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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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Six Again and Sun

Jun 09, 2006
sunny, 32 F, 6.75 nautical miles
Day 40. We woke up to a sunny and warm morning, 32 degrees when we hit the trail. As far as we're concerned, that's almost too warm for traveling as we overheat and sweat easily. It was so warm, in fact, that we could thought we could smell summer.

The sunlight has been so intense the past few days that we have been sleeping halfway out of our Integral Designs sleeping bags. The sun is an amazing force, and it is, unfortunately, easy to see how global warming is affecting sea ice.

The ice itself actually reflects energy back into space. However, water absorbs heat very effectively. That means the more water, the more heat is absorbed, melting more ice, creating more water, and so on. Scientists call this a positive feedback loop. We can see this happen in other ways too. A ski or snowshoe left on the ice overnight will leave its melted imprint in the morning.

It is unfortunate that we continue to search for oil and gas (the main cause of global warming) when we have clean energies like solar and wind already available. Our energy security lies in renewable forms of energy such as solar and wind. They are there for the taking and exist in unlimited supply. It's just a matter of political will.

By mid afternoon, the sun was so intense that we had to give our faces an additional layer of Dermatone's special zinc oxide. At least the bright day allowed us to navigate relatively easily, which was of considerable benefit as day 40 stretched long and arduous.

We bit the figurative bullet this morning to try to get through the pressured nastiness that we had spent most of yesterday afternoon in. Instead of veering northwest, we headed straight north into the ugliest of the ice. There was more pressured ice, more traveling from small ice pan to the next (we call this puzzle navigation), more leads, pretty much more of all the conditions that make traveling difficult. We were snowshoeing for nearly three hours.

In the end our gamble paid off (at least for now) and we are camped on the south end of a very nice looking piece of ice. Hopefully, we'll be able to make more than six miles tomorrow.

We are trying to be extra careful as we are traveling outside the range of any support or rescue. Planes from Canada can only fly to 87 degrees N and Russian helicopters can only fly as far south as 88 degrees north. We've got our fingers crossed for extra good luck during the next 35 nautical miles.

A note about today's picture. For most of the really difficult sections of pressured ice, we work together to move the sled-canoes up and over. However, sometimes the second person is left to their own devices. This allows the lead skier more time to evaluate ice, choose a route and break trail. The second skier usually catches up in 10 minutes or so. Here Eric's sled-canoe has slipped off an ice bridge into the ocean and he is trying to get it over a 3-foot embankment.

Word of the day: replete - how we feel after a big noodle dinner.

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