by Chris Bray
The flap-flap-flapping of the tent shaking violently in the wind, the drifts of snow building up actually inside our tent vestibule, and the streams of spindrift snaking across the frozen ground all accentuated the already unappealing weather this morning. Daunted by the unknown terrain lying in wait now that our esker had ended, somehow we made packing up camp a somewhat more drawn-out procedure than was strictly necessary. Eventually we got our act together, used our GPS to orientate ourselves, and headed off in what we hoped was the direction of the first big lake straddling our path to Hadley Bay.
In the white mirage ahead I spotted a pile of black dots which I assumed to be distant muskox but Clark soon corrected me, pointing out that they were in fact geese, quite close at hand. Hauling onwards for some time in quiet contemplation, it eventually struck me that these geese didn’t seem to be getting any closer, and this, combined with the fact that they weren’t moving, convinced us both they were rocks. As we drew nearer—still with no idea if they were small rocks up close or big boulders in the distance—they suddenly stood up, grew horns and became muskox.
We hauled as close as we dared and—shivering convulsively in the cold—got some fantastic photos and footage of these shaggy, ice-age beasts standing firm, enduring the merciless, bitter wind, their faces encrusted with ice and snow, framed all around by swirling white.
Further on we at last reached our first serious lake, and oh my was it good to haul on! Sure, snow covered the lake ice in a layer of sometimes deceptively deep powder, but underneath it was flat and hard. For once we were able to march solidly, and without having to continually stop to determine the best route—or help each other double-haul up hills—we clocked up some fantastic kilometres. Visually too it was astounding. Wherever I looked it was just white—everywhere. There was literally no change as my eyes travelled from the snow underfoot, up past where the horizon must have been, all the way to the white sky directly overhead; all was the same dull, depthless white. Tuning out with the assistance of my iPod, it felt every bit like I was suspended in the middle of a giant white void, with streams of snow curling and swirling around my partly obscured feet, and ahead, Clark’s PAC seemed to float weirdly in space.
An arctic fox flitted across what looked like the sky in front of us, carrying a large goose egg in its mouth. I don’t think the geese have started nesting yet as it’s still too cold, so it was likely an egg the fox stashed in the ground last autumn to last it through the winter. It’s amazing how they manage to find the same spot again months later, even when it’s covered by snow, and here we are, veering continually off course and almost doing circles merely trying to get across the lake.
We’ve brought almost exactly 100 kilograms of food each for this 100-day trip, so our carts are getting about 1 kilogram lighter every day, except for my cart, which is becoming increasingly weighed down by all the lemming jawbones I obsessively collected yesterday (for want of something better to do during nut breaks), and the rubbish bag, and the fact that for convenience we actually group all the food for the current ten-day session (we’ve invented the ten-day week out here) into one bag that Clark carries. So in actual fact, my PAC is getting heavier (damn lemmings), while Clark’s is getting lighter by 2 kilograms of food every day. Of course it will even out in just five more days when I ceremoniously get to offload my next ten days’ worth of food—10 whole kilograms—into Clark’s ‘week bag’. I can’t wait.
To our great delight, we cracked 10 kilometres as the crow flies today! Frozen lakes are an absolute dream to haul over, and poring over the map, we’re pretty excited about the possibility of linking up with a few more big ones up ahead. Today was a great day, and we’re in the highest of spirits. To top it all off, we got a wonderful swag of emails full of support from our website, including a particularly charismatic one from some guy called Ray in South Africa, who wrote, ‘Hey guys, behind you all the way!! Give it horns!’
DAY 6: Doomed to fail
Over the last five days we’ve been slowly but surely building up our confidence—confidence in ourselves physically and mentally, confidence in our systems and procedures, and confidence in our PACs. This morning, one of these took a huge and devastating hit.
The ‘morning’ started brilliantly—the sun was even dazzling enough to warrant rubbing sun cream on my nose—and getting ready to set off, things felt like they couldn’t be any better. As Clark shackled up, I casually inspected the Kevlar cover of my right PAC wheel: a little nick here, a loose thread there—and then I spotted a gaping split 7 centimetres long! The complete shock and horror of this discovery momentarily paralysed me, and then, as the flood of ramifications started to spill into my numb mind, I shouted hoarsely for Clark.
Closer inspection revealed that my entire Kevlar cover was actually criss-crossed with wear lines, and this gash was merely the first one to actually wear right through and spring open. There are countless others that—given another hour? day? week?—will certainly also split. We made these covers double-thickness, and thankfully the spilt is only in the surface layer, but the inside layer is merely an inlaid strip glued in place, and is in no way able to constrain the tyre pressure. So if (or, more realistically, when) this split opens enough, the pressure of the balloon tyre will rip it right across from one side to the other, and unfortunately then there’ll be nothing restraining the tube’s pressure and it’ll simply slide the inside layer of Kevlar apart—just like you’d unscroll a newspaper—and that’ll be it. No more wheel cover. The same wear is happening on my left tyre, and to a much lesser degree on both of Clark’s tyres.
Of course, we have spare patches of Kevlar for any splits or tears—perhaps enough for four or five big ones—but not for the multitude that seem already to be spawning. It’s pretty damning news on Day 6, and we are both utterly and completely crushed.
The immediate problem we face is obvious—how do we stop it getting any worse? The answer is far from clear. Considering most of our terrain so far has been simple snow, it can’t have caused much wear and tear. Our original pair of prototype covers (which we’ve brought with us as spares) were only made from a single layer of lighter grade Kevlar, and they survived days of deliberately savage wear in the mountains and emerged in as-new condition. How can a few days of snow hauling have brought these extra-durable covers to their knees? Is it the cold? Does Kevlar become so brittle in the cold that the gradual flexing back and forth as we roll along has simply split the fibres? The freeze and flex tests I did in the freezer at home didn’t seem to show any sign of this, but … what else could it be?
We could try and haul by day instead of night, when the temperature is usually above zero, but that means the ground will be a sloppy melted mess and near impossible to stagger through—but perhaps this is what we need to do? Or—thinking longer term—perhaps we really ought to just camp out here until it’s significantly warmer in a few weeks, rather than potentially risk the whole expedition by daring to roll any further now? But the problem might not be temperature-related anyway, so we can’t just wait around on that chance.
Viewed objectively, the most likely eventuality is that both my tyre covers will fail. I’ll then replace them with our two old, thin prototype covers, which will also surely fail even faster than these, by which time a similar fate will likely have befallen Clark’s covers. Then we will be faced with a real challenge. Without wheels we can neither float nor roll.
We decided to measure the size of the split and start hauling regardless; there really is nothing else we can do. It was a terribly bleak day today, and we both felt empty and frustratingly helpless. To make matters worse, the sun withdrew behind an ominous churning blanket of low black cloud, and the wind steadily increased, freezing us to the core. Wearing our Gore-Tex Pro Shell Primaloft jackets (our extra-warm ‘stand-around’ jackets) as we hauled, the spindrift started streaming across the snow-clad ground, and the wind bit so hard into the slit of exposed skin around the sides of our masks that we had to haul with
our faces awkwardly turned away from it, grimacing. The mouth vents in our balaclavas even froze over and attached themselves to our increasing facial hair. What’s the point? I kept asking myself, over and over. We’re obviously not going to make it anymore. Why put ourselves through any more of this hell? We’re clearly going to have to abort in a few weeks anyway. What a complete waste of three years of planning. We’ve failed two attempts now. No one will back us for a third, and I don’t have the energy to start it all again, anyway. What a disaster.
Pausing for lunch we pulled both PACs alongside each other with about a 50-centimetre gap between them, unharnessed and both squished inside the wind break formed between the two tyres. It was pure heaven wedged in there; even the sound of the wind ceased. ‘We may as well enjoy the tyres while we still have them,’ I snorted, and Clark managed a dry laugh.
In that moment—huddled dejectedly between our failing wheels, with our backs being blasted by 40 kilometres per hour wind-blown snow—we were broken men. I could see it in Clark, and I knew it was written all over me. There is no avoiding reality out here—things are what they are—and I guess that’s one of the great things about trips like this. ‘Life becomes both brutally honest and wonderfully simple.’ I could hear my own words. ‘Just fix what can be fixed, and abandon what cannot, both mental and physical.’
Clark too must have been reaching his own epiphany, and mumbled, ‘We can’t fix them, but they’re not broken yet so who knows how far we’ll get.’
Nodding, I agreed. ‘Maybe the tyres will last even without the covers for a bit,’ I suggested hopefully, ‘and when we run out of puncture repair patches, maybe we can roll along on just the rims?’ Our mood lifted with every passing second.
‘Yeah, we’ll just see what happens—let’s do our best to get to Hadley Bay anyway!’ Clark said as we both stood up. ‘We’ll give it horns!’
We both really rallied this afternoon, and although the success of the expedition now looks unlikely, morale is actually higher in the tent tonight than it’s been all trip—a real testimony to what positive attitudes can do for a team. How could we not be grinning, though—Clark did just accidently set off the tripwire alarm while heading out to the toilet. Good times. As renowned Australian adventurer Tim Cope once said, ‘Adventure only really starts when all your carefully laid plans go to ruins.’ Our adventure, it seems, is only just starting.
DAY 7: Melting already?
Evidently it snowed rather a good deal while we slept. So much so, in fact, that Clark had to engage in open-cut mining operations in search of the solar panels he’d placed on the ground to collect sunlight overnight. Great drifts of white had formed into beautifully long comet tails behind anything and everything.
The temperature, instead of dropping to a healthy minus 6 or minus 7 degrees to firm up the snow underfoot, languished around minus 1 to minus 1.5 all day today. Frustratingly, although technically a degree or so below zero, all the water up in these ’ere parts must be used to the cold, and doesn’t seem to actually freeze until somewhat colder temperatures—so all the wind-blown snow and freezing drizzle collecting on our jackets, pants, tent and everying else just melts. It’s our first taste of being damp, and makes us feel even colder. The wind didn’t let up all day either, and the net effect was a rather draining day.
The various lakes we crossed were themselves thankfully still frozen solid; however, the surface layers of old melting snow and recent powder rarely supported our weight, and every few steps—without warning—our feet would break through into a well of slush. Adding insult to injury, the moment our feet became twisted down one of these wells, the PAC’s momentum shoved us bodily forward, over onto our hands and knees. The funny thing is, though, how much of a lottery the whole thing is: Clark might be hauling right beside me on apparently firm snow, and then for no reason I’ll plunge through while Clark suppresses a laugh and keeps hauling until he breaks through. Scrunch, scrunch, collapse, scrunch, collapse, collapse, collapse. The worst is when, in falling over, our gloved hands plunge through into their own Slurpie-like well, flooding with icy water. So it’s been a hard day, but it’s all part of the fun, and we’re in good spirits. The tear in my Kevlar cover doesn’t seem to have widened too much further today—perhaps 5 millimetres—and one other wear-line seems to be opening, but only a little. Perhaps this warmer weather has helped slow its degradation after all?
We’re camped in the middle of Zeta Lake at the moment, and depending on the temperature when we wake up tomorrow, we might be marooned out here surrounded by a sea of slush, or alternatively, we may be able to haul briskly onwards to Hadley Bay. Despite soggy conditions we made 8 kilometres as the PAC rolls today (7.62 kilometres direct by GPS), so we’re more than happy with that. We’ve now also crossed the 71 degree N line of latitude, and crossed the 106 degree W line of longitude. You’d be surprised the number of little things we can find out here to celebrate with a little extra chocolate ration.
DAY 8: Duck-footed sled dogs
This morning we decided to pump up all four tyres to a slightly higher pressure, the idea being that the tyre will then flex and deform less as it rolls, therefore hopefully reducing the flexing fatigue that seems to be the most likely cause of the tear. Clark’s tyres were already slightly tighter than mine, which perhaps explains why his are in better condition. Only time will tell. In the meantime though, I just hope that the increased pressure won’t further rip the existing tear in my tyre cover.
The snow around camp seemed surprisingly pretty firm and we set off (albeit rather late, after the morning’s tyre pumping), but we soon found that it was actually much slushier just outside camp. In fact, the lake’s snow cover became so slushy that we very quickly smeared to a complete halt, our feet churning uselessly in the sloppy mess beneath us as even the wheels started to sink in. With a few tricks still up our sleeve, we dramatically produced our Yowie snowshoes—awesome little strap-on, semi-flexible snowshoes with spikes on the soles—and continued hauling. They worked a charm, but only for a few more iPod songs, after which the snow became too slushy even for Yowies, and we just stood there panting, like exhausted ducks with our huge snowshoe feet, totally beaten. We literally couldn’t move our PACs at all—we were hopelessly stranded in the middle of a giant melting icecap. ‘Bummer,’ I muttered, casting around for ideas. ‘What now?’
Clark proposed joining the PACs together (as we do each night) and he tried hauling from the front, while I pushed from behind. This only worked until I caught up to Clark’s sloppy wake, whereupon all my traction was lost. ‘Maybe if we both haul from the front?’ Clark suggested, ‘Like a dog team.’ I had my doubts—and also my concerns for what these loads would do to our PACs—but desperate times call for desperate measures and we rigged up a ‘double-haul’ system, one harness tied in front of the other, both attached back to the same towing points.
‘Okay: One … Two … THREE!’ I called and we both flung ourselves into the harness, and to our delight, the whole ungainly 500-kilogram, 8-metre contraption began to scrunch its way through the snow behind us! It was intolerably slow progress, but it was progress nonetheless, and we spent the rest of the day inching our way across the giant Slushie that is Zeta Lake. We felt like a cross between sled dogs and the old-school heroic explorers like Shackleton, hauling their enormous wooden boats arduously across the snow. At least having four fixed wheels made the vehicle tend to self-track in a relatively straight line—which is something we have yet to master individually in this featureless white void. The teamwork aspect of double-hauling worked well, too: when travelling individually we’ve been free to pause and catch our breath whenever the need struck, but together, the fact that the other hadn’t stopped urged us both on. The effect was a series of epically long marches that dragged on forever, until eventually a particularly slushy patch would suck us to a halt, and being literally unable to pull free, we’d both hang weakly in the harness. Only then—safe in the realisation that neither of us wa
s still hauling—could we dare declare a nut break.
It was during one such nut break when Clark, inspecting the tyres, spotted that our excessively pumped-up inner tubes are actually starting to wear through against the edges of the rim itself! With the rubber inner tubes being less than 2 millimetres thick, the fact we can actually see a groove worn into them around the entire circumference is pretty frightening. It’s a cruel world—if we don’t pump them up tightly, the Kevlar covers flex and wear—but if we do, the inner tubes themselves wear away and will surely split, something that our puncture repair kits simply won’t be able to handle. What to do?
‘Well, we can either do nothing,’ I rationalised aloud, ‘in which case I’d say they’ll burst by the end of the day, or we can let them back down again.’ Deciding we’d rather have torn covers than no tyres at all, we undid the morning’s pumping and continued on our way—looking very much like two exhausted, duck-footed fools wearily dragging a giant campervan. We pushed on an hour or so past our usual chuck-hiking-poles-down time, urged on by the knowledge that the snow is only going to get softer in the coming days, and we need to get across these frozen lakes to reach Hadley Bay—if we get that far.
We managed 5.36 kilometres today, and have crossed the lake itself. We’re now parked in a little alcove side lake, and tomorrow, we shall see … It seems pretty likely we’ll wake to find ourselves marooned in a sea of total slush, or worse still, floating around on a liquid lake, locked in by hunks of ice. I secretly love that each night we go to sleep with no idea what tomorrow will bring. The only scary thing is that the snow here is too slushy to set our bear alarm.
DAY 9: Slow progress
We both agree that today was the hardest slog yet. We made 6.08 kilometres by the GPS in a direct line, but there was nothing direct about today’s route. It was also our longest ever day of hauling—over ten hours—and the cruel weather ensured that this didn’t include lengthy nut breaks.