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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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Life on the Ice


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Ice Puzzle

Jun 08, 2006
sunny, some fog, 27 F, 6 nautical miles
Day 39. At the end of today, we felt like a couple of hungry, over-worked sled dogs (just trust us on that one). The day brought lots of cracks, pressure, brash ice, leads and broken ice - a smorgasbord of Arctic hardship. We should have known this was coming.

However, as eternal optimists, we keep thinking each day is the day that the conditions will improve dramatically. Today our expedition adage was never more true: 'Where there's good ice, bad will surely follow.'

Sometimes when we wake up in the morning and take our first compass bearing, we find that our ice pan has rotated overnight. It's a bit disconcerting to leave camp in a different direction. Today we joked that we had indeed been traveling the wrong direction and made our way south to poorer ice conditions.

We spent a couple hours snaking through small broken pans of ice. They looked like giant white puzzle pieces separated by inky black water and icy mush. We struggled with heavier loads for 9 hours and made only 6 miles. It goes without saying that we are once again, very tired. When is our next rest day, we wonder?

We eat all our rations each day now and are just beginning to feel a bit more hungry. The topic of food has started to enter our casual conversations. We think about fresh salads, cookouts with grilled chicken and a meal at a nice brew pub sitting at, of all things, a table. Don't get us wrong, we still have lots of love for Clif bars.

We also wanted to thank all the kind people at the Rolex Awards for Enterprise who have been an important part of our journey.

We also thought we'd expand our poetical horizons a bit and delve into the exciting world of haiku.

Attempt number 1:

All is snow and ice
When it's overcast, we can't see
Each night noodle night.

Of course, one last limerick to round out the day.

This is an ode to our favorite dinner, the noodle. Some are straight and others curly like the hair of a poodle. Spaghetti, elbow and egg, We eat them to the last dreg. If we were Picasso, we'd include them in our best doodle.

A note about today's picture: the chunk of ice Lonnie was standing on just before this picture was taken disintegrated beneath his skis. He jumped off at the last second.

Word of the day: laconic - there isn't much talking during the day, as our conversations have evolved into simple statements about ice and navigation.

(we randomly open the dictionary each day and pick a word that relates)

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