The Sun Has Got His Hat On
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