Ben Saunders - Polar Explorer, Motivational Speaker

Initiative

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 Tuesday, May 23rd, 2006. Responses are currently closed, but you can trackback from your own site. }