Bracing myself in a whiteout gale 200 miles south of the Arctic Circle, I carefully winded a mitten through four layers of facial coverings to wipe snot off my nose before it froze. Having no feeling left in my face, I approximated what I thought was a decent wipe and withdrew the mitten. In the instant between pulling the mitte nout and before my clothes sort of reform around my face another icy burst made its way through, which I swear went all the way down to my boots then somehow bounced off my feet and made its way back up again. I had the suspicion I had a long day in front of me.

Garrick, Alan, Richard and I were standing in the middle of Baffin Bay on about five feet of frozen seawater. We were almost exactly in the middle of the channel- meaning there was no land within 10 miles of us. Just miles and miles of frozen water. This thought was initially disconcerting. I mean, we instinctively knew that it was winter almost ten months of the year here, and we were more or less in the middle of the winter, and consequently there was no real danger of the ice melting under our feet, but so.

We’d been on the ice for about five days. Long enough for everyone to identify that specific part of their harness that really bothers them, notice where blisters are developing and are going to keep developing, and finally learn for sure which part of their body gets coldest first. But not quite long enough to get into a nice flow… the beauty of a routine we hope will eventually carry us the several weeks and hundreds of miles we need to reach the Pole. This day is a large part of establishing that routine. We spent the first few days negotiating extra rough terrain and getting a feel on the ice. This day was our first long distance day- we hoped to cover 12 miles pulling 150 pound sleds.

The morning was easy enough. The sun smiled on us as we quaked the last of the morning chills out of our bodies through our boots. Sliding across the ice is an inherently pleasant experience… sort of like sashaying across a wooden floor in your socks. Something about a face mask seems to really isolate you out here… your breath rattles around inside of it and even on a quiet day each man was alone with his thoughts. We were trying to simulate Polar navigation on this day, which means rather than following terrain features we shot a bearing on our compass and did our best to follow it no matter what. Our bearing corresponded with an especially craggy looking mountaintop and we directed ourselves towards this for a while.

Around 11, however, a storm started to come in. Winds quickly reached around 40 kph and stayed there. Thankfully, the wind approached us perpendicularly, rather than full on in the face. It was strong enough we each had to lean into it,our bodies making these kind of ridiculous looking acute angles toground. With the wind brought whipping snow. Within a few minutes we couldn’t see anything past a few feet.

There’s something so disconcerting, lonely, and terrible about being isolated in this respect. We couldn’t hear anything through the wind’s whipping. Under 3-5 layers ofclothes and with digits that freeze within a few seconds of exposure to the elements, we couldn’t really use our sense of touch when manipulating our equipment. And now we were losing our sight.

Placed in conditions such as this, old standards of coping and normality no longer apply. The night before, in the tent by the grim light of our greasy stoves, we’d carefully plotted our course on our map of the Bay. Not wanting to be reaching constantly into unreliable pockets to grab our compass, we’d affixed the device onto a kind of goofy looking belt we all took turns wearing. Surprisingly, once you get into a routine it’s relatively easy to ignore the howling of the wind as it buffets you. What is almost impossible to ignore is the fact you’re wandering into a total snowstorm with nothing to guide you other than a small piece of plastic with a magnet you’ve screwed into your belt. You’re painfully aware that you could very well be wandering in circles, or somehow in the complete opposite direction of where you want to go. Your misdirection, by the way, could have serious consequences for the three poor souls following you silently in the snow.

I wish had some kind of quote I have to hang onto in times like that. The only one that springs to mind is “This too, shall pass,” but I have no idea where it comes from. I do know that if we’d have stopped to think of the 10 miles we had left to cover in the snowstorm, or the total number of steps that implied, or the number of hours of exposure in weather where skin freezes almost instantly required to make it, we never would have gotten anywhere. Rather, each person, agreed on the goal, did whatever they could to make things bearable in that moment. In that way, the sum total of moments aggregated, and we found the strength to achieve our goal that day.

I think we have about 200 days left before we step foot onto the Antarctic shelf. Think we have around 250 days left before all of this is a distant memory. I’m so glad I’m part of a team that makes these days always bearable, and often wonderful.

-Andrew

We’ve been back about ten days now and have had the opportunity to reflect on our training up in Iqaluit in (really) North Canada.

While we were up there for a number of reasons, we were there first and foremost, to tap the experience of our trainer Matty McNair someone with unparalleled polar experience. We learned a number of things, how to dress, how to shelter, how to sleep, how to pack and pull a pulk (our sleds) how to cook (and what to cook), how to move across the snow and ice, how to navigate and how to do it all while being safe from the freezing temperatures or not blowing yourself up with your gas burning stove.

Unrelated, you would think, from polar expeditions - some of us even learned how to sew.

The ‘practical’ learning was excellent and gave the group the ability to talk more confidently about how we tackle our challenge and reassure ourselves that we had the knowledge and ‘second-hand’ experience to deal with a great many of the circumstances that we may find ourselves facing.

However, the second part of the training was when we got the opportunity to put what we learned into practice and were let loose on the ice to explore for ourselves. We said goodbye to Matty and our filmmaker Matt and headed off into what for us, was the unknown.

With Andrew Jensen our appointed navigator, he lead the team across the frozen sea on the afternoon of our first day in the direction of land at the other side of the bay. With the light fading and temperatures dropping we knew we wouldn’t make the coast and decided to make camp where we were. We screwed the lines of the tent firmly into the ice and piled snow around the tent to ensure the tents would last the night - we really didn’t want to have to skulk back to base the next day to admit we couldn’t even last one night! When the tents were up we got the stoves going inside to dry our clothes and melt snow for drinking water. This was when we made our first mistake. We had camped on the flat sea ice, and there were few snow drifts so we were scraping snow too close to the sea ice for drinking water. As a consequence, dinner that night was VERY salty and our drinking water just as bad. I got a bit dehydrated and had trouble eating breakfast and that really slowed me down next morning. It’s okay to make mistakes as long as you learn from them and we had learned.

Other mistakes that we learned from included setting fire to our clothes as we tried to dry them, not remembering to bring a ‘pee’ bottle for the sleeping bag (we won’t share how certain members got round this), wrestling with defective stove systems and nearly setting fire to the tent, holding a metal shovel with bare skin and suffering frost burns and spilling boil-in-the-bag food inside the tent - it’s a nightmare to clean up!

When we hit the land the next morning we pulled our pulks up to some very undulating terrain and disconnected ourselves and went in search of an Inuit monument that we were told was on that hill. We don’t think we found it, unless the Inuit’s traditionally use discarded oil drums as monuments, which we assumed they didn’t. We sought out a wide variety of terrains to pull our pulks over, it’s good to get the different experiences, occasionally you can just use a bit of momentum to get the pulks over some hills, sometimes it’s brute force or alternatively it’s a lot of team work to help pull and push the people and pulks to the proper place!

When you are skiing across vast expanses, as we were in Canada and will be in Antarctica, it’s an amazing experience. At first you are in awe of the lunar beauty of the environment especially when viewed through the pleasantly hued lenses of our polarized Oakley goggles, maybe you are even a little intimidated by your utter isolation but then it becomes a very ‘internalized’ experience. Without music or stories on your MP3 player your brain is left alone to explore colourful and fanciful daydreams, come up with great ideas or simply to process the magnitude of what we are doing. Allowing your imagination to roam free on these long walks is essential as otherwise you would focus on your exertion and effort to pull your pulk and it can be quite boring.

As a group we have committed to stay very close when walking - this is especially important for Alan, who needs someone close to follow especially when terrain gets difficult and he can’t see whether it is snow or ice he is walking on (it makes a big difference as to how you ski). However, when the sun is shining, the wind at your back and the snow is packed down walking is quite easy and we would often walk in a line or two by two so we could chat and share how we were feeling or just joke around. This is a lot of fun. However, we were fortunate to experience a range of conditions while out there from high winds (which we had to walk against), snow storms and whiteout conditions. This was great to experience but when conditions get tough, the walking is tough. You are usually trudging in a line, as it easier to walk in someone else’s compacted snow so it’s lonely and your pulk feels so much heavier to pull.

Our last two days were ‘mileage’ days where we wanted to prove to ourselves that we could pull the weight for the distance over at least two consecutive days. We covered ten nautical miles each day in pretty unpleasant, oppressive weather. On those days we structured it that we would have a break every 2 miles or thereabouts. That being the case, every step was a step closer to a break and bizarrely you get really excited at the opportunity to release yourself from the weight that feels like it is dragging you backwards with every step. When break time arrived, we pulled the pulks into a triangle and sat in a blocker bag which is a makeshift shelter to block out the wind. When inside, the team gets together to share stories, jokes, snacks and the state of their blisters or other ailments! The atmosphere was quite convivial and it’s nice to have these moments together as a team to alleviate the loneliness of walking in a line.

Break times were also snack times as we don’t have time to do ‘lunch’ stops and get the tents up and the stoves going so you have to eat at each break. The snacks we had prepared were a real mixture, we had dried fruit and nuts, salami, chocolate, cheese, butter, Clif bars, Pringles, bacon bits. You have to remember that all these snacks are utterly frozen and that when frozen most things tend to taste pretty much the same anyway. I don’t see hard, congealed bacon being a regular part of my diet going forward. A bit of planning can help though, but putting some frozen cheese or salami inside your base layer clothing means that at the next break stop you have a delicious body-warmed and defrosted snack - just don’t forget that you put it there.

When it came to food - we learned what worked for each of us. Alan and Garrick came up with the genius idea of cooking mini pizzas in their tent using the butter to fry up the salami with cheese and bacon on top. Apparently the pan took some effort to clean but it was worth it! The Mojamix for breakfast was very popular and the highlight of our culinary day, Alan and Garrick preferred to eat it dry in the morning out of the bag, whereas Andrew and I would open the bag, and add powdered milk and hot water and have a delicious, warmed and healthy start to our day.

Mornings were an interesting part of the day. We had phenomenal Marmot sleeping bags which were rated down to -40c/f and kept us so warm which, when combined with our efforts during the day meant that we usually slept pretty well. However we still had our faces out of the sleeping bags because we couldn’t risk the moisture in our breath getting into the bags and freezing, which would have made them less effective. So we would awake with hats, balaclava and often head torches still at various angles on our heads and bizarrely a slight smattering of snow on the outside of the bags where we had been breathing. When you wake up and see that, there is very little incentive to get out of the sleeping bag!

Everything in the tent freezes at night so when the stoves go off so you end up with a wide array of electronics, water bottles, and occasionally foodstuffs in your sleeping bag with you which you have to fish out in the morning.

We were really proud of what we achieved as a team, we proved we could do it physically. We proved we could put up with the hardships cheerfully (for a few days at least!). We proved that we could work well as a team and came away energized and enthusiastic about the challenges to come, whether that is the Antarctic trek or the fundraising challenges that continue to lay ahead of us. It was very much a team effort.

The team is much more than the four of us at the moment though. There are a number of people and organizations that we need to recognize again that made our training possible. The Tuck School of Business at Dartmouth and the Haas School of Business provided much needed financial support but we also need to recognize that they also provided the inspirational environment for us to believe that we can do this and equipped us with the teamwork and leadership skills to execute on our objectives. We also want to recognize Marmot, Mojamix, Oakley and Professors Punam and Kevin Keller for their continued support of Polar Vision - it is deeply appreciated.

If you want to see a map of our travels click here.

Onwards to Antarctica!

-Richard