm.
This has been by far the worst weather I've seen in the Arctic. At best, it could be described as foul. At worst, it felt like it was trying to kill us. "Let go of that tent, lads," the crazy wind mocked, as it flung sleet into our eyes, "and I'll take it off you faster than you can run. You'll never see it again". "Leave that ski pole lying on the ground, and I'll bury it before you realise where it's gone".
The horizontal snow pelted the right side of our heads and legs and arms as we skied blindly into the gloom, caking us with ice. With near-zero visibility, we trusted chest-mounted compasses, themselves plastered with snow, to steer us clear of the crevasses (somewhere to the left) and the cliffs (a little off to the right). Our tracks vanished behind us as quickly as we made them. With skis off, we plunged knee-deep into fast-drifting snow.
Surrounded by the whiteout, we lost all reference points - there is no shadow, no sun, no contrast. The only way you can tell you're going uphill is that it gets harder. Downhill, you fall over more often. Normally I relish being in the lead, but today it was a relief every time I handed over to Tony. Instead of claustrophobically scanning through steamed-up goggles for a nonexistent horizon, I could latch on to the red of his rucksack. It was a joy and a relief just to see something.
And because the temperature is above freezing point, we're soaked. Right down to our underwear. Our cameras are steamed up, there are puddles on the tent floor and our fingertips are wrinkled like we've spent too long in the bath. This doesn't feel like a polar expedition; it's more like a Scottish winter's day on steroids. It's miserable, but in a way I'm glad it's happening. As I said to Tony as we clambered into our sopping tent, it's great to have mental reference points like these to fall back on.
{ Filed under Greenland on May 30th, 2006 | 1 Comment }
Not a huge amount to report today (it was a rest day, after all). I'd love to tell you that we've been on a day-trip to the nearby mountains, or doing circuit-training in the snow, but the truth is that the weather has taken a turn for the miserable and we've spent most of the day in our sleeping bags, peeking out occasionally to monitor the low cloud and driving snow.
The day hasn't been wasted, however, as I unearthed another(!) book in Tony's sledge, the novel 'Shantaram' by Gregory David Roberts, given to us to read in Greenland by the wonderful Sunny Bates (hi Sunny!). Lying here with a slight headache, I'm half-proud and half-ashamed to admit that I started it this morning and I'm now on page 479, which I'm sure is a personal record. It's one of the finest books I've ever read, and I'd wholeheartedly implore you to buy/beg/borrow a copy, even if you don't plan on being holed up in a tent during an Arctic storm any time soon…
Tomorrow, it's on with the expedition: come snow or shine (or whiteout) we'll be heading back on to the icecap for a 100-mile round trip with rucksacks rather than sledges.
{ Filed under Greenland on May 29th, 2006 | 2 Comments }
Not a particularly restful Sunday for Ben and Tony: we bashed out our longest day yet, a shade under 20 miles (as the crow flies) in ten hours of skiing.
We finished the day on a real high, with the low Arctic sun behind us illuminating the stunning coastal mountains as they came into view. As we crested the final ridge, I spotted the depot flag we'd left at our very first camp site. Tony was zipping down the slope, about 20 metres to my left, with his sledge threatening to overtake him. Mine was playing up as well, nudging me in the calves several times as it gathered momentum. I decided there was only one thing to do, and sat on top of it to enjoy the express route down the hill. The look on Tony's face as I shot past him at a good 20 mph was priceless.
There's a wonderful feeling of weary satisfaction that only a full day of hard toil can bring. As I neared the North Pole in 2004, I often stretched my days out to 10 or 11 hours of skiing, putting the tent up with wobbly legs and collapsing into my sleeping bag feeling utterly spent. I was amazed by the human body's powers of recuperation and regeneration, and marveled constantly at the fact I could repeat this for weeks at a time without rest (I think I had three or four days off during the 72-day expedition).
I promised Tony a rest day tomorrow if we made it back to the coast in a single push. We'll spend it practicing our crevasse drills, and fitting our new 100-litre Gregory Denali Pro rucksacks before setting off for the icecap again with them (and sans sledges) on Tuesday.
{ Filed under Greenland on May 28th, 2006 | 1 Comment }
In an effort to avoid going completely barmy during our forthcoming 120 days of isolation in Antarctica, Tony and I have put a bit of effort into thinking up extra-curricular activities to keep our brains ticking over when we're not hauling sledges around.
My 2004 solo North Pole expedition was the first time I'd used music on an expedition, and my three little mp3 players were worth their weight in gold. I had a couple of books as well - Yann Martell's 'Life of Pi' and Piglet's Little Book of Courage.
On last year's Greenland expedition, we took things a step further by saving the BBC's Reith Lectures ('The Emerging Mind' - worth Googling if you fancy a bit of brain spinach for your iPod) as mp3 files on SD cards and listening to them in the evenings on our iPAQs (the tiny palm-top computers we use to update this site). In an ingenious masterstroke, Tony also knocked up mini versions of both Connect4 and chess using the Excel program on his.
Ever keen to push the envelope, we have several lectures this year, courtesy of Stanford University (freely-available online) on everything from Richard Nixon to the Enlightenment to Evolution… Once we've listened to them, we wipe the card and reuse it in our digital camera. As we're here to train, the heavier our sledges are the better, and to that end we have a huge stack of books for bedtime reading. Between us, we have Bruce Chatwin's 'In Patagonia' (highly recommended - I think Alex at WorldChanging put me on to it - cheers Alex!), Noam Chomsky's 'Hegemony or Survival', Louis Menand's 'The Metaphysical Club', 'The Ancestors' Tale' by Richard Dawkins, 'Pragmatism' by William James and 'Darwin's Dangerous Idea' by Dan Dennett.
Phew. We'll probably limit ourselves to one (or maaaaaybe two) books each in Antarctica. Any recommendations?
{ Filed under Greenland on May 27th, 2006 | 5 Comments }
In one of Lance Armstrong's books ('Every Second Counts', I think) he mentions a joke he and his team mates would play on their manager, who was sat in the team car during races. If Lance was having a particularly good day, he'd radio back to the car and say "I need a mechanic… It's my chain… I can't feel the chain".
Today, I couldn't feel my sledge. We left our second (and final) depot first thing this morning and turned back toward the coast. This meant two things: that we now had a trail to follow, all the way back to the sea, and that the cold wind we'd been skiing into was now at our backs. Our pace was noticeably quicker today - I tend to start the first 'session' of the day fairly speedily, in order to generate a bit of heat, but today we never slowed down again. We covered a half-marathon in just five hours of skiing (excluding breaks) which doesn't sound that fast, but it's double the speed we were managing a week ago, hauling our fully-loaded sledges uphill through soft powder.
Today is the first day of this expedition where I've been consistently happy and upbeat, throughout the day. Forging along, with the sledge skittering along behind me and the sun on my face, there's nowhere I'd rather have been.
{ Filed under Greenland on May 26th, 2006 | 1 Comment }
This is the first time I've skied on the plateau of a major icecap, and I think I underestimated how mentally challenging it would be. There is almost nothing in the way of external stimulus - a 360° flat horizon, ridged snow extending as far as the eye can see in every direction, a cloudless blue sky and a sun that turns in a tight circle but never rises or sets. Nothing living. White and blue.
All my previous expeditions have had a touch more in the way of variety and excitement - last year's Greenland expedition was along the length of a mountainous valley, and my three North Pole expeditions have all been over the surface of the Arctic Ocean - a skin of sea ice that's constantly drifting, breaking up and refreezing; a giant assault course that keeps you permanently on your toes.
Even on those trips, I've noticed my dreams become more vivid and colourful - perhaps as a result of the lack of visual stimulus during the day. It's a theory that's borne out by the epic dream I had last night; a full-on technicolor bonanza involving marauding polar bears, pack-laden donkeys, kukri-whirling Gurkhas, Sir Ranulph Fiennes, a Royal Air Force base and the entire staff of the Field & Trek store I worked part-time in when I was sixteen…
Tony says his dreams seem to largely revolve around the consumption of Callipos (i.e. he's dreaming of orange ice lollies while lying on top of several million tons of ice). I'm sure they'll have a few extra cast members after several hundred miles of the famously featureless and barren Antarctic plateau later this year.
{ Filed under Greenland on May 25th, 2006 | 1 Comment }
For the past few days, we've been heading inland on a bearing of 330 degrees (NNWish). Now we've left the mountains of the coast behind, the plateau of the Greenland icecap itself is featureless, with no landmarks and very little in the way of navigational cues. Every direction looks exactly the same, which, according to Tony, who's been boning up on his metaphysics, means that we could walk in any direction and be going the right way. Luckily, Tony is not in sole charge of navigation.
We can find our way using a number of means:
- GPS (v. accurate but impractical when it comes to a) battery life and b) holding the unit while juggling a pair of ski poles.
- Compass: equally accurate and no problem with batteries, but does tend to mean your lasting impression of the great outdoors is a dial with a little red arrow.
- Appeals to the Almighty: supposedly infallible, but based on previous performance can be erratic. Strictly a last resort.
- The power of the sun! (And a few other clues.) With a bit of practice, skis and poles make a fine sundial. At 6am our shadows point due west, at midday due north, and at 6pm due east, so we can work out our bearing without resorting to gadgets. Also, thanks to recent northerly winds, the sastrugi (ridges in the snow - see pic) run north-south, so providing our skis are crossing them at 45 degrees or so, we're on the right track. Tony and I amazed ourselves today when a quick lunchtime check of the GPS revealed we'd skied for six miles on a bearing of *exactly* 330 degrees, just using the sun.
After a bit of mutual back-slapping, I thought I'd play a practical joke on Tony by sitting on his sledge as he skied off. Except he didn't seem to notice the combined weight of his sledge, my sledge and me (280kg or 616lbs in total), merely adjusting his harness slightly and leaning into it a bit further as he skied. As I scooted along giggling, with my knees by my ears and my skis like outriggers, giving the occasional push with my poles, I reflected that I couldn't have a better team mate for Antarctica.
And I wondered, briefly, how many times I might be able to pull the same trick down south…
{ Filed under Greenland on May 24th, 2006 | 5 Comments }
A good, solid day's skiing today. The crazy winds of the last few days had carved the surface snow into sastrugi - frozen ridges that in today's case ran perfectly north-south, and we skied into a crisp northerly breeze that died down as the day went on.
The funniest moment of the expedition so far came this evening, as we built our first depot. In Antarctica, we'll bury food and fuel every 100km on our outward journey, marking each cache as a GPS waypoint (high-tech) and by building a giant snow-cairn, topped with a custom-made carbon fibre pole and a black flag (low-tech).
Except we found that the pole (which we'd pressed into service as a makeshift tent peg a few days earlier) was blocked by a rock-hard plug of ice, and we couldn't get the flag into it.
Tony held the tube up to the sun, peered into it, and banged it hard against his boot, then his sledge. No luck. "We could pour a bit of fuel through it", I suggested, before gingerly trickling some of our precious white gas into the tube. No luck. Tony whacked it with a snow shovel, then kicked it again. Nope. Then it hit me:
"I could pee into it."
Tony handed me the pole and ran over to the tent to grab the camera. Needless to say, it worked a treat. Improvise, adapt, overcome.
{ Filed under Greenland on May 23rd, 2006 | 2 Comments }
The process of getting text and photos from our little tent on the Greenland icecap to your computer screen involves a fair amount of technological jiggery-pokery and a healthy dose of crossed fingers, but the basic routine looks something like this:
1) Write blog post - I do this on an HP iPAQ (a PDA, or palm-top computer - the kind of thing you write on with a stylus). I write it in the 'pocket' version of Word, and then paste it into…
2) WordPress! - WordPress is a free CMS, or Content Management System. It's hugely popular, and like many people, I use it to power my blog. Damien du Toit hacked together a static html page for us last year, so we can compose entries offline before dialing up. But before we do that, we need to…
3) Pick a photo - We're using a Pentax *ist digital SLR camera (and no, I've no idea how *ist is pronounced) which takes SD cards (removable memory cards, the size of a postage stamp). Once we've chosen a pic du jour, we take the card out of the camera, plug it into the iPAQ and shrink it down to a smaller size using a piece of software called Photogenics. Once we've saved the photo (they're numbered from 01 upwards) we can…
4) Dial up - to get online, you need an Iridium satellite phone, a lead to connect it to the iPAQ, and an old-fashioned dial-up internet access number. I forgot this bit when we left the UK, so I called uber-geek Pete Barr-Watson from Reykjavik airport to see if he had one. Thankfully, Pete came up trumps and we're using his number to get online. (Online is perhaps a slightly misleading term - the bandwidth of the Iridium phone is too small to let us check email, or surf the net.) Once we've clicked the 'Pete's dial-up' link and the phone has flashed up 'Data Call in Progress', it's time to…
5) Send the photo back - we do this via FTP (and a nifty program called CedeFTP) - a 10kb photo typically takes around 50 seconds to upload. Once that's done, we're ready to…
6) Blog! - click 'post' on Damien's WordPress page, and Bob's your uncle. Unplug the phone. Eat chicken curry.
There are a couple of commercially-available software packages aimed at expeditions, but they're not cheap. The beauty of our system is that the total outlay for software was about $50 and we're not limited to sending back just photos and text - we've transmitted Word documents, Excel spreadsheets and text files so far on this expedition, and we'll be sending back video and podcasts (audio updates) from Antarctica.
Techno-jargon aside, it's a beautiful evening here - perfectly still and a few degrees below freezing, with a low, orangey sun casting long shadows over the pale blue snow. Normal blogging will resume tomorrow…
{ Filed under Greenland on May 22nd, 2006 | 3 Comments }
The wind didn't let up for a second last night and Tony kept on waking up, convinced that the solar panel had blown away. I managed to sleep through most of it, though my dreams were certainly pretty crazy. This morning we put the sun hats aside and donned full polar battle gear as we clambered out to meet the wind head-on.
Spindrift searched out every nook and cranny and our sledges were almost buried. The snow was a fine powder, great for downhill skiers but not so good when you're dragging a heavy sledge. With the wind in our faces, the going was relentlessly tough.
The wind rose just as we decided to put up the tent and the poles were bent into crazy angles before we managed to tension the wildly flapping fly sheet into submission. Lying here on top of my sleeping bag, basking in the sunlight that's percolating through the fabric, with the wind still howling outside, it seems barely believable that a few square metres of paper-thin material can provide such a cosy shelter.
On the menu this evening: chicken curry or cod and potato casserole. The curry is definitely our fave, and I may need to call a game of scissors, paper, stone to decide who gets what (I'm in the lead so far, after winning the match that decided who sat in the co-pilot's seat on our helicopter flight out to the icecap). On three: one… two… three!
{ Filed under Greenland on May 21st, 2006 | 1 Comment }
A friend emailed me when we were delayed in Reykjavik and we agreed to meet after Tony and I were back from Greenland. "And when you are," she said, "you can tell me exactly what it is that you're doing out there".
So, what exactly are we doing out here? Last year we came to Greenland to test new equipment - a new sledge design, a new tent and a new type of flexible solar panel that we hoped would reduce the amount of batteries (and perhaps even fuel) we'd need to haul in Antarctica. It was also, at four weeks, the longest period Tony and I had spent together under expedition conditions; a chance to see how well we gelled as a team.
This year, we're here to fine tune things. We're testing a few new pieces of kit, including two different combinations of ski and skin (the strips of fabric on the base of our skis that give us traction on the ice). But principally we're here to gather data; to compare our speed wearing rucksacks to our speed hauling sledges with the same load. In Antarctica later this year, our plan is to lay depots of food on our outward journey and then ski from depot to depot with rucksacks on our way back to the coast at Berkner Island. The information from this Greenland trip will help us make our crucial food/fuel/daily mileage calculations for our 120-day trek down South.
Speaking of which, the scenery is looking particularly Antarctic today. A 360-degree expanse of featureless white, stretching to meet a distant pastel-blue horizon. The weather's becoming more authentic as well; the sun seems impossibly high and the wind is wrestling with our tent, spindrift fizzing against the taut fabric, inches from my ear. All we need now is for the temperature to follow suit and freeze the powder we've been dragging our sledges through. We'll see what tomorrow brings…
{ Filed under Greenland on May 20th, 2006 | 1 Comment }
Ben Saunders is the youngest person to ski solo to the North Pole and holds the record for the longest solo Arctic journey by a Briton.