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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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Blizzard at 86

May 28, 2006
sunny (1 hour) cloudy, windy, blizzard, 24 F, 6 nautical miles
The day seemed to start off nicely with a bit of sun and high wispy clouds. But like the ice conditions, we know that good weather will be followed by bad - or in our case constant overcast. Today turned into the rawest of raw bone devils (see May 18th entry) that we have had to date.

Our morning progressed fairly easily as we made an 'S' around a large lead and pressure. The wind continued much as it had yesterday, blowing in from the southwest. About a half hour before our first sit down break the wind began to pick up.

We huddled behind a chunk of ice to protect us from the biting wind and spindrift as we snacked on, you guessed it, Clif bars. It was a cold break. However, when we hit the trail again 10 minutes later it was really snowing hard, the wind had increased and visibility decreased. We pressed on.

We haven't reported on it much, but we are drifting quite a bit. Most mornings when we check the GPS, our position is slightly off from the previous night. Usually, we drift south (up to a half mile) and east. Last night, we drifted a couple hundred meters north, but also considerably east as well. This is bad because being too far east near the pole means having to fight the normal movement of ice toward the Greenland Sea. So, we've been traveling north-northwest.

The conditions deteriorated so much over the next hour and a half that we felt it necessary to cut our day short. Visibility was down to nearly zero and the snow was blowing hard. It was possible to keep moving, to what we thought might be forward, but at what cost?

We hurriedly set up camp and tried to keep the snow at bay while we unloaded our tent gear into the Hilleberg Hotel. As you can see, the leeward end of the tent was soon plastered with snow. So, here we sit, in relative comfort while a storm rages outside.

But as we wait, we also know that this strong wind is pushing the ice east. Our fate, for now, is largely out of our control.

Amazingly, we made it to the 86th parallel. We looked for our usual snow bunting scout but it must have taken an early hiatus due to the weather.

Check out www.oneworldexpedition.com to see what our amazing expedition manager, John Huston, is up to. We know he's been busy coordinating our resupply.

Word of the day: zephyr - the breeze blowing today... NOT

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