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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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Almost

Jun 30, 2006
overcast, 32.7 F, 7.5 nautical miles
Day 61. The ice appeared eggshell thin as the forces of wind and current have recently fractured this area into a maze of pressured ice, leads and small pans. There was so much open water that the scent of warm (almost warm) salt water was constantly in the air.

It was a weird travel day. Overcast, foggy and damp, the terrain revealed itself slowly. We were constantly stumbling through a wall of pressured ice straight into a series of leads. At one point, small slabs were heaved in long curving arcs. In other spots, the north-northeast wind pushed slabs close enough together that we zig-zagged across several large leads.

We crossed roughly 50 or so cracks in the ice that we could span with skis and had to catamaran the sled-canoes seven or eight times to paddle across large leads. Only a few miles from the Pole, we were seeing more open water than either of us would have ever guessed.

Navigation was especially difficult today as well. We stopped to check our declination with the GPS every hour. It is much easier to navigate with a compass; however, the north 'red' end of our compass is slow to setttle. Leaving the tent we adjusted our compasses to 96 degrees west declination. By the end of the day we were at 117 degrees west.

Its difficult to put any more significance to one day versus another; however today, we tried to muster some extra emotion or meaning on this the eve of achieving the previously impossible. But 61 days of having our sled-canoes get stuck on every ice chunk between here and Ellesmere Island, skiing on thin ice, wading through deep snow and worse have left us too weary for introspection.

We are so close to the North Pole right now that if we could stand on top of the Hilleberg Hotel, we could see it - not that it would look any different from the ice and water nearby. So many times we have felt that the Pole is such an arbitrary point. What makes the ice so many miles and struggles away from here more important than the frozen chunk underneath our skis? 'Absolutely nothing,' crossed our minds more than once.

But we know the North Pole will be different. Each day has been so amazing and unique in its own right. We would have never guessed how much the ice could change in character and personality. The moving ice that nearly killed us, the biggest pressure ridge ever, the ice chunk that looked like Ronald Reagan, the snow drift that was blown to a paper-thin width...these small things we will keep with us forever.

To travel through the world's last great wilderness is a privilege and we feel lucky to be here. On the surface at least, the frozen Arctic seems unspoiled by human hands. It is comforting to know that places like this still exist. Remote and uninhabited. Vast beyond our wildest imaginations. We hope we have tread lightly enough.

The truth is quite the opposite. Even here, we humans have cast our influence whether we intended to or not. The sea ice is melting. Open water surrounds our camp.

Near the end of the day a gull swooped down, and determining we were inedible, flew off. A lone seal lazed on a frozen lead sunning itself in overcast skies. Every so often an ice chunk caught our attention as we passed - like so many other ice chunks have before.

Today's picture: An explorer's view of one of the many leads we paddled across today. Some were fairly small (8 feet); others involved several hundred meters of paddling.

Word of the day: carte blanche - when we are so tired the lead skier makes all route decisions with little argument from position number two.

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