Filing daily reports from
the field would ruin a trip, but it's fun to do pre-briefs and
debriefs.
SPECIAL NOTE:
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August 30
Over the weekend, the Clipper Adventurer made national and international headlines when it got stuck on a rock two days ago near Kugluktuk in western Nunavut. According to a note I received from Adventure Canada this morning, charts at the time indicated a depth of 68 meters, not the 3 meters that produced the snag. This is the ship that is supposed to be conveying us from Ilulissat down the coast of Labrador in two weeks, so I'm not sure if it will be dislodged from its rock perch and inspected/repaired in time. There are no spare ice-strengthened ships hanging around a dock in the Arctic somewhere, waiting to be called into service.
The Clipper Adventurer holds about 130 passengers, plus crew. It's a good ship, run by an experienced Swedish captain. Its sister vessel, the Lyubov Orlova, is identical in size and similar in layout, but the Orlova did not have the Clipper's multimillion dollar upgrades, so it's fraying somewhat around the edges, and its Russian captain inspires less enthusiasm than his Swedish counterpart on the Clipper.
The incident recalled the more serious one in the Antarctic a couple of years ago, when the MS Explorer hit a submerged piece of ice and sank to the bottom, after all the passengers had been safely evacuated. And some years earlier, the World Discoverer, another polar cruise ship, sank after striking a rock near the Solomon Islands, in the off season. All these ice-strengthened cruise ships migrate like terns, working the Arctic in summer and the Antarctic during the northern winter.
Clipper Adventurer last summer off the coast of Northwest Greenland.
August 16
Next month, I'll again be joining Adventure Canada as a lecturer on their Greenland and Wild Labrador cruise.
I don't expect that our ship will be in danger of bumping into any large, floating ice islands. In the last couple of weeks, I've read that this ice island that calved from Greenland's Petermann Glacier might become a concern to oil platforms or shipping lanes, although there are neither within thousands of kilometers. And of course, every major calving raises the cliche spectre of global warming. I'm not trying to shrug off a serious climatic phenomenon. It's no doubt happening, and it certainly makes sense that people are responsible...but global warming seems to be the only thing ever written about the Arctic. To anyone who knows the north, the media's take on arctic events is naive, repetitive, superficial, and sometimes wrong.
Some years ago, for example, environmental reporter Andrew Revkin of The New York Times joined a tourist icebreaker cruise to the North Pole. To his horror/surprise/astonishment, there happened to be open water when they reached the Pole. His subsequent article made world headlines; it was one of the early popular articles that put global warming in the public eye. The article spawned a book, and although he's done a lot of other writing, this is the article of his career.
Except its whole premise was wrong. Patches of open water happen all over the Arctic Ocean in summer. Have, for centuries. Sometimes a patch coincides with the North Pole, sometimes not. By the time his ship returned to port, the Pole was probably ice-covered again. At the time, he had no idea that this was a routine event.
In subsequent years, scientists have tracked the disappearance of multi-year ice on the Arctic Ocean and noted the thinning sea ice compared to earlier in this century, or even 20 years ago. All important information. But open water at the North Pole is just a red herring.
Likewise, the plight of the plucky polar bear. On past Adventure Canada cruises, whenever we've spotted bears -- which is every trip -- I've always tried to photograph them on as small and miserable an ice floe as possible, knowing that these images will sell. Which, heh heh, they do. In marginal parts of the Arctic, polar bear populations are down, and surviving bears are thinner. But in the eastern Arctic, where I roam, there are more polar bears than ever. Northern Labrador is crawling with them. Until not too long ago, you might not see one for an entire summer.
As the climate continues to warm, polar bears will likely disappear or decrease in the marginal parts of their range. On the other hand, as the Arctic Ocean turns from large areas of multi-year ice, which bears and seals don't like, to first-year ice, which they do, the Arctic Ocean may come to abound in polar bears -- where, until now, only the occasional one prowls.
August 12
The Mealy Mountains in southern Labrador, site of an upcoming new national park, are a tough place to travel in summer. First, they're hard to get to. No roads run into the park. Boats can deposit you on the south shore of Lake Melville, but there is then a wide apron of bog between the shore and where the escarpment of the Mealys suddenly rises.
String bogs: not ideal hiking.
I managed to get in thanks to the generosity of Gudie Hutchings of Rifflin' Hitch Lodge, a high-end fishing camp on the nearby Eagle River. The lodge has its own helicopter. I flew from Goose Bay to the heart of the English Mountains, the high point of the Mealys. From the air, the rocky landscape looks like good walking, but this perspective changed once I confronted the reality on the ground. Thick stands of near-impassible krumholz guard all but the highest reaches. It can take an hour to maneuver 100 meters through this wiry shrub. Rocks and boulders cover the unseen footing -- unseen because the krumholz is visually impenetrable as well. Your next step may take you down up to your thigh, into some dark realm. Then you must step up again onto the next boulder. It's slow and picky work.
The flies add to the degree of difficulty. While mosquitoes dominate the interior plateau of central Labrador, black flies rule the Mealys. Every step, thousands rise to greet you from their resting places on the ground. Here's a little clip of the entourage outside my tent. Little wonder that the old trappers and Innu only traveled the Mealys beginning late September, and abandoned them in summer for the cooler, less buggy coast.
Still, once you get above the krumholz, to the alpine meadows in the breezy upper reaches of the range, the going is straightforward. I spent five days in the English mountains, then another several days around the Wonderstrands, the 50-kilometer-long sand beach that Vikings mentioned in their sagas and which will also be part of the new Mealy Mountains National Park Reserve.
The English Mountains, highest part of the Mealys. The right-most peak, with the snow patches, may be the highest point of the whole range, reaching 4,000 feet.
The north end of the Wonderstrands, near the abandoned fishing community of West Bay.
August 3
Back from Labrador with plenty of stories, but the Hubbard retrace itself ended up as something of a dud. Unfortunately, my partner Philip Schubert had too hard a time with his 95-pound pack, despite the training he did with that weight. He was struggling from the first steps, and soon we had to shuttle his load forward in stages. By the end of the first day, we'd advanced a mere 1.3 km. The following morning, he admitted that he'd bitten off more than he could chew, so we turned around.
While Philip used his sat phone to call for a boat ride back to North West River, I continued up the Susan River for a couple more days. But I was bored: I'd been looking forward to discussing/arguing/sharing insights about the Hubbard expedition for a few weeks with someone else who knows the saga well. So in the end I backtracked, and after returning to Goose Bay, I spent the next two weeks tramping the Mealy Mountains -- site of an upcoming new national park. More about that later.
Stuff like this happens occasionally with partners you don't know. Northern travel is not like climbing, where the abilities of all parties are clearly known. Northern travel is more of a blind date.
Philip had two friends who were going to do a little canoeing near our original end point at the east side of the Smallwood Reservoir. Together, the three of them drove up the Orma Lake Road and started canoeing. But on the third day, Philip fell sick and had to be medivaced out by helicopter. This was not a good summer for him. He seems to be feeling okay now.
July 3
Off today to Labrador to trek Leonidas Hubbard's ill-fated 1903 route with Philip Schubert. Philip is an Ottawa canoeist who has been chipping away at the Hubbard saga for several years. When I was just starting my expedition career, another friend and I retraced Hubbard's route up the miserable Susan River -- a tortuous, rocky stream that the too-optimistic novice explorer managed to convince himself was a native thoroughfare into the unexplored interior. In three weeks on the river, we paddled a total of 15 minutes. The rest of the time was spent lining, portaging and dragging the canoe upstream through the rapids. A good project for someone like myself, who finds actual canoeing a little boring.
Hubbard ultimately perished of starvation. His two companions, Dillon Wallace and their half-Cree guide George Elson, survived by the skin of their teeth. Wallace later returned to the camp where Hubbard died and chiseled a memorial note into a nearby rock. In the 1970s, a relative of Wallace's returned by helicopter to the site and inexplicably bolted a bronze plaque over the original inscription.
Jerry, above, and Philip Schubert, below, on earlier expeditions to the Hubbard Rock.
The Hubbard tragedy made a big splash; along with the Greely expedition, it was one of two Canadian wilderness tragedies to make the front page of The New York Times. Dillon Wallace later wrote a book about the expedition. The Lure of the Labrador Wild became one of the classics of northern exploration literature. The writing is not great but the story still rivets.
Philip and I are off with 95-pound packs to hike the 220-kilometer route from the start of the Susan and Beaver Rivers to Windbound Lake -- now the eastern edge of the Smallwood Reservoir. Figure a little over three weeks, as we wrestle through the bush at first, squish through the string bogs of the plateau higher up and enjoy the company of seventy zillion mosquitoes and blackflies. I bought my first bug jacket in 20 years for this trip: You'd think that as an arctic specialist, I'd have lots of experience with insects. But there are few to zero biting flies in the High Arctic; and the coast of Labrador, where I've traveled a lot the last few years, tends to be too cool and breezy. The hordes are inland.
We'll also be taking some time to climb some hills done by Hubbard and his crew as they scouted for the elusive Lake Michikamau. For me, it's a chance to reacquaint myself with the Hubbard story. I expect a trip of moderate difficulty -- no great distance but heavy packs and lots of flies put it solidly in the expedition category, with its philosophy of delayed gratification.
As usual, I won't be updating this site again until I return from Labrador, around mid-August.
Carrying a heavy pack is mostly about pain tolerance: How miserable can you be and still enjoy the experience?
June 21
More images from Huangshan. With all these granite pillars, and no one climbing them, you have to wonder why the place is not one of the world's primo destinations for sport climbers.
June 18
Alexandra and I are just back from China. Nothing expeditionary about it: just shooting video in Shanghai for a friend. Apart from the work, it was a tourism experience in a city of 20 million: hitting the Bund, buying custom-tailored clothes and $40 stylish eyeglasses in the markets, and hoping that the delicately gelatinous shark's fin soup that our host served us will not prompt the Shark God to seek retribution the next time I go ocean swimming. We went to Expo but the lineups at most pavilions are 3-5 hours -- longer at the most popular sites -- so we didn't go into anything.
On our one outdoor excursion, we visited Huangshan, or Yellow Mountain, for a weekend. It's a five and a half hour bus ride from Shanghai. The phallic peaks are reminiscent of the Bugaboos here in the Rockies or smaller versions of Fitzroy in Patagonia. But pagodas and tortured pines give them a beauty all their own. Beginning in the 1930s, workers created a network of trails, including precarious but solid stone steps leading up these precipitous peaks, with 2,000 foot drops on one side -- that was an astonishing engineering accomplishment. Huangshan may be the only place in the world that is both one of the natural wonders and one of the manmade wonders at the same time.
But for an arctic traveler used to the Silence of the Lands, or even for an ordinary North American who likes the cottage or quiet hiking trails, Huangshan was disturbing, because of the number of people and the way they behaved. Twenty million people in Shanghai is one thing; you expect cities to teem. But to have the same hectic, noisy feel on mountain trails overlooking stunning peaks made me grasp what a billion people really means. The Taoist peacefulness that one associates with these Chinese sugarloaf mountains, and which is easy to recreate in photos (see below) was totally absent. Guides blew shrill whistles in my ear summoning their flock; others bellowed on loudspeakers. Everyone shouted. Hundreds walked along oblivious, pecking text messages on their omnipresent cell phones. Climbing Lotus Peak, the high point, I had to jostle through shoulder-to-shoulder crowds for 15 minutes before I could climb the last little stair to the narrow summit. Here, a tinny whine revealed itself to be a couple of local entrepreneurs who had set up a table and were etching the names of summiteers on Olympic-type medals to sell as souvenirs.
Several hotels sprinkled near the mountaintops allowed thousands to awake at 4am and race outside to catch the sunrise over Huangshan from one of several overlooks. A hundred people packed shoulder to shoulder on each little platform, shouting, taking snapshots of each other, hallooing for echoes. No one, it seemed, was simply admiring quietly. I had the sense, perhaps unfair, that if air pollution ever reaches the stage where the real sun is no longer visible through the haze, enterprising engineers will construct an artificial sun that rises on cue, and everyone will still flock to look at it.
A typical cross-section of a Huangshan trail...
...though you wouldn't guess it, to look at the photos that can be taken here.
May 24
Last year I was at the desk writing Arctic Eden, due out this coming September, and so spent three days in a tent rather than the usual three months. This year will be more normal.
Most of the time will be spent in Labrador. Years ago, a partner and I retraced Leonidas Hubbard's 1903 canoe route up the miserable Susan River, dragging, line and portaging our canoe up a shallow, rocky stream that the inexperienced Hubbard believed was a major Innu route into the interior. Sometimes we made just one mile a day. It was hell, but a good hell, kinda. In three weeks on the river, we paddled a total of 15 minutes. Since I find canoeing boring, this was perfect.
This July, Philip Schubert and I will be hiking their entire 240 kilometre route from the mouth of the Susan to Windbound Lake. Philip is another Labrador traveler bitten by the Hubbard bug. He's devoted several summers to canoeing pieces of the Hubbard/Wallace/Mina Hubbard expeditions. Maybe because of Labrador's relative accessibility, lots of people have focused on the tragic Hubbard story -- everyone from travelers like Philip and myself to academics who try to sell Hubbard's wife Mina as the greatest explorer since Captain Cook. After Hubbard's death, Mina and Hubbard's partner Wallace had a falling out, and vied to finish Hubbard's planned route. Mina completed it several weeks before Wallace, but she did it like a bwana or memsahib, being royally shepherded by guides. Women here in the Rockies are strong and competent in the outdoors and have little interest in Mina's story -- they've outgrown her as a role model -- but she continues to appeal to urban feminists.
Strange for a northern traveler to admit, but this will be the first trip since that initial Hubbard lark when I will have to deal with lots of flies. Mosquitoes are largely missing from the High Arctic; black flies totally absent. And on the coastal kayak trips I've done in recent years, conditions near the water are, with some exceptions, too cool and breezy for many flies. I just bought my first bug jacket in 20 years.
Lots of other travels happening as well, including some non-outdoor stuff. Alexandra and I are off to China shortly for three weeks, mainly Shanghai. An opportunity to travel, photograph and help out some friends at the same time. So I won't be updating this website again until mid-June.
May 7
A 2008 CBC documentary called Polar Bear Fever profiles polar bears as four-footed rock stars. It interviews environmental lawyers in Arizona and the filmmakers of An Arctic Tale. It shows Knut, the polar bear cub which became an international sensation at the Berlin Zoo. With the exception of bear researcher Andrew Durocher (and to a lesser extent, photographer Norbert Rosing, who films them in Churchill) it doesn't speak to anyone who actually knows polar bears. Even Sheila Watt-Cloutier, the Inuit activist who is the media's usual spokesperson for her culture, is a townie who, apart from her early childhood, has little experience on the land. The Inuit who actually know bears rarely give good interview, and they never push the right enviro-speak buttons.
Experienced arctic travelers, both Inuit and white, don't regard polar bears as loveable or cute or symbolic. Rather, as a presence to fear and respect. Polar bears are great to see from a distance, but some individuals, inevitably, are too curious. They break into your tent or sled. They approach you with intent. I wouldn't say that they're out to kill you, but let's say they're out to test whether you're something edible and not-too-dangerous. I've had this too often to find polar bears cuddly. During these encounters, fear for your own life is compounded with anxiety for the bear's. When a bear is approaching and doesn't get the hint from noise or flares, how close do you let it come before raising the shotgun? A bear's death would be a tragedy. Fortunately, polar bears are conservative, and if you're able to swallow your fear and convince them you're dangerous, they usually withdraw.
My favorite polar bear/global warming headline is this one from The Onion. But most southern journalism just parrots the usual bears-as-global-warming-icons theme. "Animals are yet, to many people, little furry parables," wrote skeptic Bergen Evans in his 1946 classic, The Natural History of Nonsense.
Bodice ripper: An archival still from the film Polar Bear Fever.
April 29
A couple of weeks ago, one of the inexperienced North Polies was plucked off the ice by Canadian search and rescue. Sketchy accounts failed to make it clear exactly why he needed rescue. He'd fallen through the ice but had extricated himself and set up his tent. He'd had minor frostbite from earlier in the trip, but nothing terrible. Even if he was low on fuel, I couldn't discern why he didn't wait a day or two for an aircraft that he chartered to reach him -- apart, of course, from the salient fact that rescue cost him nothing while a private pickup from that location would have set him back over $50,000.
The Canadian military had been doing a sovereignty exercise in the area, based out of CFS Alert, and probably regarded it as a public relations windfall that further emphasized their presence up there. News stories about the rescue featured comment after comment from readers, including the usual foaming at the mouth from sober citizens who resent their tax dollars paying for such shenanigans.
Readers of this website will know that I'm no fan of most North Pole trekkers. Nowadays most of them are hustlers looking for quick reputations as "adventurers". These challenges used to be wonderful; now they're little different from any marathon, except that they attract more egotistical types. Most of them feign experience that they don't have, and when they get into trouble, they sell it as force majeure rather than incompetence.
Nevertheless, I've also met the citizens who resent paying for rescues. They tend to think that all adventurers are idiots, and should be holding down 9-5 jobs and raising families, or whatever people are supposed to do. They resent more than paying for rescues; they resent those paths less traveled, because these seem to reject the conventional route that they themselves have chosen.
I've written about my own first arctic trek, over 20 years ago, that ended ignominiously in rescue -- or rather, in a search, because I was fine. It made me give a lot of thought to SAR. Among other things, I discovered that you can't waive your right to search and rescue, any more than you can waive your right not to be murdered. That search and rescue has a budget, and that these high-profile salvage jobs do not deflect money from orphans and poor widows; it means that the SARtechs do a little less training, because part of the training budget went to the sort of exercise for which they are training. I also discovered that such sober-citizen-infuriating incidents happen infrequently -- typically once every 10 years. Officials told me that by far the most common SAR operation involved looking for fishermen off the east and west coasts who've stopped somewhere to visit friends without reporting home.
Adventurers tend to be pretty fit, but help pay for the astronomical health care costs of smokers and the super-sized. Those without kids still contribute to schools. Although I'm not sure I fully subscribe to the argument, it's possible to regard rescue as just another part of the social contract.
April 5
The life of an outdoor photographer has always been a little weird. First of all, there is no single way to survive at this. Some photographers make their living exclusively from selling their images directly to editorial and advertising clients, or through stock agencies. Stock imagery can sometimes be boring -- how many ways can you photograph businessmen shaking hands? -- but the best photographers are superbly skilled, imaginative, driven.
Then there are the photographic educators, who don't sell much but lead tours and workshops. A lot of them are not very good photographers; they are the Those Who Can't Do, Teach types. A few, however, are remarkably good. Artistic outdoor photographers, for example, often don't sell much imagery -- their work doesn't lend itself to commercial use -- but they have a vision to impart.
Finally, there are what I call the Businessmen, who produce workmanlike photos, competent but uninspired, but have superior marketing skills. They self-publish postcards, prints, greeting cards, calendars and books, then get them in the right venues through hard legwork. Their stuff may not be great, but they know how to make a living.
Many photographers do a combination of these things, depending on their individual skills. And far more than most professions, the outdoor photography universe has always been in flux. The survivors tend to be those able to adapt to constantly changing circumstances.
The business of selling imagery has taken a major hit in the last two years. Prices of images have dropped drastically, as the number of good shots has exploded, largely thanks to digital. Digital's instant feedback makes the learning curve extremely quick. There is also comparatively little cost to digital imagery. Many full-time pros used to spend $20,000 a year on film. That was an effective barrier to the masses producing good photography.
There are also a lot of amateurs giving away their photos for free or almost free on places like Flickr. Doctors and dentists are taking photo tours with top professionals and coming back with great shots, which they are happy to sell for peanuts and bragging rights. Soon, the value of an image will drop so low that full-time shooters won't be able to offset the cost of production. It remains to be seen whether outdoor photography will survive as a profession. Seeing the writing on the wall, some pros are becoming photographic educators. Some of these are imparting great technical advice in their workshops, seminars and online courses; others profess to explain how to become a professional outdoor photographer, which is selling the sizzle, not the steak, because the way of life they're pitching is essentially over.
April 2
On a recent sledding trip, my partner and I concocted a list of Songs to Sled By -- a sure bestseller, we joked. We chose the tunes for their humorous connection rather than actual suitability -- the Proclaimers' I Would Walk 500 Miles, for example. I listened to that song once on the trail, but the beat and melody were all wrong. Another on that bogus list: Shook Me All Night Long, because of the perfect incompatibility of heavy metal and arctic silence.
Strange to admit, I've found only two songs that are absolutely perfect for sledding. They're fast, and you can only play them when sledding briskly on good hard snow, while walking, not skiing. They are: Bonnie Tyler's It's a Heartbreak, and Taylor Swift's You Belong With Me. Their beat can keep your legs driving for an entire afternoon.
March 26
On the surface, the art of sledding is so self-evident -- you walk and you pull -- that at first glance, there seems little to learn. I learned to sled by sledding. I wasn't aware of learning anything, or of improving. I just sledded.
But in recent years, I've shared manhauling trips with partners who were unfamiliar with this form of travel. Everything went fine, but I discovered that there is something to learn, after all.
The most obvious technical flaw with novice sledders is that they don't use their ski poles enough. Rather than use them as a second set of legs, they use them as delicate little feelers. They do almost all their pulling with their legs. This is inefficient: a quadruped pulls more forcefully than a biped. By the end of a sledding expedition, your triceps and upper back muscles should be at least as well-developed as your legs.
Then, when going over rough sea ice or uphill, inexperienced sledders continue to use their legs exclusively, when they should be enlisting gravity to help them. Hauling a heavy sled up and over pieces of rough ice hundreds of times a day can exhaust your legs prematurely. When the sled begins to climb over the ice block, you need to stop straining with your legs and simply lean forward, letting your weight do the hard work. (This is particularly effective if you can brace your feet on the downslope of another ice block and "fall" forward.) The moment the sled crosses the fulcrum onto the downhill side, you begin marching again. Done fluently, you don't miss a step. It saves the legs from having to horse the brunt of the load, and as a fringe benefit, you can stretch your legs during the lean, relieving those tight muscles. This whole process is harder to describe than to do, but it makes a huge difference. On a sledding expedition, your legs are gold, and you have to treat them as your most valuable item of equipment, and give them every form of relief and advantage.
Sledding isn't rocket science, but there is stuff to learn, as I saw when Bob Cochran and I sledded 700 km from Devon Island up the east coast of Ellesmere. Bob had done one previous sledding journey, but by the end of our 700 km trek, his sledding technique had gone from okay to impressive. In particular, he had the timing of the lean down pat when hauling over blocks of sea ice.
Use gravity more than your legs to haul a heavy sled over rough sea ice.
March 17
So many people currently skiing to the North Pole are beginners. Their climbing skins flop off, they suffer frostbite, they break their ski poles ... their constant litany of issues sounds like a titanic struggle against the elements but is mostly just inexperience. By comparison, Richard Weber's group just steams along without melodrama, putting in good mileage, making it look physically demanding but otherwise pretty easy. And that's the way it is.
It was also a treat for me today to read some advice from Borge Ousland on repairing a broken ski pole with a snow stake. I've only ever had one broken pole and I fixed that with a pole repair sleeve, but his is a great makeshift solution. At the end of his advice, Borge even adds this elegant postscript:
"...take care that the metal sawdust doesn't end up on [your] sleeping mat, it will puncture it."
Borge uses Thermarests; I do too in summer, but not in winter because it's so hard to detect a pinhole leak without submerging the pad completely in water and looking for bubbles. But he probably has an workaround for that too. A real traveler.
March 9
Climber Tom Hornbein is best known for his epic 1963 traverse of Everest, up the West Ridge and down the South Col, with Willi Unsoeld. It included a forced bivouac around 28,000 feet. But Tom has also survived other epics, including several hikes with Alexandra and I, and the following. Although the identity of the member in question is not revealed, Tom's matchless attention to detail makes it likely that the victim of this near-catastrophe was someone else on the expedition.
From ACCIDENTS IN NORTH AMERICAN MOUNTAINEERING
American Alpine Club, 1989, p. 76
INADEQUATE EQUIPMENT FOR NOCTURNAL DIURESIS, WEATHER
Washington, North Cascades
On August 19, 1988, four veteran mountaineers set out to ascend the West Ridge of Eldorado Peak in the North Cascades of Washington. The group was surprised by high winds, rain, and snow and was forced to make camp at 2030 meters. Equipped primarily for a summer climb, the oldest climber, who has predictable nocturnal diuresis at altitude, had forgotten his usual "pee bottle," a zip-lock bag. Undaunted by his forgetfulness, the climber fully opened one of the four 25 oz. cans of Foster's Ale, carried to high camp by one of his compatriots, to use as a substitute. During one of his nocturnal wakenings (necessitated in part by prior ingestion of the contents of the can), high winds and snow made impeccable maneuvering difficult, and he incurred a superficial laceration from the sharp edges of the can. Excessive blood loss was prevented by a firm squeeze technique; and so as not to foreshorten their trip, steri-strips were quickly applied longitudinally. This technique provided painless, effective closure of the two centimeters horizontal laceration. With no further trauma or change in morphology of the injured part, the steri-strips lasted for an adequate length of time to permit an uneventful descent. (Source: R.B. Schoene)
(Editor's Note: While no category exists for this kind of accident in our data base- nor do we intend to create one, this candid account is included for the readers' edification. With thanks to the members of this group, R. B. Schoene,T.F. Hornbein, W. Q. Sumner, and F. Dunham, we hope the most important member has fully recovered....)
March 1
Here's a little YouTube video of Alexandra wrestling with her 65-pound pack while we were trekking on the north coast of Ellesmere for a month. Alexandra only weighs 122 pounds, and I'm peeing myself laughing with her struggles to stand up with a mountain on her back. But once up, she carried that load for seven hours.
February 22
I've lived in the Rocky Mountains for 11 years, but only recently did I ski the Wapta Icefields for the first time. I always wanted to, though: it's the closest you get to an arctic landscape in these parts. A couple of weeks ago, I finally got to ski it with mountaineer and writer Geoff Powter.
We had not a cloud nor breath of wind -- very much like the Arctic in spring. But for Geoff, who had done Wapta several times before, the conditions weren't just good, they were unprecedented. Wapta socks in easily. "Good conditions are when you only have to take out your compass to navigate four times a day," he said.
Because of the alpine huts up there, backpacks can be relatively light. You don't need a tent, sleeping pad or even utensils. However, you were only one ridge removed from the Icefields Parkway. It didn't have that arctic isolation or self-sufficiency.
We began at Bow Lake, lunched at the edge of the icefield at Bow Hut, skied up Rhonnda Ridge, and did an exquisite downhill run over well-bridged crevasses to Peyto Hut. The following morning, we skied Mt. Baker, then back to the Icefields Parkway via Peyto Lake -- a somewhat messy exit requiring us to take off our skis and stomp cross-country for a while. Nice two-day semi-Arctic experience.
Rhondda Ridge above the Wapta Icefields.
View from the top of Rhondda Ridge.
Peyto hut.
Sunrise near Peyto hut.
February 13
The practice of adventurers "training" for their sledding expeditions by pulling tires has become commonplace. That began with Borge Ousland, a fine traveler but also one with a good photographic eye. It's not clear whether Borge thought this exercise would help and was trying to give himself an edge, or whether it was just a good photo idea.
In fact, pulling a tire has no real value, except to give beginners confidence that they are doing something to prepare themselves for the Arctic, and to give a quirky publicity image showing a distinctive form of training. Walking briskly on a sidewalk for two hours a day is more effective, but it doesn't look as good.
A few years ago, I set up an image of myself training for an upcoming expedition, below. I was doing a magazine story on the project and wanted some visual variety. Try it at home, don't try it at home: it doesn't matter. Just don't imagine that it's actually training.
February 4
Explorersweb has posted its list of 2010 arctic expeditions. Nothing of interest, just the usual: couple of clowns, couple of dreamers, including one whose only sponsor seems to be, charmingly, OK Tires. Greenland crossings and North Pole treks, done in the usual ways, are similar nowadays to cycling across Canada -- hard enough, but lacking in imagination.
One trek, unheralded except locally, began this week in Labrador. An Innu man from Sheshatshui, Michel Andrew, is walking from Sheshatshui to Sept-Iles. I'm not sure how long that is, maybe 1,200 km. Last year, he snowshoed the 300km from his village to Natuashish on the north coast. He did that alone; this year, various young Innu are joining him. Details are sketchy, but I get the sense that they are walking mainly on the snowpacked Trans-Labrador Highway, pulling light sleds behind them and camping in stove-heated tents by the side of the road. Here and there, they'll need to snowshoe cross-country.
It's been a mild winter in Labrador, but early February is always the coldest time of year. By mid-month, the sun is high, days are longer and the air warms considerably.
I don't expect Andrew to put in a world-beating pace -- his trek last year was about as slow as it is humanly possible to go. But from a recovering alcoholic, from a culture which is known in modern times more for its gasoline-sniffing kids than its athleticism, one thing it can't be accused of is a lack of imagination.
Innu boy, practicing for the future.
February 2
I'll be making some changes to this website shortly. Among other things, the Writing page will now include occasional blog entries. (Until now, Expeditions, Gear and Ellesmere have been the three pages I update regularly.) As a fun thing for today, I've attached a piece I once wrote about Groundhog Day. Go to Writing for this little tribute to winter. Nothing to do with expeditions or the Arctic, though.
January 24
A couple recently skied 1,100 miles across Antarctica in 70 days -- an average of 16 mpd. Unlike most polar expeditions to the usual suspects -- North Pole & South Pole -- that was a pretty good trip, at a decent pace. It's also a sustainable pace in good snow, with a moderate load. Most days they would have been making at least 20 mpd, to catch up from the beginning of their trip, when their sleds weighed 300 lbs and even 16 mpd would have been a challenge.
Sledding is a delicate poker play: Do you bring less food in order to go faster and finish sooner? Or do you bring enough food to cover a more conservative pace, knowing that if conditions are good, the extra weight will slow you down and the expedition will be longer than it has to be? It's partly a gamble -- one big dump of snow can change everything -- but the answer also depends on where you're going, what time of year, and how well you know your own speed and that of your companions. But 20 mpd, with a load up to about 250 lbs, is possible to maintain in hard spring snow.
Winter expeditions -- where the snow has a lot of friction -- trips with bigger loads, places where it snows a lot, sheltered country where the snow is not windpacked...all affect sledding pace dramatically. In time, as fitter travelers discover the polar regions, I suspect that 30 mpd will become a more common pace; I've managed that for a couple of weeks, and may have been able to sustain it for another couple, but it's pretty intense: 12-13 hours/day at 120 steps/minute.
January 23
Polar travelers often report losing a filling during an expedition. This is not a coincidence. It's caused by the filling's exposure to temperature extremes. The mouth is warm; frozen food and cold air create constant expansion and contraction that over time weakens the filling. It doesn't help that frozen food is often hard as a rock.
I used to lose fillings regularly; and my bridge fell out on almost every sledding expedition. When I mentioned this to my dentist, he experimented with a different bonding agent, one that didn't expand or contract as much with change in temperature. Since then, nothing has fallen out.
The same dentist -- an imaginative guy who's past president of the Alberta Dental Association -- has an unusual hobby: He enjoys painting designs on his patients' crowns and bridges. He uses a tiny brush with a single strand of hair. The miniature painting gets baked on and lasts indefinitely. He's painted tennis racquets, golf clubs, rabbits, freemason's symbols. He gave me a polar bear. Call it a tattooth, if you like. I like to think of it as a good luck charm, but considering the number of incidents I've had with polar bears in recent years, maybe it isn't.
January 18
On April 3, I'll be giving a seminar in Calgary on Top Ten Tips for Expedition Photographers. Here's the link.
January 13
Xanadu is less than a two-day drive from Beijing, but it feels much further away. En route, we passed fragments of the Great Wall; village houses of brick, as if reinforced against the Big Bad Wolf; donkey drivers on their cellphones shared the roads with black Mercedes. The roads, though paved and pothole-less, were narrow for two-way traffic moving at such varying speeds. Passing on blind curves was just the way it had to be done. Minimizing the risks took a lot of concentration. By the end of an eight-hour day, our driver was totally bagged.
Though herders do stay in gers in the summer months in Inner Mongolia, tourist gers were also common. They were like little cabins or cottages, and varied in features. Some had electricity and small TVs; others were more basic; a few had portraits of Genghis Khan, like little shrines, on the night tables. One of these small tourist camps stood just a few miles outside Xanadu, and we used it as a base.
We visited Xanadu twice, and spent hours poking around. Only a handful of Chinese tourists joined us, and those who did looked bored. When Alexandra spotted a weasel among the ruins, they briefly became animated -- wildlife! -- but the site itself did nothing for them and they left quickly. Meanwhile, some visitors from Mongolia proper had come 1,000 kilometers specifically to visit Xanadu, and they wandered the site reverentially, tears in their eyes. Fragments of green tile from the palace ceiling littered certain areas. In others, a low mound of earth was all that marked the glory days of the Mongol empire, and it seemed more inspirational of the poem Ozymandias than of Coleridge's epic.
Alexandra and the ruins of one of the 13th century buildings at Xanadu.
January 10
After our experiences in Tuva, we had high hopes of getting into the backcountry of Inner Mongolia on horseback. But China is not Russia. It's much more urban. Even if our Chinese companions from Beijing had wanted to gallop over the grasslands for days and camp under the hazy stars, it would have been difficult to arrange. In Russia, you made a couple of inquiries, someone put you on to his cousin's friend's brother, and later that afternoon, after a short drive to a family's ger, you were saddling your horses.
Inner Mongolia is almost the size of Alaska, and we had only about 10 days, including driving from Beijing. We had wanted to photograph the Naadym festival here too, but we had faulty information and missed it by a day or two. So instead, we sought out what is for westerners the most famous place in Inner Mongolia -- the ruins of Xanadu, the summer palace of Kubla Khan and the subject of one of the best-known poems in the English language.
Sign pointing the way to Xanadu.
Next: Xanadu
January 6, 2010
Mongolia has become an adventurer's destination. Besides its charisma of remoteness, it includes the Gobi desert and an exotic culture. Deserts and locals in colorful clothing are flypaper to travelers. One man recently rode a horse across Mongolia. Another imaginative fellow knocked a golf ball from one end of the country to the other.
Alexandra and I have never been to Mongolia, but we've traveled comparable locales directly above and below it -- the Russian republic of Tuva and China's Inner Mongolia. In Tuva, we spent a few days on horseback but we couldn't go as far as we'd hoped because forest fires tend to ravage the countryside during the searing summer months. Tuva has a classic continental climate. In July, the temperature often soars to +35 or +40C. Now, in early January, it's so consistently frigid that today at -39C it bests the Pole of Cold at Oymyakon, also in Russia. Tuva is so continental that it's considered the Center of Asia. At least, a monument in Kyzyl, its capital, makes that claim.
When in Kyzyl, we met Kongar-ool Ondar, the famous throat-singer. (Check YouTube for his performance on David Letterman.) My photo of him in front of the Center of Asia monument is the cover of the Lonely Planet's guide to the Trans-Siberian railway -- which is strange, because the Trans-Siberian doesn't go through Tuva. We had to drive to Abakan, in the neighboring republic of Khakassia, to catch the train.
Kongar-ool Ondar and the Center of Asia monument beside the Yenisei River in Kyzyl.
Like Mongolia, Tuva celebrates the herder's festival of Naadym with bareback horse races, archery and Mongolian wrestling. As in sumo, there are no weight categories, and some of the earlier rounds pitted 300-pound behemoths against 98-pound weaklings. Among some North Americans, Tuva was well known during Soviet times for its colorful triangular and diamond-shaped postage stamps. They were one of the exotic jewels of a philatelist's collection. The best stamps featured drawings that wonderfully juxtaposed past and present, such as a galloping camel being overtaken by a locomotive or a horse glancing upward at a huge dirigible floating past.
Our stay in Tuva coincided with the Naadym festival. Unlike its counterpart in Mongolia, the festival drew no tour groups or other westerners. Still, we were happy to escape the heat of Kyzyl into the backcountry of gers and squat horses and fermented mare's milk.
I said that we hadn't been to Mongolia. That's not entirely true. The Mongolian border is a relatively short drive south of Kyzyl, and one day we went to the border, marked in this location only by a crumbling marker. Glancing around to make sure no border guards were poised to shoot us -- which had happened recently to some Tuvan horse rustlers -- we stepped gingerly across the marker for the superficial hell of it.
