EXPEDITIONS

Filing daily reports from the field would ruin a trip, but it's fun to do pre-briefs and debriefs.

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 350km 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.

Alexandra, rear, and friends in Tuva.

Next: Inner Mongolia