by Chris Bray
I shot at (but unfortunately missed) a duck that would have gone superbly with our pasta dinner.
Actually—not feeling hungry—that’s something I am increasingly missing.
DAY 7: Death Terrain
Despite lurching awake several times due to a bird call that unfortunately is almost indistinguishable from our bear alarm—this feathered fiend has been striking fear into our hearts on a daily basis—we had a good sleep, and woke full of enthusiasm for a record day along the esker. Our PACs were steamrollering smoothly along behind us, and for the first time, we could actually maintain a strong, fast, uninterrupted stride. Listening to up-beat music on our iPods and with permanent smiles plastered across our faces, we flew along the esker, spirits soaring. By first nut break, we’d already blazed an astounding 3 kilometres. ‘That’s further than we got all yesterday!’ Clark pointed out, beaming. ‘Keep this up and we might even reach our 15-kilometres-a-day target!’
Our map told us it wouldn’t last, however, and after only 3.5 kilometres of heaven, we made a gradual descent into hell. It didn’t look bad at a distance, but soon we were surrounded by an endless expanse of the worst hauling terrain we’ve seen to date: horrifically sharp, jagged pieces of limestone, all propped up and poking at impossible angles, each designed to trip, snag and rip. It was as if someone had laid an enormous slab of concrete somewhere, kilometres across, and then changed their mind and jackhammered the whole thing, and hidden it all here. Trying to haul across this stuff is torture. Every step, the unstable plates of rock tip and clank, and all too often one wheel will suddenly snag, and the PACs’ momentum then pivots the carts around, flinging us back and forth like rag dolls on the end of a stick. Picture hiking with a heavy pack, with a little brother hanging from it, flinging himself from side to side and jumping, always trying to throw you off balance. To drag the PACs up and over the snagging rocks, we literally have to crawl on all fours—the fabric of our gloves is shredded, and our hands are bleeding from grabbing the knife-edged fragments as we try to pull ourselves forward. It is exacting a horrible toll on both us and our PACs.
‘It all used to be nice and flat,’ Clark mumbled dejectedly to the video camera, ‘with the odd rock sticking up. But now,’ he turned a sample in his hands, ‘it’s every rock sticks up, and the odd flat rock.’ Stumbling upon a muskox skull a few hours further into it, we decided to call this kind of terrain ‘Death Terrain’.
Spotting a large lake, we made a beeline to it (in slow motion). It was big—3 kilometres across—and rather than tear ourselves apart any further on the Death Terrain surrounding it, we decided to try paddling across. Excited about our first major paddle, we changed into our Gore-Tex drysuits and pushed the PACs in.
And pushed. And pushed. Despite its being so wide we couldn’t even see the other side, the entire lake turned out to be only about 30 centimetres deep and we ended up hauling almost all the way across. Still, the soft squelchy bottom was pure bliss, caressing and massaging our traumatised feet through our wetsuit booties, and we actually managed a decent speed too. Clark thinks we should aim for as many big lakes as we can, and I couldn’t agree more!
It was 8.30 pm by the time we’d converted to hauling mode on the far bank, and so we set up the tent and tripwire. While Clark boiled up some dinner, I unloaded and inspected the contents of both PACs to check everything was still dry and confirmed thankfully that the hull hadn’t sprung any leaks after being bashed around on the Death Terrain all day.
We are both absolutely exhausted—we’ve scarcely the energy to raise our spoons to eat. It feels as though every muscle in my body has been sprained from the whiplash of Death Terrain hauling. We are in good spirits though, and very satisfied with today’s progress—13 kilometres! A record! Almost 15 kilometres! Things are looking up!
DAY 8: Hiking poles
My watch alarm went off at 7 am. Neither of us stirred. I heard Clark’s go off at 8 am and opened a cautious eye, shifting slightly in my sleeping bag to look across at him. My whole body ached terribly. Clark showed no signs of life, and so I decided to close my eyes for another five minutes. At 9 am, both our alarms went off, and as we both silenced them, we knew each other must be awake. ‘Guess we should get up then,’ Clark’s croaky voice drifted out of his sleeping bag, done up so tightly that only his nose was visible.
I considered not responding. ‘Yeah, I guess,’ I finally conceded.
It was almost lunch by the time we’d eaten brekky, packed up and started rolling. ‘It’s a balance,’ I commented, chewing on my peanut butter tortilla wrap with extra butter. ‘If we push too hard one day, then—’ the copious amount of peanut butter was gumming my tongue down, making it hard to talk, ‘—then, we pay for it the next day with a slow one.’
Clark nodded thoughtfully, adding, ‘Yeah, there’s no sneaking extra hours hauling overall … it evens out. We should just do what we can.’
A large buck caribou with towering antlers followed us for several hours today, circling us, edging closer to get a better look before retreating and starting again. It’s fantastic out here—so many animals that basically walk right up to us, having likely never seen humans before. I’m getting some great photos! The birds flying overhead seem equally intrigued. ‘Here comes another one—look!’ I’d point at a goose or duck flying towards us from the distant horizon. Reaching us, they fly around and around looking down, then head off, right back to where they came from.
In the afternoon the tundra again dissolved into Death Terrain. Having been flung painfully to the ground for the umpteenth time, Clark suddenly had an idea. ‘We should try using the hiking poles.’ Up until then we’d been grasping the hauling yoke itself as we hauled in a vain attempt to restrain its violent, thrashing outbursts, and so as Clark extended his pair of Exped hiking poles, I had serious doubts that letting go of the yoke could result in anything apart from bruised sides and possibly even kidney damage. I watched as he lurched the PAC into motion, and clattered his way forward like some giant four-legged insect. ‘It’s great!’ he called back, looking genuinely delighted, ‘Really helps you balance!’
I dug my pair out and gave it a try. He was right. Not only do they greatly add to our stability and prevent us being flung around so much, but we can poke and prod rocks in front before we get to them to see if they’re stable, use them as crutches to step over muddy pockets, and even lean against them when we’re tired. Now we can’t haul without them! We learn something new out here every day.
DAY 9: Anger management
Around 4 am I woke to find the jagged rocks beneath me had punctured my air mattress, and as blowing it up only provided temporary relief, I soon gave up and lay there, waiting for my watch to tell me it was morning, while the sun continued to blaze relentlessly through the tent fabric.
We hauled to the first of several lakes for the day, unloaded, and for some reason found it even harder than normal to withdraw the axle to convert to kayak mode. After much cursing, we eventually got it, repacked everything, and theatrically paddled into the fog. Having heaved the PACs onto the bank at the far side, we then unloaded all the heavy gear again, and Clark performed the ‘Clark Manoeuvre’—briefly hoisting the stern up—while I lowered the wheels.
It has been getting harder for days, but now the axle bluntly refused to slide through. Without the axle clamping the wheels together, when Clark could no longer hold the back-breaking weight of the PAC, the wheels would simply splay out sideways and we’d have to start over again. ‘Stupid bloody thing!!’ Clark swore harshly, voicing my own anger, ‘Is it full of grit or what?’ Rinsing it in the lake didn’t help.
Ten minutes later we were still trying, my hands were covered in bruises from attempting to bang the axle home, and Clark could only hold it up for increasingly short intervals. ‘F&%king thing!!’ We were both starting to lose it—I could tell Clark was getting inwardly frustrated with my inability to get it through, and me at Clark for always letting it go just when I almost had it
. ‘Why does everything have to be so fuc*%ing hard?! Why won’t you just,’ I was kicking it now, ‘GO (thump) … IN!!’ Bang! With a final unnecessarily vicious kick from my hiking boot, the axle slammed home. Instantly, all our anger and frustration melted away, and we were left standing there silently reflecting upon the rage we’d so easily worked ourselves into. ‘It probably just needs re-greasing,’ I murmured.
Hauling onwards, I couldn’t help wondering how we’d cope with seven more weeks of this kind of pressure. So far we’d always managed to laugh it off, or at least direct our anger towards the situation itself, rather than each other, but we’d come pretty close to snapping at each other just then. I could tell Clark was pondering the same thing, yet neither of us spoke about it.
We are clearly being pushed to our limits out here—mentally as well as physically—and I think it’s going to take an enormous amount of self-control to keep it together. Being stuck with the same one person—and no one else—for 24 hours a day, seven days a week, for eight or nine weeks, would be enough to seriously stretch the sturdiest of lifelong friendships to breaking point. But mix this with the kind of stress, sleep deprivation and hunger we are facing out here, and we’ve got a recipe for disaster. I dread a falling-out. We depend on each other’s cooperation to survive.
The rest of the day passed uneventfully, and morale in the tent tonight was unnaturally high, perhaps in a subconscious effort to help lift each other out of earlier thoughts. We chatted openly about this and that, about girlfriends (specifically our lack of—and how we’d make up for lost time in the social scene once we returned home), about our dogs, our friends. ‘I’ve been thinking …’ Clark commented. ‘It’s kinda good that we haven’t known each other for all that long, hey?’
I knew where he was coming from. ‘Yeah, it gives us heaps of stuff to talk about, and … ’ I hesitated.
‘Means we haven’t already gotten on each other’s nerves!’ Clark added, and we both laughed, trying to pretend that it wasn’t the crux of what we had both been worrying about all day.
DAY 10: More lake paddling
After re-greasing the axle this morning, converting to kayak mode at today’s first lake was a delightful anticlimax, and we were soon paddling into quite a strong headwind. The landscape through which we’re travelling is fast becoming a patchword of lakes, and in the wind some of them were large enough to form small whitecaps—crumbling waves that constantly slammed over and rushed along the top of our PACs, spilling either side of the cockpit. Sealed inside my drysuit and with hood drawn down snugly over my snow-mask, I felt quite invulnerable—detached from the situation, almost as if I was playing some kind of virtual reality game. It was actually a lot of fun. Crunching through waves, iPod playing in my ears … Sure, the PACs aren’t all that hydrodynamic, and it’s a bit like paddling a freight train at first—paddling the water madly while the PAC only very gradually picks up speed—but once she’s moving again, the momentum just keeps her going. Checking my GPS I was thrilled to see I was doing 3 kilometres per hour—even with a headwind—much faster than hauling!
It was hard to keep track of Clark, as turning my head to the side merely gave me an unparalleled view of the inside of my drysuit hood, and eventually I had to put my paddle down, pull my hood down and look back. Clark was a long way back, paddling hard. Whoops, I thought, that’s not going to be good for team dynamics …
Soon reunited—aided by the fact I was blown halfway back across the lake while I waited—we pulled alongside each other and I apologised. ‘No, that’s all right,’ he assured me, ‘but we should try and stay together, in case one of us gets into trouble.’
We agreed on an ingenious communication system for paddling. Every so often whoever was in front would look back, and raise his paddle horizontally in both arms, signalling, ‘Everything okay?’ We’d hold this pose until the other spotted, and either replied with the same signal, indicating, ‘Yes, all is okay,’ in which case we’d carry on paddling, or, if we held our paddle up vertically, ‘No, wait up.’ It’s a great system, and prevents the dangerous and infuriating situation where the person behind wants to stop for some reason (to bail out water, fix something, or because they’ve seen something amazing), but then has to spend twenty minutes trying to first catch up to the leader, just to ask them to wait.
By the time we’d paddled along our second lake for the day, we were absolutely spent. For the first time Clark actually cooked dinner inside the tent vestibule to shelter from the icy wind. I had my reservations about this practice, having heard of plenty of tents burning down, but Clark made a point of tying the tent flap wide open to appease my pedantic safety qualms, and it seemed to work fine. It was actually really nice having dinner in bed.
DAY 11: Mud pits
The wind’s now so strong that the waves on the lakes have actually churned the surface into froth, which blows across and builds up in great rafts on the downwind side. Foamy clumps keep breaking free and tumbling across the tundra. We can’t paddle into this wind, so we’ve had to haul around all the lakes today.
We had lunch looking down into a lush swampy valley that looked like Sir Arthur Conan Doyle’s ‘Lost World’—herds of caribou shuffling around lakes dotted with birdlife. It was amazing. Smugly thinking we were starting to be able to read Victoria Island’s terrain, we cunningly opted for a drier-looking deviation ahead. How wrong we were.
Gradually at first, so we failed to notice, we started passing more and more dried patches of dirt. Anywhere from one to two metres across, they were actually pretty good to haul over, being flat and hard, and we were soon inadvertently linking them up, hauling dot-to-dot.
‘How good are these!’ I called back to Clark enthusiastically. No sooner had the words left my mouth when my foot plunged through the dried crust and sank boot-deep into thick brown mud. The PAC’s momentum carried me onwards, planting my other foot in, the viscous goo still sucking hold of my first. Thrown forwards, my gloved hands sank into the mess and the PAC then rammed into me from behind. ‘Back out!! Back out!! IT’S A TRAP!’ I shouted, already laughing, despite the pain.
The comic nature of the situation soon died away as we carefully negotiated the minefield. It was impossible to tell the difference between the solid patches and those harbouring deep mud. The latter increased to the point where, after veering right and left, hopping over and stepping around, eventually one wheel of my PAC squelched down, sinking up to the hull into mud. ‘Give me a hand—I’m stuck!’ I called.
‘Same here!’ Clark’s reply drifted across from nearby. We teamed up, and with an almighty effort managed to drag my PAC up and out, but not before the other wheel, and me hauling at the front, sank into an even deeper slurry. It actually felt like quicksand—if I stood still, I felt myself sinking—I had to keep lifting each foot in turn up through the slop, forcing gravelly mud inside my boot as I pulled free, by which time the other boot had sunk so deep that I had to try and lift that one, basically marching on the spot in slow motion. The more we moved, like wet cement the more liquid it became, and the more it spread.
After several hours, we’d progressed perhaps another 100 metres, when both PACs became hopelessly bogged, again. Heaving together to free Clark’s, we succeeded in getting both wheels bogged at the same time, and the whole PAC hunkered down into the slurry. ‘AAARRGGHHH!! F*#KING MUD!!’ I swore, my suppressed rage finally boiling over. We tried again. ‘One … two … three … and PULL!!’ We smeared forward an inch, the wheels not even turning, just ploughing into the mud like anchors. ‘And, PULL!!’ Nothing.
‘Damn you, Victoria Island!’ Clark clenched his fists.
‘All right, let’s unload everything,’ I said, defeated. Even entirely empty—with all our possessions scattered about on the mud—we still couldn’t pull it free.
‘This is ridiculous …’ Clark fumed, exasperated. Over a nut break, we paved the mud in front of each wheel with slabs of nearby rock, and with Clark throwing his weight into t
he harness and me lifting and pushing behind, making noises like I was going into labour, the PAC slurped forwards and up onto our little pavings.
‘Go! Go! Keep going!’ I urged, and while Clark played hopscotch with smaller mud pits in front, we scurried all the way across to the base of a dry-looking hill before we dared pause. ‘Nice one, guv,’ I panted. ‘Now let’s go back and get all the gear.’
It was almost dusk (i.e. midnight) by the time we had finally relayed all the gear and both PACs to the hill, and together we wearily clambered up. ‘Hey, is this an esker?’ Clark said excitedly. Raised smugly above the surrounding muddy swampland, a winding, flat-topped pebbly path snaked tantalisingly northwards into the distance. To the west—towards our goal, the far side of the island—an endless patchwork of mud, lakes, spongy grasslands and swamp extended as far as the eye could see.
Still starving after dinner, we pored over our map and filmed a video diary relating our predicament. ‘This tail end of the esker we’re on here … it goes all the way up to the coast, a good 30 kilometres, and if it stays like it is out there—’ I couldn’t help splitting a grin ‘—that could be … well, quite a lot easier than our planned route.’
DAY 12: Fresh meat and disasters