Exotic Bad Luck
There's a truly hardcore Russian polar expedition going on at the moment; Matvey Shparo and Boris Smolin are trying to get to the Geographic North Pole in the polar night (i.e. before the sun comes up in the spring). They started skiing from the coast of Siberia on Christmas Eve, and they hope to reach the Pole by late February, a time when most expeditions are still getting ready to start (and nearly a month before I'll set off for the Pole from the coast of Canada). You can read their updates here, and the patchy quality of the translation makes it almost poetic. It's gripping stuff:
"We are living from one stay for the night to the other… After we pack our tent in the morning, we can not have a rest any more… Ice is thin, pressure ridges are low, it is absolutely impossible to hide from the wind behind them, and the wind is everywhere. We turn our backs upon the wind, drink hot tea… and continue our route. It seems that never before in the universe such cold and such constant wind had ever been blowing anywhere… Our ice-floe is shaken. There are shocks again and again. It is impossible to sleep, so we decided to get up and to go. It is disgusting that all things in the tent seem to be moist. The main problem is that we can not completely recover our strength and to have a rest.
Strong wind from SEE, snow, blizzard. A new challenge: in blizzard our lanterns can break only three meters in the darkness. D.S. asked us: "Is it beautiful?" But we can not think about any beauty at the moment, as we can not see anything. You keep thinking only how not to lose the main direction of our route… A sudden danger is threatening us. We took a new ration from the sleds – our today's supper, a morning breakfast (for tomorrow) and daily snacks – all these products were soaked with petrol. It appeared that the polar bear, who attacked us on the fourth day of the expedition and tore in pieces out bottle with petrol, had also poured the petrol on our food provisions.
This is some kind of exotic bad luck. You can not eat the food, saturated with petrol, as petrol does not blow away. How many our rations have been lost?"
— Filed under Miscellany