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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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A Paddle to the Pole

Jun 26, 2006
some sun, overcast, 33.4 F, 6 nautical miles
Day 57. The Arctic Ocean is breaking up underneath us. The fractured slabs of ice we traveled across today made us reassess everything we know (or thought we knew) about sea ice. For us now, all bets are off. We can only take each day as it comes.

Today we paddled across a big lead for 40 minutes straight. That's right, we said 40 minutes - over a mile of open water. At the time, we were probably 35 nautical miles from the Pole. Unbelievable. We are seeing more and more open water than ever before and openly wondered that when (or if) we reach the Pole, it would be by canoe.

Further evidence of a disintegrating Arctic ice sheet: A pair of gulls circled curiously over head for several minutes.

This, of course, also makes us think of polar bears, which could go extinct in our lifetime because of global warming. Polar bears won't be able to survive if their Arctic environment continues to melt down like we are seeing.

The snow was so soft that the lead person had to use snowshoes to break trail. Even with the additional buoyancy, we sink 12 inches or more into the snow. Its good exercise for the legs, as if we need it. Imagine doing the stairmaster for eight or nine hours straight, then add pulling a 200-pound sled-canoe to the mix for the anaerobic phase of your workout. Now do this for several days and you will begin to understand what we are experiencing.

Physically, it is energy-sapping work (Lonnie ate four Clif bars in the first part of the morning). There is no way that we could do this alone. Sharing the work is our only hope. Tomorrow we will go from 1-1/2 hour stints as lead person to 1 hour. The deep heavy snow is just too much for our normal intervals.

These last miles to the Pole are proving to be our hardest. Much harder than we ever imagined. Deep soft snow, maze after maze of leads, and now, pressure ice as big as we have seen since the first few weeks of our journey. Throw in a melt pool cleverly disguised by a layer of snow and you have a recipe for wet feet and slow travel.

That 'good ice' we had been hoping to see for so long does not exist. Our future for the next few days is not difficult to predict. We are no longer inching forward, we are millimetering.

We have eaten breakfast, lunch and dinner together for 57 straight days. Our dirty socks hang in each other's face as they dry in the tent. We get in small disagreements every so often. Lonnie is a morning person; Eric likes evenings. Despite all this, we are still on speaking terms with each other. Better actually. If anything this journey has strengthened our ability to work together, which is good as our survival literally depends on one another.

Once again our MSR snowshoes have proved lifesavers. So much in fact that we're making them our sponsor of the week. Please visit www.oneworldexpedition.com to learn more about MSR and their great snowshoes, which we call four-wheel-drive for our feet.

Today's picture: The sun came out and managed to make the fractured nastiness that we have been traveling across look beautiful and serene. If you look closely, you can see the ice under the water, too!

Word of the day: portent - soft snow, bad ice, omens for the next few days.

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