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Polar Explorers Lonnie Dupre and Eric Larsen send daily dispatches during their unprecedented four-month journey to the North Pole and back. The expedition team will pull and paddle specially modified canoes across nearly 1,000 miles of shifting sea ice and open ocean. Their objective is to complete the first ever summer expedition to the North Pole and to highlight the growing issues surrounding global warming.
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frida

May 16, 2006
sunny, cloudy 19 F, 9 nautical miles
Which would you prefer: mind-numbing travel on a flat pan, the physical strain of powering over pressure ridges, or the emotional stress of negotiating fractured ice and leads? Having a hard time deciding? Don't worry, we'll give you all three.

Don't get us wrong: Our journey is not all hardship and pain, but each day seems to bring a different problem that we have to work through. Our vote, by the way, would be for flat ice.

Today started on an incredibly flat pan of ice. We whooped and hollered at our luck. The nautical miles cruised by effortlessly for almost three hours. We spotted two dark cigar-shaped clouds in the distance (these form above leads and generally mean lots of open water) and tried to veer in between them.

At first we seemed to have missed most of the fractured jumbled mess we'd been expecting, but then we entered an area of slabbed pressured ice, then some flatter drifty areas, then several bigger leads and pressure...ad infinitum.

Later in the afternoon we had a great stroke of luck as we just missed an area of huge thick slabbed pressure to the east. All we had to do was cross one small gap and we were out of the worst of it.

It was truly incredible to ski along five-foot-thick ice blocks shaped in hundreds of different angles, the larger ones appearing blue. In some places ice piled up to almost 20 feet! There is a subtle beauty in much of the Arctic Ocean, but this ridge was just the opposite, still starkly simple, but awe-inspiring as well.

Now we are in the tent celebrating the fact that tomorrow is a half day of rest and we get to sleep in. Bye for now; noodles beckon to be eaten.

Word of the day: invigorated - what we hope to be after our half day rest.

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