Greenpeace Project Thin Ice 2006, Save the Polar Bear  
 
Life on the Ice Polar Bears Extreme Expedition Global Warming What You Can Do
 
     
Live Progress
Podcasts
Read Blog
Explorers Blog

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.
Explorers Blog

Life on the Ice


Previous << | List All | >>Next

Not Easy

Jun 15, 2006
overcast, whiteout, snowing, 31.5 F, 6.75 nautical miles
Day 46. We'll give you the most important information first, then, as Paul Harvey would say, the rest of the story. On June 16th the public comment period on getting the polar bear listed as a threatened species ends. There is still time for you to help save the polar bear. Take Action: http://members.greenpeace.org/action/start/84/thin_ice

Page 2. In a related news story, we saw a set of polar bear tracks ambling off to the west. They were older tracks judging by how drifted they were; however, with all this open water around us one must be near. We have placed our camp on orange alert as a result of the sighting. In other wildlife happenings, a pair of ivory gulls circled our camp a few times last night. They are beautiful birds, completely white (go figure) with black beaks.

Last night, we drifted two miles south (and of course a bit east) - an inauspicous start to a day that, now finished, ranks as one of the most physically and mentally difficult of our expedition to date. It was an Arctic cornucopia of the worst possible travel conditions. The day started nice enough, the wind had shifted, cooling things a bit and firming up the snow. But like so many of the other 'good' conditions we experienced, it didn't last.

The light soon went flat and we were once again stumbling blindly forward. It started to snow too, and hard. We wondered if another blizzard was on its way, but it just kept falling at the same steady rate all day. The new snow stuck thickly to the bottom of our skis, made them heavy with no glide. Stopping to scrape the snow and ice off only helped for a few minutes. We switched to snowshoes.

When we put on our MSR snowshoes, it's like putting a truck into four-wheel drive. We are able to pull the sled-canoes up and around ice that would be impossible with skis. On the down side, our travel slows and we expend extra energy lifting (instead of sliding with skis) each step. Still, without snowshoes, we would still be on the ice post-holing our way to madness or worse.

The only really good part of today was that we were able to laugh about it once it was over. For over six hours, we snowshoed. The sled-canoes seemed like a pallet of bricks and stopped dead at even the slightest pause in forward momentum. The ice was worse - small pans, pressured together in random ways, lots of open water leads filled with compressed snow and some brash ice. We had to veer so much east and west that at times, we thought we might be going in circles.

It's hard to convey the feelings we have during a day like today. Several times we were near temper tantrum level when a sled-canoe got stuck or a piece of ice disintegrated underneath us. There's intense fear when facing a tenuous brash ice crossing or relief like when three car-sized chunks of ice heeled over just after (not while) we had hopped across them. Frustration and despair as we scout the route and see more bad ice. Physical exhaustion as we try to pace our efforts. Hunger. Desire to stop and quit. Drive to keep moving forward.

When we finally reached a big flat piece of ice with 15 minutes left in the travel day, we didn't know whether to laugh or cry.

It is equally hard to describe our emotions now that today is nearly complete. Before today we had hoped for good ice to the Pole, now we expect bad.

Today's picture: Lonnie shows the 3 inches of snow sticking to the bottom of his Asnes skis (Thanks Gary at Neptune Mountaineering).

Word of the day: wretched - the word of the day is our day.

(each day we randomly pick a page out of a pocket dictionary and find a word to describe our day)

Upgrade Flash

You need flash 8 or greater to view this part of the site. Click here to get the latest version of Flash

 (C) 2006 Greenpeace USA
702 H Street, NW, Suite 300, Washington, D.C. 20001 (800) 326-0959

One World Expedition
Project Thin Ice 2006 | Save the Polar Bear (home) Greenpeace