by Chris Bray
‘Now this is the real Arctic!’ Clark shouted back, his voice muffled by layers of balaclavas, hoods and collars. It was a whole new learning experience with the terrain; once mostly soft tussocks and easy to wheel over, each tussock is now as solid as steel, jerking the PAC around as each wheel snags. Mud pits at last have all finally become as firm as they always looked like they should have been, and we even tried hauling across the thicker edges of frozen lakes but found it impossible to get any traction with our feet on the glassy surface, and the odd splintering cracking noise underfoot was a little disconcerting. The most confusing thing of all is that the patchwork of lakes—which we use to orientate ourselves on our map—are all now frozen and as white as the land around them, making them very hard to see. We ended up getting disorientated and finally agreed to turn on the GPS (we don’t have any spare batteries now, and it is no longer accepting charge), which revealed we needed to backtrack almost a kilometre to avoid a large semi-frozen lake.
By 6.30 pm the temperature was dropping fast, along with the visibility, and with the esker still 3 kilometres away we decided it’d be safest to call a halt and do the last bit tomorrow. We set up camp on a blanket of snow, praying that as our body warmth melted it during the night we wouldn’t find ourselves deposited upon sharp rocks. Clark had the brainwave of pulling out the two tiny foam cockpit cushions from our PACs—each about 30 centimetres square—and using them as a ‘mattress’, as our air mattresses had long since failed on us. It worked a treat; positioning one under the bum, and one under the shoulder, they comforted the worst of our bruises.
DAY 47: Getting serious
Determined to get to the esker today, I called our pilot for an update, and he said he was looking into diverting a scheduled flight from Resolute to Cambridge Bay to pick us up somewhere on the esker. That’d be brilliant, and would save us a fortune. ‘I assume he’s not talking about their regular passenger flight?’ I said, grinning at Clark. ‘This is your captain speaking, we are just making a bit of a diversion now to try and land on a strip of boulders and ice in the middle of nowhere to pick up some other passengers …’
The pilot also suggested that as our food rations only last until 2 October, we should aim for a pickup no later than 25 September—just over ten days from now—else freak bad weather could easily delay plans, leaving us stranded out here without food.
By the time we set off, the weather had deteriorated further—we couldn’t even see 50 metres in front of us, so we basically had to go the long way, feeling our way along the shores of lakes and following their interconnecting streams rather than trying to walk in a straight line. With snow blanketing the ground, we can’t even see what we’re hauling over anymore, and our PACs’ wheels keep dropping into holes and getting wedged between rocks. It’s impossible. With no other option, we again tried our luck walking on the frozen edges of the lakes, but again our feet just slid around on the slippery surface, unable to get a grip.
In a moment of inspiration I put on my Yowie snowshoes, which have spiky metal cleats on the bottom, and it worked a charm! Soon we were clink-clink-clinking our way along the wonderfully flat ice, laughing at all the horrible terrain just metres beside us. Then, with a horrible cracking sound, Clark’s wheel broke through the ice, plunging his PAC over onto its side. We knew the water was only shallow and so we were in no danger, but it proved quite difficult to get close enough to the floundering PAC to help Clark haul it free, without causing more ice to break around it. We got it eventually, and marched determinedly onwards.
There was a lull in the biting wind and driving snow, and through the haze I spotted the tail end of the esker now only 500 metres away from us, stretching like a white road into the distance. Desperately hurrying towards it, we were suddenly presented with a horrendous swathe of the most atrocious rock-strewn mess we had ever seen. ‘There’s no way we can haul over that!’ Clark groaned, and I was inclined to agree. We spent a good hour trying to find a way left and right around it, but always we were cut off by the same nightmare terrain. The gale rose again, and flurries of snow were swept across the ground, coils of spindrift whirled across patches of open ice and jets of powder streamed around and over the jiggered hunks of rock in between.
‘F*&k it! Let’s just go for it. This is getting crazy!’ Clark roared and swung forward headlong into the rocks. Again and again we were flung to the ground, tripping and falling, being pushed and shoved by our lurching PACs as they bounced and snagged on rock after rock. Clark’s hiking pole managed to jam itself between two boulders and, unable to get his hand out of the wrist-loop in time to let it go, his hand got wrenched backwards as the momentum of the PAC surged forwards and ran over the pole, bending it badly and spraining his wrist. ‘F&%k you Victoria Island!’ he swore into the gale, and onwards we struggled. The icy fingers of desperation were starting to clutch at us, and things were becoming very full-on, very quickly.
We finally stumbled wearily up onto the much-anticipated esker. ‘It’s not much of an esker, really, is it?’ I mumbled, staring in alarm at the jumble of rocks on which we stood. ‘It had better improve further on, or we’ve got a serious problem. No plane is going to land on this stuff.’
Hauling onwards for another 500 metres, things did not improve, but spying a convenient little flat spot for our tent, down a slope and out of the worst of the wind, we decided to call it a day.
It proved nearly impossible to hammer our tent pegs into the frozen ground, and I ended up splintering several of our metal pegs, and banging my senseless fingers with the tomahawk, which did not improve my outlook on the world. After some 30 minutes I gave up, having only managed to get a few pegs in, and most of them only 2 or 3 centimetres deep. ‘It’s unlikely to blow away if we’re in it,’ I reasoned, and we piled inside, incredibly thankful for being able to get out of the wind and slowly warm back up.
DAY 48: Surely they’re not still out there?
I woke with my alarm at 1 am to check if I needed to take aurora photos, but thankfully the lack of stars across the inky black sky indicated total cloud cover, so, feeling quite relieved, I went back to sleep. The darkness gradually lightened to the dull grey we’ve become used to, and still we lay there. Ravenously hungry and also feeling weak, bruised and battered from the efforts of getting to this esker, we decided to reward ourselves with a rest day. ‘Maybe at least this incessant wind will die down by tomorrow,’ I justified.
We spent the day doing still more repairs to the PACs’ hauling system, chipping through increasingly thick ice to find water, and writing expedition update #22 for the website. In this update I finally mentioned the obvious—that we aren’t going to make it to the far side, but that we’re okay with that, as we’re out here for the journey not the destination. Clark sanity-checked it for me as usual, and I uploaded it and downloaded our emails.
We received several interesting emails tonight; all, it seemed, with a common theme of concern. I hadn’t written an update for several days since reporting the start of the icy weather, and some of our followers have been growing anxious. It turns out winter has well and truly struck Cambridge Bay too, and the talk of the town had turned to us two poor souls presumably still out in the worst of it. My dad had even got a surprise call in the middle of the night from the Royal Canadian Mounted Police who, tipped off by two separate anxious locals, had riffled through their ‘I’m out on the land’ files, and found ours, dated as heading out almost two months ago. The alarmed officer could find no record of us having returned, and dialled the first emergency contact number—my dad. I can only imagine what must have raced through Dad’s mind as he took the call.
Dad convinced them that we are alive and well, with food and shelter, and have a pickup organised for the coming weeks. In his email to us, Dad did stress, however, that he got the impression from the RCMP that if something does happen to us out here, we are essentially unreachable even by helicopter in weather like we’ve been enduring this week. It’s a sobering real
isation. ‘Imagine if our tent blew away or tore or something,’ Clark pondered aloud, as the sides bowed in around us.
DAY 49: One last lake
The wind had eased by the morning, and the temperature climbed to minus 2.8 degrees—almost balmy! We shackled up and hauled along the esker, keeping our eyes out for potential airstrips. ‘It’s not looking good,’ I frowned over a nut break. ‘Maybe on the other side of that giant lake it’s better?’ The section of esker we were hauling along—nothing more than a series of rocky, interconnected hills—was eventually cut off by a very large lake. We’d seen it on the map, but had hoped to find a potential landing site well before reaching it. It seemed we were out of luck.
‘The problem is,’ I considered aloud, ‘that being a large lake, it’s probably not going to be frozen all the way across …’
Clark knew where I was heading, and continued, ‘So we won’t be able to haul across it, and we won’t be able to kayak across it either. We can’t exactly walk out until the ice breaks under us and then quickly convert to kayak mode and paddle!’ We laughed bitterly, picturing this in our heads. ‘But it’s such a convoluted, weird-shaped lake that to haul around it will literally take days!’ We both knew it was our only option, and figured we’d better get a move on—deadlines are starting to creep closer.
It was already getting late as we hauled over the last rise and the big lake came into view. Funny-coloured, textured ice seemed to stretch all the way across to the far side, some 3.5 kilometres away. As I stared at the ice, wondering if it’d be solid enough to haul over, I noticed the texture on its surface was moving. It wasn’t ice after all, but water. Open water, the whole way across—we could kayak! ‘It’s not frozen!’ I shouted back excitedly as Clark drew level. We couldn’t believe it. ‘Quick, let’s paddle it!’ I urged, and Clark took little convincing. With the temperature already falling—heading at least in Cambridge Bay for a record low of minus 9 degrees Celsius and worse up here—it would likely start to freeze over by morning, making it impossible to cross.
Converting my PAC to kayak mode by the shore, I changed into my drysuit and dug out my kayaking gloves and booties. Not expecting ever to have to paddle again, we’d rather carelessly shoved them down inside the cockpit, where they had absolutely frozen solid in a horribly contorted mash. I managed to separate out my gloves and beat them against the PAC wheel in a bid to break the ice inside them enough to make them malleable, but they remained as hard as rock. I even tried sloshing them in the lake as the water must at least be above zero degrees, but nothing could soften them, and there was no way I was going to force my fingers back into that icy torture chamber. I opted for my thinner hauling gloves.
We slid the PACs across just one metre or so of firm ice rimming the lake—marvelling as we did so how easily they glided across the ice—and climbed aboard our bobbing kayaks. ‘We should have done an icecap traverse to the South Pole with a sled,’ I grinned. ‘Whose stupid idea was it to come here and use wheels?’
Kayaking the 3.5 kilometres across this lake was unforgettable. As we paddled, the temperature plummeted and our paddles started scooping through a semi-frozen slurry forming on the surface. Every splash froze onto the deck of our PACs, building up thicker and thicker. Every time I swapped sides with my little paddle it had frozen firmly to my gloves and I had to break it free.
We headed for a little alcove opening up in front of us, where two steep hills plunged directly into the lake, forming a beautiful little 10-metre wide entrance that we paddled through into a quiet lagoon off to the side. It was like paddling through a scene in The Lord of the Rings, surrounded by towering snow-capped peaks. We scrunched our PACs through a thin crust of ice already stretching out from the bank, and nosed into shore right beside where the esker continued on again. The scenery is unbelievably beautiful.
‘What a fitting end to our paddling!’ I said as I stood up. ‘Oh, look at this!’ As I tried to straighten up, I found my entire drysuit had turned into a rigid suit of armour—as if someone had poured a vat of clear epoxy glue all over it. As I bent my arms and legs, whole sheets of ice peeled away from the fabric.
We set up camp on a beautiful little patch of snow tucked in the lee of the esker, and I called Sky News for our weekly interview. They had clearly read my update last night, but to my delight, instead of having to field questions about why we’re not going to make it to the far side, the newsreader was full of support: ‘It’s the adventure that counts. Keep going!’
We tried in vain to convert the PACs to hauling mode, but the axle has literally frozen in place holding the wheels up, so we’ll deal with that tomorrow. We clambered wearily into the tent, but glowing inside with relief at being here.
We were inundated with beautiful emails tonight, in response to my ‘we’re not going to make it but we’re okay with that’ website update last night. It was so wonderfully warming to read them all—it filled us with pride and happiness; all trace of guilt or failure just melted away. Messages from people we knew, and people we didn’t. Some Cambridge Bay locals wrote to say, ‘You are true explorers.’ ‘You are a credit to all who have explored the barrens before you.’ And ‘No one in Nunavut would even try to do what you have done … I am proud of you.’ Many of these messages come from respected Inuits and people who have spent their life in the Arctic—it means a huge amount to us. A pilot who apparently works around the Arctic said that we had opened his eyes, and that he now feels that he knows this land much better than ever before. Although it was well after dinner, we made ourselves another lunch and lay in our sleeping bags savouring it, brimful of happiness, just enjoying the moment, and thinking about all the good things we can now start looking forward to.
We just need to find somewhere for a plane to land.
DAY 50: Seen any tarmac airstrips around lately?
I hung up the phone, and Clark looked at me expectantly. ‘Well?’
‘It’s going to cost $10,021 for the pickup,’ I said bluntly, still in shock myself. Clark gaped at me as I tried to explain. ‘Apparently there are no scheduled flights to divert, so we’re going to have to charter a Twin Otter plane all the way from Resolute!’
‘Ten grand!?’ Clark repeated. ‘That’s ridiculous!’
‘And it gets better,’ I added, grinning at the incredulity of it all, ‘they need us to find 350 metres of flat, level, solid, non-rocky, straight ground to land on.’
‘Oh, great, so we’ll just keep our eye out for a tarmac then, shall we?’ Clark snorted, ‘ ’cause there’s heaps of them round here.’
We couldn’t help grinning, but inside, a little jolt of fear had just shattered last night’s comfortable feeling that we’d made it, that we’d crossed the lake and were almost home. ‘Shit, I hope we can get picked up,’ Clark mumbled, ‘there’s blatantly nothing like that around here, or anywhere else, for that matter.’
‘I’ll give that other pilot a call,’ I said, thumbing through my little notebook to where I’d scribbled down the number for Willie Laserich from Adlair Aviation—a local Cambridge Bay company that we knew didn’t have tundra tyres on any of their planes, but might know someone who did.
I dialled the number and a warm, grandfatherly-like voice answered with a thick German accent. ‘Yes, I am Willie.’
I explained our predicament, finishing with, ‘So … is this something you can do?’
He thought it over. ‘Vot is your GPS position?’ he inquired. ‘Hmm, yar … this will be fine, you just call me one day before, and I will come over. Okay?’
Surely it couldn’t be that easy? ‘Sure,’ I managed, ‘and, er, how much will that cost?’
‘About $4,200, is that okay?’
Clark saw my eyes light up, and he started grinning in anticipation. ‘That’s great!’ I said, and remembering the final snag, added, ‘Oh, and a runway … We’ve been told we need 350 metres of flat, level, solid, non-rocky straight ground.’ I held my breath.
‘How long did you say?’
‘Three hundred and fifty metres.’
I heard Willie chuckle and there was laughter in his reply, ‘You won’t find that out there … No, no, we should be okay with about 100 metres.’
‘What a legend!’ Clark burst out after I relayed all this to him. ‘Let’s have a second breakfast to celebrate!’
We eventually got out of the tent, and began our day surrounded by such breathtakingly wild and picturesque surroundings that several times we found ourselves just standing there in awe at the raw beauty of it all. The snow was littered with ptarmigan, fox and lemming tracks, and walking to the shore of the lake we saw ice now stretched way out towards the middle.
‘We made it across just in time!’ I said, and wiping snow off the ice with my boot, marvelled at how flawless and transparent it was. ‘Hey, look at this!’ Encased by solid ice for the winter, the ripples on the lake’s sandy bottom were visible, complete with a wandering line of wolf tracks through the pattern.
We headed over to the edge of what looked like a wide, snow-filled valley, but walking down into it revealed its true scale—merely 5 metres across. Our ‘Boys’ Own’ adventure day revealed still more amazing discoveries, including whole towering sand dunes apparently made of frozen sand, set hard like cement until I chipped out a hunk and warmed it in my hand, at which it ‘melted’ back into powdery grains. We climbed one of the hills looking down over the ‘gateway’ through to the larger lake that we paddled, and took in the beautiful scene. We are so lucky to be here, on this particular day. It’s absolutely perfect.
Tomorrow we’d better start looking for a landing site.
DAY 51: Searching
After waking to find a lemming snuggled cosily beside my neck just underneath the tent fabric, we packed up camp in the morning, shackled up and heaved our PACs up onto the esker. ‘Right, let’s find ourselves a runway!’ I said, and set off. We found a place that looked almost suitable right away and pacing it out, it seems to be about 250 metres long, pretty flat but with a few frozen tussocks that are essentially like rocks growing intermittently across the ‘tarmac’.