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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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Soft Snow Slow Go

Jun 11, 2006
overcast, whiteout, 31.5 F, 8 nautical miles
Day 42. There have only been a few days when we've ended the travel day early - not by much, just five or ten minutes. Yesterday was one of them. Looking a few hundred yards ahead we saw a flat pan, but first big pressure. Rather than risk making a sore back worse, we set up camp. But you already know this. Still, that one simple decision may have saved us from serious injury or worse.

A quick morning scout revealed the ice pretty much as we had left it - a big pressure ridge (40' wide), then some manageable mess and finally, what seemed like flat ice again just a few hundred yards away.

For the next hour and a half we struggled with all our will and might to cover those few hundred yards. The pressure ridge was fairly straightforward but required our combined effort to heave the sled-canoes up and over chunks of ice almost big as cars.

A five-minute ski later revealed what we couldn't see from the morning's scout: an area of semi-frozen brash ice - the worst by far. Some chunks were large enough to stand on; others were around 2 feet in diameter. All were pushed haphazardly together.

We pulled out every last trick we knew and improvised a few new ones just to get through that small section. Hopping from ice chunk to ice chunk, pushing our sled-canoes in the water and long lining (using the two pull lines as one long rope) them through watery sections, dropping the sled-canoes down off ledges and trying each time to pull them back up to a more stable position.

It's both scary and exhilarating to make it through something like that.

Traversing that route last evening would have been a nightmare. As it is, we're pushing our physical limits to actually move those heavy loads. Exhausted with no place to camp would have put our lives at serious risk.

We spent the last four hours of the day traveling through whiteout conditions, tripping on snowbanks and stumbling down slopes. During days like today it's easy to think the Arctic Ocean is a barren place but really, there is a complex ice ecosystem being supported by the ice that includes distinctive Arctic species such as seals, whales (including the narwhal!), walrus and polar bears.

Even at its most inhospitable, this place surprises us. Today, a lone gull flew in between us then off to the east. Where had it been and where was it going? We'll never know. It didn't seem to be in a hurry so maybe it was enjoying the Arctic just like us.

The warming weather is becoming a bit unnerving as well. At freezing point anything that touches snow gets wet. Our gloves were soaked by the end of the day. A south wind made the snow really soft to boot. Our skis and sled-canoes seemed to have considerably less glide.

Today was also particularly fun as we got to do something we like to call swimming in a 14,000 foot deep ocean. When we encounter a lead with ice too thick to paddle, yet too thin to ski across, one of us will put on a dry suit, get in the water and use his body to break the ice. Once on the other side he will pull the catamaraned sled-canoes across. Fun fun!

Word of the day: delicatessen - you know why.

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