Archive for the ‘Greenland’ Category:
Phew. Where do I start? Returning from any expedition is always a bit of a shock to the system, but this time has been way off the scale. Ironically, Tony and I are in superb physical condition after four weeks on the Greenland icecap, but I don't think we quite realised just *how* much work was waiting for us back home in London (where the current heat and humidity is feeling rather oppressive after the crisp Arctic breeze). The amount we want/have to achieve between now and October is unreal – one part ridiculous, one part scary and one part the most exciting thing I've ever done.
My to-do list is behaving like a time-lapse fim of bacteria in a petri-dish; every time I cross one item off, about twelve new things pop up around it, instantly. It's overflowing out of my desk diary and onto scraps of paper, Word documents, mind maps, backs of envelopes and the big file in my brain labelled 'procrastinate'. If it wasn't so much fun, I'd call it stress. Stress verging on burn-out. And that's the way my life seems to be panning out: burning and freezing. Burn, freeze, burn, freeze, yin, yang, peak, trough.
I've said this before, but it bears repeating – the next few months are going to be crazy. There are times when I'd rather be in your shoes, watching it all unfold like a reality TV show on steroids – no script, and the longest unsupported polar expedition in history. And there are times where there's nowhere I'd rather be than in the thick of it, whether that's battling hunched into a screaming whiteout, swearing at the wind, or sat here in front of a laptop at 3am with the to-do list from hell…
[Last up, BenSaunders.com is now a member of the 9Rules network - 'a community of the best weblogs in the world'. It's a new departure for me - I know Ed's not a fan, but it'll be interesting to see how things pan out. I'll keep you posted...]
— Filed under Greenland
After a spectacular helicopter flight through the mountains, we touched down in Tasiilaq, a small fishing village on the east coast of Greenland, a few hours ago. I'll write more after I've had a few hours' sleep!
— Filed under Greenland
A slightly alarming start to the day; we called Air Alpha, the operators of the helicopter we'd chartered to pick us up tomorrow, to be told that as of June 1st, they were 'no longer operating in East Greenland'. Hmm. Thankfully, after a few frantic satellite phone calls, we managed to sort things out – it seems we're being picked up from the same location, at the same time, by the same pilot, in the same helicopter, but by Air Greenland. All very confusing, but the good news is that the weather's been perfect today and the forecast for tomorrow morning looks good.
The weather was, in fact, so good today that rather than resting (as any sensible human being would do after dragging sledges and lugging rucksacks for ten marathons up and down the same stretch of featureless icecap) we decided to build 1) a giant windbreak that we could read/sunbathe behind and 2) an icy multi-gym. A day without some form of exercise just didn't feel right, so I dug a giant hole in the snow, Tony built walls either side of it, and we slung a combination of skis and snow shovels between the two walls in order to do chin-ups and parallel bar dips (as gracefully demonstrated by yours truly in the pic – note my natty 'Muhammed Ali' silver inner boots). A fierce competition for the remaining chocolate rations ensued, and we're now lying here with full bellies, stiff arms and sunburnt legs.
On a slightly more serious note, this expedition has been a key testing phase for SOUTH later this year, and I wanted to give a quick shout-out to two people that have gone way beyond the call of duty. The first is my incredible assistant, Natasha Montrose, who has been running both my and Tony's lives while we've been in icy isolation (and dealing with an avalanche of spam email that I seem to have triggered by setting up an 'out of office' autoreply thingummy). The second is Pete Barr-Watson. I've not yet met Pete (although I now owe him several beers and a slap-up dinner) but he stepped in to host this website when the original hosts went a bit wonky last year, and he's provided us with a huge amount of techy support over the past few weeks; you wouldn't be reading this without him. You're both stars – thank you.
— Filed under Greenland
"Look",Tony yelled out of the tent door at the wind last night, "either crap or get off the pot". I cracked up laughing at an expression I hadn't heard before, but I agreed entirely with its sentiment. As we turned in for the night, I think we both hoped the weather would give us a decent run for our money rather than continue with the dreary whiteout conditions we'd spent the last few days in. Failing that, it should shove off and let us enjoy our last few days on the icecap.
Surprisingly, the wind took absolutely no notice and we awoke to the same horizontal snow and zero visibility that have been our constant companions of late. We set off for the final push back to our coastal base barely able to see each other. At one point I stopped to readjust my backpack and looking up found that Tony had almost disappeared ahead of me. Losing each other was a distinctly unpleasant prospect as, though I carry the tent, he has the tent poles.
At our third break, about four hours in, we huddled with our backs to the wind, the snow creating mini-vortices around us and blowing back in our faces. We discussed the tricky upcoming task of navigating the narrow strip of ice between a crevasse field and a sheer cliff without being able to see anything, when looking up from my half-eaten energy bar I let out a cry of disbelief (with perhaps a rude word or two thrown in for good measure). Where seconds ago, there had been nothing behind us but swirling white, now there was a mountain range, vast and majestic. We could see again. Greenland, it seemed, knew how to make an entrance.
The next few hours were an unmitigated delight. Being able to see a path ahead made a huge difference to our collective mood, and the descent as we wended our way towards the coast made for some hair-raising skiing moves. As we closed in on our base camp, the mist from the sea rose to greet us, creating phantom mountains and cauldrons of valleys. Wisps of fog hurried across our path, as if late for a meeting, and the snow became laden with moisture.
We reached our destination about an hour ago, awarded ourselves extra chocolate and are now lying cosy in our tent. We can't stray too far from this area over the next two days because of the uncertainty of our pickup time. This depends largely on (you guessed it) the weather – we'll be keeping our fingers crossed for clear skies and helicopter-friendly winds on Friday…
— Filed under Greenland
Not much to report today – another day battling through horizontal snow and zero visibility. Lying here in the tent, with the stove emitting its reassuring roar in the background and the incessant snow fizzing against the tent fabric, Tony and I were discussing how an entire day of whiteout affected us mentally. We navigated using compass and GPS, and it turns out we were both afflicted by a worrying feeling that we were, at times, skiing round in circles – during the first session this morning I was convinced we were going to stumble across our campsite again.
During the day my mind would come up with imaginary landscapes, and for a while I skied alongside a river, around Richmond Park, and through the bottom of a snowy halfpipe (like the snowboarders use in the Winter Olympics), its icy walls curving up on either side of my tracks. Tony imagined his way along London's Tottenham Court Road, from Warren Street tube to Trafalger Square.
The good news is that neither of us are showing impending signs of madness after our day of sensory deprivation, and perhaps more importantly, our average speed remained respectable. We'll be on a tight schedule in Antarctica later this year, stretching the limits of the seasonal window for expeditions, and we won't be able to afford the luxury of sitting out bad weather in the tent.
— Filed under Greenland
Confusingly, we switched back to skiing during the day today – we woke up at midnight but the weather was pretty horrific, so we set the alarm to go off every two hours in order to keep an eye on it and pick the best time to make a move. That time came at 6:30am – the thick whiteout seemed to thin a little, we could just about make out the horizon, and we decided to go for it. The window didn't last long, however, and we were soon enveloped by the mist and snow.
I figured we would still have a fairly reasonable time of it as our tracks from yesterday were still faintly visible. If they lasted, navigation would be a doddle. They did last, for almost an hour. Serendipitously, this was exactly when Tony was due to take over navigation. I handed over the chest-mounted compass to young Tone and suggested that he take a bearing and then focus on a series of landmarks on that course to follow.
Five minutes later, Tony stopped to thank me for my sage advice, pointing out that the falling snow had now covered everything with a rather uniform blanket of white, and this combined with the faint snag that visibility was around four feet meant he was having a little difficulty picking out appropriate landmarks. He said something else after that which seemed to involve a lot of hand gestures, but the wind took his words away and I didn't really catch it.
Navigating on a bearing through a whiteout doesn't really rank up there with life's most pleasurable experiences, though at least today we had the wind at our backs and didn't have to wear goggles; the double-whammy goggle and whiteout-induced claustrophobia is truly horrible. Take a normal pair of ski goggles, remove the lens, trace around it on a piece of white card, then stick the card back in where the lens should be, and you'll just about get the idea.
With Tony cursing the weather and the wayward compass, and both of us cursing the sticky snow that was once again starting to glue itself to our ski skins (the strips of fabric on the base of our skis that give us traction on the snow and ice) in heavy clumps, it was panning out to be a grim day.
The breakthrough came at our second break, where in a fit of rage, I decided to remove my skins completely and try skiing without them. It shouldn't have worked – the base of the ski is completely smooth, offering no purchase on the snow, and for the first few minutes, it was like skiing on ball bearings, complete with a few hilarious 'Scooby Doo' skiing-on-the-spot moments. But gradually my style adapted, I stopped slipping around quite so much, and I realised I was travelling really fast. Tony soon followed suit, and we revelled in our new-found turn of speed. I'm sure Norwegians do this all the time, but we are English after all, and skiing with any kind of technique just isn't cricket, as Tony put it. Suddenly the day didn't seem quite so bad.
[As a technical aside, if anyone's into this kind of thing, we're using handmade Norwegian Asnes skis - 190cm Sondres with full-length skins for pulling sledges and 190cm Ragos with short skins for skiing with rucksacks. Both sets have Salomon SNS X-Adv bindings - for expedition use, I reckon this combination is unbeatable.]
— Filed under Greenland
Tony's alarm went off at midnight and he peered at me groggily with one eye; we had had barely an hour's sleep. I tried to set a good example by enthusiastically half-climbing out of my sleeping bag, unzipping the 'kitchen door' and lighting the stove for the breakfast snow-melting session. The first thing I noticed was the cold – probably the lowest ambient temperature we'd had on the expedition to date. My fingers stuck momentarily to the frozen metal of my spoon. It was a good sign – I knew we'd be facing some of the 'proper' Arctic conditions I'd been hoping for for days.
Quite what a surprise we were in for only became apparent when Tony unzipped the tent's outer door. I watched him step outside, fully kitted up with face mask, mitts and polarized goggles, like an astronaut stepping onto an alien moon for the first time. The sun was glowing a deep, nuclear orange and skimmed the horizon, bathing the scene in a strange blue and yellow light. Pink spindrift sped past on the wind, swirling around his ankles. Not many people have seen this I thought to myself as I strapped up my ski boots and followed him out of the door. 'Wow' he shouted back at me. 'Wow, wow, wow.'
We skied for seven hours, and the glory dissipated as the hour of day became more sensible. We've pitched the tent next to our final (and furthest) depot of food, we'll get a few hours sleep and then repeat the process at midnight tonight, when we'll turn and retrace our tracks to the coast for the final time.
Tony is already asleep and I'm feeling pretty bleary-eyed (and utterly confused about what time/day it is now) so I'm going to sign off with a little bonus for y'all – if I've managed to get it working, you should be able to see an extra-large version of today's slice of Greenlandic sunrise (and possibly the largest image I've sent back via satphone) by clicking on the photo above…
— Filed under Greenland
Tony and I woke at midnight last night, ready to test out our night skiing, to find that Greenland had other plans. A complete whiteout had descended and the falling snow was gently absorbing our tent into the icecap. We wanted to get a decent test of the difference night-skiing would make to surface and speed so we decided to hole up in the tent and see what 24 hours might do to conditions.
A few hours ago, the sky began to clear a little and our visibility once again extended beyond our tentpoles. We were greeted by a vista that was almost ethereal in its scope and quality. For as far as we could see, every ridge, every mark was gone; as there wasn't a breath of wind, the snow had fallen with incredible uniformity. It was as though we were looking out over glass. It seems counter-intuitive to say this, but this is something I have never encountered in the Arctic before. It had a haunting tranquility that left us both speechless. It almost seems a shame to tarnish the perfection that surrounds us with a set of ski tracks but we're hoping that the surface will have frozen a little by tonight and we can get the chance to see how fast we can go on this enormous ice rink.
(The ball of snow you can see in the picture is the belly of a snowman I started building yesterday. Thanks to the lack of a carrot, lumps of coal and a stripey scarf, it's not one of my finest creations…)
— Filed under Greenland
I said yesterday that Tony and I are fairly impervious to cold. Unfortunately, the same cannot be said for the heat, and today was a scorcher. We set off this morning in our usual warm (anything above -10°C) weather gear, but were soon stripping off to our thermals. As the sun rose higher, the heat reflecting from the ice made the sweat pour off us and our 330ml per hour of energy drink started to feel more and more inadequate. Carrying a 25-kilo rucksack didn't exactly help matters either.
However, the fun really started when the heat began to melt the snow and the surface we had been making decent progress on suddenly decided it would come along with us for the ride. Our skis felt like they doubled in weight as more and more snow stuck to the skins. There was no gliding now – it was more like trudging through a freshly ploughed field. After eight or so miles of frustration and various attempts to find a solution, we decided to put up the tent and wait for the cold of night when we hope we will have better conditions to cope with. We're having an early dinner and setting the alarm for midnight…
— Filed under Greenland
When you're dragging a sledge, it leaves a nice, uniform tramline track for the person behind to follow. No such luck if you're carrying a rucksack. I found out today that Tony skis with his feet really close together, almost touching as his boots brush past each other with every stride. And he leaves a peculiar trail to follow – it looks more like someone's ridden a motorbike through the snow, and I named it the Haile Monorail. I ski with my feet wider apart (as this is a family site, I'll leave you to imagine the laddish exchange of insults that followed me pointing out exactly why I skied in this fashion). Tony blames it on playing the double-bass as a youth, and the resulting bow legs. He also maintains it's more efficient…
This morning's observation led me to reflect on other quirks we have. When skiing on a bearing with no landmarks, Tony is deadly accurate for 98 percent of the time, but throws in the occasional wild deviation for no apparent reason. I have a tendency to steer a little too far North (we've been heading NWish from the coast). I think this springs from too many expeditions where the ability to ski due north has come in handy.
Tony blows his nose an awful lot (so much so that he fears he's losing precious calories). When we stop, I down my drink in one go, and wolf up my energy bar as if someone's about to steal it; Tony is a little more civilised.
We both seem conveniently impervious to the cold, although when we do feel it, we seem to feel it at different times – yesterday Tony was skiing with gloves on when my (bare) hands felt toasty, yet now I'm curled up in my sleeping bag with my lucky hat on, whereas Tony is lying on top of his with his sleeves rolled up.
I'm always amazed how quickly the human mind and body can adapt to such a spartan, alien existence. Tony and I have each assumed different roles, often without even discussing them, and we take huge pride in everything we do, from pitching the tent correctly, to finding good quality 'melting' snow for the stove, to navigating safely through a whiteout.
Right now, I'm going to navigate my way through a beef stew. It's been a tough day (17 miles, 1,200 vertical feet of ascent, horrible sticky snow) and I'm ravenous.
— Filed under Greenland
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
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
