Resolute is home to over 200 Inuit and a number of transient Canadians, mostly technicians and scientists. Ginny was housed in a tiny shack with her radio beside her bunk, Simon lived in the main scientists’ accommodation. The black dog from Tuktoyaktuk had grown to almost twice Bothie’s size and Ginny was plainly infatuated. Our boating outlook from Resolute to Alert, Ginny warned us, looked bleak. In a week or so the sea would almost certainly undergo a general freeze-up, stranding us in situ.
The Resolute meteorological station commander proved to me by way of his ice-charts that we were all but blocked into Resolute for the year. The strait east of Bathurst Island was frozen, as was the northern end of Lancaster Sound. All routes to the west and north-west were already solidly iced. We could still attempt a 600-mile detour round Devon Island but its eastern coast was storm-bound and a maze of icebergs. I thanked him and opted for the last course through lack of a positive alternative.
For four days our whaler, very nearly crushed in one overnight ice-surge, was blocked inside Resolute Bay. Then, on 25 August, a southerly wind allowed us to escape east along the coastline of Cornwallis Island. The seas were rough and high for hundreds of miles and the coast to our north was either teetering cliff or glacier, pounding surf or disintegrating icebergs. With over 1,000 miles to Alert and under a week before freeze-up, we slept little.
With high waves breaking violently upon icebergs all about us, we were caught ten miles short of any shelter at nightfall. Two propeller blades broke against chunks of growler ice. Straining my eyes up at the mountain tops silhouetted against the moonless night sky was not easy, for the boat bucked and danced in the waves. Charlie fought the tiller to avoid icebergs visible only at the last moment. By weak torch battery and wet chart I guessed at the location of Dundas Bay and we nosed cautiously past cliffs against which waves smashed twenty feet high, luminous in the darkness. The mouth of the bay was crammed with grinding bergs and only lack of choice made us risk pressing on. Once past the outer ring of clashing icebergs a huge swell took over from the breakers. Soaked to the skin and numb-handed, we secured the boat between two grounded bergs and camped in a long-deserted Inuit hut. For an hour before sleeping we let the tension unwind as we lay on the floor propped up by our elbows, sipping tea by candlelight and chatting of Army days long ago in Arabia. Charlie’s not such a bad old sod after all, I thought to myself.
The next five days are etched on my memory. I remember a blur of danger, a race against the dropping thermometer and constant cold. The nastier the elements, the further the natural barrier of restraint between Charlie and me dissipated. Our latent antagonism disappeared altogether once the predicament of the moment entered the danger level and became positively unpleasant.
Glacial valleys draining enormous ice-fields created bergs larger than cathedrals, which sailed seaborne from their dark spawning valleys to collect off the coast. Battered ceaselessly by waves containing broken ice-chunks, these bergs disintegrated bit by bit. A course running parallel to the cliffs and mere yards offshore seemed the least dangerous.
Waves smashed against cliffs and icebergs in a welter of thundering surf. Our port propeller’s shearpin split against a growler, a half-submerged chunk of ice, entailing a repair job only possible at anchor. We prayed the second engine would keep going or we would soon be fibreglass matchwood, ground to pieces by rock or ice.
Eventually we found a deep inlet between cliffs. At the only possible landing point a large polar bear sat watching us, so we stopped in rocky shallows and fought to steady the craft among basking beluga whales. I stood in the sea holding the stern as still as I could while Charlie worked as fast as he could on the propeller. The bear dived into the sea and swam around us. We kept the rifle to hand but only the animal’s nose and eyes remained above water as it swam.
After 300 miles we rounded the north-eastern tip of Devon Island and aimed across Jones Sound for Ellesmere Island. At Grise Fjord, the most northerly Inuit village in Canada, we beached the boat in a safe cove and rested for twenty-four hours. Our skin was the texture of etiolated bacon, our faces burned dark by the wind and the glare. We had lost a good deal of weight and various parts of our bodies, especially our crutches, thighs and armpits, were suffering from open sores and boils. The sea was due to freeze over in two or three days, should the winds drop and flatten the water.
Back in Resolute, Ginny, fully aware of the dangers of Devon Island’s east coast, had awaited my radio call for twenty-eight hours. At Grise Fjord I fixed up an antenna between Inuit drying frames and, although her voice sounded faint and faraway, I could detect Ginny’s happiness that we had reached Ellesmere Island.
With forty-eight hours to go and 500 sea miles to cover to the most northerly point we could hope to reach, Tanquary Fjord, we slid into our damp survival suits after emptying the last of our foot powder down the leggings.
The journey to Hell’s Gate Channel was a blur of black cliff, freezing spray and increasing pack-ice. The channel was blocked with bergy bits but, through good fortune, the only alternative corridor, Cardigan Strait, was partially open and we edged into it beneath the great mountains which guard the western gateway of Jones Sound.
The long detour had paid off, but that same evening the surface of the sea began to freeze, congealing silently and quickly. Twenty miles south of Great Bear Cape we were caught between pack-ice and newly forming frazil ice, a paper-thin crystalline cover.
Forcing our way back south through the new crust, we spent an anxious night camped at the edge of Norwegian Bay and Ginny promised to obtain aerial guidance if she could. At noon on 29 August, Russ Bomberry, a Mohawk chief and one of the best bush pilots in the Arctic, flew his Twin Otter overhead for two hours to guide us, by a labyrinthine route, through sixty miles of loose pack to Great Bear Cape. When Russ flew away back to Resolute, we broached our last bottle of whisky. We slept five hours over the next two days and prayed for once that the wind would continue to blow. It did and the surface grease ice did not settle thickly enough to prevent us ascending Greely Fjord, Canon Fjord and finally the dark narrows of Tanquary Fjord, a cul-de-sac deep within glacier-cut mountains.
Tiers of snow-capped peaks rimmed the winter sky as we snaked into a twilit world of silence. Wolves stared from shadowed lava beaches but nothing moved except ourselves to sunder in our wash the mirror images of the darkened valley walls. Twelve minutes before midnight on 30 August we came to the end of the fjord. The sea journey was over. Within a week the seas behind and all about us were frozen.
Alert camp lay 150 miles to the north-east of Tanquary Fjord. With the temperature dropping daily and sunlight hours fleeing over the polar horizon, we needed to reach Alert within three weeks. The eastern heights of the main United States Range and the Grant Ice-cap block a straightforward overland route. We planned to use skis and snowshoes, rucksacks and light fibreglass sledges to cross the ice barrier, carrying fourteen days’ food and cooking fuel from Tanquary Fjord where we abandoned the boat.
Charlie carried his bear-gun and I packed a .44 Ruger revolver into my eighty-pound rucksack. We followed a series of riverain valleys, trudging slowly, for we were weak from the months of boat travel and many salt-chafed sores that rubbed as we walked. In one narrow valley a huge ice-tongue, an offshoot from the icecap, tumbled into the canyon blocking our advance. Summer floods had cut a long tunnel through this icy barrier so, with heads bent and rucksacks dragged, we crept underneath the glacier and through the dripping culvert.
Charlie slipped on ice and his forehead struck a rock. Hearing him shout, I dropped my pack and ran back, thinking a bear had attacked him. Blood filled one of his eyes and covered one side of his face and neck. He felt sick and faint. An hour later, bandaged and dizzy, he carried on. That night we checked his feet and found broken, weeping blisters covering both his soles and most of his toes. He said he ached all over.
Charlie and I seldom walked together. Sometimes we were separated by an hour or more. In a film made
later of the expedition, Charlie said: ‘Ran is always pushing himself. He can’t do it the easy way. I don’t know what drives him but he always pushes himself. I’m not that way inclined. I’m a slow plodder. If I tried to keep up with him, I wasn’t going to make it.’
Each time I stopped to wait for Charlie, I became cold and impatient and swore at him. If I had moved at his pace I could have avoided this, and I did try once or twice to do so. But I just could not maintain such a desultory amble.
On the third morning ice crystals lined our tent, although we were merely 1,000 feet above sea-level. Snow covered the land and walking was difficult. Skis were not practical due to long stretches of ice and rock. Charlie’s left eye was quite closed and puffed up like a yellow fungus. His back and his knees and his blistered feet all hurt him. The blister wounds had gone septic and walking must have been purgatory for him.
In mid-September we passed Omingmak Mountain and Charlie could go no further without a rest. His groin glands were swollen with poison and his knees with fluid. But winter was coming and I urged him to keep going, for we had to complete the journey over the high ice-caps before polar sundown. There seemed little point anyway in waiting for new skin to replace the open sores on Charlie’s feet since the first few miles on snowshoes would soon re-open them.
We emptied the contents of our rucksacks on to our light portable sledges and, strapping on snowshoes, set out in a cuttingly cold wind. The temperature fell to –18°C as we passed Lake Hazen. North of the lake I tried to follow a bearing of 130° but the compass was sluggish. Musk-oxen snorted and stampeded as we loomed through the freezing fog.
There were no distinguishing landmarks. At 2,200 feet above sea-level we camped in a frozen gulley at –20°C, a temperature which remained steady for three days’ hauling through deep snow-fields where the stillness was immense. No musk-oxen now. Nothing and nobody.
Over the rim of the Grant Ice-cap, spurred on by increasing cold, we limped at last to the edge of the high plateau beneath the twin glaciers of Mount Wood, dwarfed by the blue ice-falls which rose to the sky. A wary hush presided below these 2,000-foot ice-formations. A cataclysmic event seemed imminent. Craning my neck back to ease my knotted shoulder muscles, I glanced up and felt momentary unease as the sky-high ice-falls above seemed to teeter on the verge of collapse.
Towards dusk we found the narrow entry-point to the upper canyon of Grant River, a winding ravine that falls thirty miles to the sea. The canyon kinked, snaked and was blocked by black boulders, so that often we manhandled the sledges over solid rock for hundreds of yards.
On 26 September, towards noon, the river-bed plunged thirty feet down a frozen waterfall. From the top of this cleft we could see the Arctic Ocean, a jagged vista of contorted pack-ice stretching away to the polar horizon. Nine hours’ travel along the edge of the frozen sea, dreaming of warmth and comfort, brought us to Cape Belknap and, by dusk, to the four little huts that we knew so well, the most northern habitation on earth.
We had travelled around the polar axis of the world for 314° of latitude in 750 days. Only 46° to go but, looking north at the chaotic ice-rubble and remembering our failure in 1978, we knew that the journey to date had been easy compared with what lay ahead.
Five days before our arrival at Alert, Ginny had flown in with winter equipment, our old Antarctic skidoos and the two dogs. The three of us spent the next four months of permanent darkness in the Alert huts preparing equipment, completing a new series of scientific research tasks and training on the local pack-ice.
In mid-January the Alert met-man warned me that his sea-ice recordings showed a thickness of 87cm, thinner than that of any previous January on record, the average being 105cm. The true cold, which crackles the nose and ears like parchment, congeals the blood in fingers and toes like rapidly setting glue and fixes the sea-ice slowly into a precarious platform to the Pole, finally came in late January. Better late than never. The camp thermometer hovered around –51°C with a fresh ten-knot breeze. One night a fox outside the hut awoke me and I noticed Ginny’s hot-water bottle lying in between her bed-sock’d feet – frozen solid.
We received a radio message from a Californian friend. Walt Pedersen, the American aiming to reach both Poles, had given up his impending attempt on the South Pole due to stonewalling by the US National Science Foundation. We could still become the first people in history to reach both Poles. Prince Charles radioed through to Ginny and mentioned that he had heard rumours of a Norwegian team racing us to cross the Arctic. ‘No racing,’ he said to me with a stern edge to his voice.
By the last day of January I must decide when to set out to cross the Arctic. To start prior to the first appearance of the sun would be to lay myself open to accusations of irresponsibility. On the other hand it was imperative that we reach the North Pole before the annual summer break-up. Once at the Pole we would at least be in the zone of currents which float their ice-cover in the general direction of Spitsbergen or Russia. If we delayed our departure from Alert until after sun-up in March, as in 1977, we would again risk falling short of our target. Whenever we set out we could not be certain that success was attainable, for the simple reason that no man had ever crossed the Arctic Ocean in a single season.
On 13 February 1982 I said a quick goodbye to Ginny. We had spent the previous night in our hut closing our minds bit by bit to reality. Over the years we had found it better that way. The wrench of departure was worse than in Antarctica for we both knew the southern crossing was a mere nursery slope compared with the Arctic.
The weather was clear, although the day was as dark as night, when we pulled away from the huts. I glanced back and saw Ginny clutching her two dogs closely and looking up at the passage of darkness by which we had left.
Charlie and I sat astride the open, heavily laden skidoos, each towing 600 pounds of fuel and gear. Our beards and eyelashes were ice-laden within minutes, for the chill factor was –90°C when stationary, increasing with the speed of our advance. We followed a wild zigzag way along the dark and ice-girt coast. I remembered the 1977 travels which helped me not to get lost, although that year we had of course travelled in daylight. Crossing a high pass somewhere on the Fielden Peninsula, Charlie turned his sledge over on a steep slope above sheer cliffs. He managed to extricate himself some yards from a long drop into the dark.
On 17 February we came in twilight to a canal of newly open water from which emanated dark clouds of frost-smoke. In the depths of winter, long before sunrise and at a point of maximum coastal pressure, this was an ominous sign. We had not expected open water so early. With extra care we skirted the canal and entered a narrow corridor of blue ice, emerging a short distance east of Cape Columbia, that coastal point off which the southerly sea currents split west and east. This makes the cape a sensible jumping-off point from land-ice to sea-ice. After axing ourselves a ramp of ice-blocks we took the skidoos for a twenty-foot slide over the tide-crack. We were now ‘afloat’ at sea.
We camped 300 yards out from the coast in a field of broken ice. In a way I was glad of the darkness for it prevented a wider and therefore more depressing view of our route north. I pressed a mitt to the raw end of my nose and was silent as a host of vignettes flooded my mind, memories of what had passed last time we tried to pit our wits against the power of the Arctic pack. We had learned a lot of lessons then about what not to do.
The Transglobe Expedition’s route across the Arctic
During the first day of twilit labour with our axes we cleared 800 yards of highway through the pressure rubble. Our axed lane was precisely the width of a skidoo and it followed the line of least resistance, which unfortunately added 75 per cent of extra distance to the straight course we would have taken were it not for obstacles. To gain the Pole we must cover 825 miles – then much further again on its far side to reach a potential rendezvous point with the ship.
There were two dangers: failure to reach the Pole – and therefore the Spitsbergen current – by summer floe
break-up time, and the subsequent worry of failing to reach the Benjamin Bowring before the end of summer when the ship must retreat to more southerly waters. We could not hope to achieve either goal without air re-supply with food and cooker fuel from the Twin Otter which was to fly out from England with Gerry Nicholson and a skilled Arctic pilot called Karl Z’berg, a Swiss Canadian who had flown our chartered Otter in 1977.
We axed our skidoo lane through 200 yards of twelve-foot-high ice-blocks. Damage to equipment was inevitable as the only way to negotiate the switchback lane was at full tilt, bouncing off walls and over iron-hard slabs. On 19 February my drive axle snapped. That did it: I determined to switch to manpower and abandon the skidoos – at least for the first hundred miles where the pressure rubble would be at its worst.
The previous winter at Alert, preparing for this eventuality, I had tested two lightweight eight-foot-long manhaul pulks and it was with these fibreglass sledges, carrying 190 pounds each, that we pushed north on 22 February. After eight hours of haulage, our underwear, socks, facemasks and jackets were soaking wet or frozen, depending on which part of the body they covered and on whether we were resting or pulling at the time. But, by the end of four dark days, we had logged eleven northerly miles. This would not sound very impressive except to someone who has also pulled a load in excess of his own bodyweight over pressure rubble in the dark and at a temperature of –40°C.
Charlie plodded on at his own pace and, unable to slow down, I stopped every hour for twenty minutes or more for him to catch up. I attempted to avoid freezing solid during these long waits by cursing the Arctic in general and Charlie in particular. Sheer exhaustion overcame any fear of bears or indeed of falling into the sea.
Mad, Bad & Dangerous to Know Page 12