The 1000 Hour Day

by Chris Bray

  The snow is increasingly sloppy, and we spent most of the day with the PACs joined, double-hauling dog-team style, scrunching and splashing our way along. With nothing to aim for in this white nothingness, all I could do to vaguely maintain course at the front of the dog team was attempt to keep the wind biting into my face at the same angle. From behind, Clark could see me veering left or right relative to his wanderings and would bang the appropriate harness rope in correction, but even still, it was hopeless. Checking the GPS we’d often find ourselves travelling almost 45 degrees off course. The furrows pressed into the snow by our wheels are now so deep that turning this rigid contraption is basically impossible—a cruise liner would have a tighter turning circle. It is actually easier now to untie ourselves, walk around, separate the PACs and realign them individually, then reconnect them in the new direction, shackle ourselves back up, and keep going.

  Just as we climbed wearily into the tent at the end of our depressingly overcast, cold and windy ‘day’ (local night), as usual the wind eased and the weather started to fine up as the sun climbed higher in the sky, burning away the cloud. Despite the problems it will bring, I am secretly looking forward to when local night temperatures rise above zero, removing any point in us continuing to haul through the miserable ‘night time’ weather. The world we haul through is dead and totally uninviting, yet frustratingly, whenever we peep out of our tent when we should be asleep, the world is bathed in wondrous sunshine and there’s often even a caribou or two around. Relentlessly teased by these visions, we’ve both started to become besotted by this balmy image of what the daytime Arctic must be like—sun perpetually beaming down, great lines of caribou streaming past, arctic foxes flitting around the butterflies, baby lambs bleating and frolicking in the flowerbeds as puffy cotton-wool clouds drift merrily across the rainbowed heavens. Well, maybe we’re in for a reality check, but right now, I have to say, night hauling sucks.

  Connecting briefly to the internet via our Iridium satellite phone before bed, I uploaded our daily news piece and photo to our website. Checking our emails, we received some exciting news—CASARA (which I’m guessing stands for something like Canadian Air Search And Rescue … Aardvark) wrote to say that they ‘May utilise us as Targets’—in the next day or so for a bit of ‘spotter training’ for their Hercules aircraft team! Awesome!

  In the meantime, the race against time continues—tomorrow we’ll try to cross the next big lake and then follow the linked series of lakes and rivers north towards Hadley Bay before they dissolve away from under us. Unfortunately, the reality is that Hadley is still probably another ten days away at best, and so we’re unlikely to get there before the world melts and we start puncturing our weakening tyres on whatever’s beneath.

  DAY 10: The sun!

  Today was—minus the frolicking lambs and butterflies—almost exactly the dreamy Arctic summer’s day we have been imagining. We woke a little late, but in our defence decided that today we’d shift the official Chris & Clark Time Zone forward two hours, getting up at 9.30 pm local time and hauling through until 8.30 am. Not only would this mean we’d actually get up on time, but we also hoped this might enable the snow to be a bit crisper by the time we started hauling, and perhaps enable us to enjoy some of the ‘daytime’ sun towards the end of our day.

  Well as it turned out, the entire day’s weather was bliss. The dazzling sun swept around the clear blue sky, topping up our solar panels and warming our spirits despite the temperature falling to a crisp minus 6 degrees, which kept the snow underfoot relatively firm.

  We double-hauled with snowshoes all day, and although we did break through occasionally—our snowshoes sloshing up great spadefuls of water which congealed our boots and pants into one solid hunk of ice—for most of the day, the lake surface was perfect: an endless flat expanse of windswept snow and ice, whisked into mini sastrugi (ridges formed by the action of wind) as if the waves on the lake had been snap-frozen in time, featuring peaks, troughs and even curling crests. With every snow crystal on the ground shimmering and glinting like a carpet of diamonds in the sun, our mood today could not have been better.

  Being Day 10 has its own rewards—almost all our food rations are portioned out into ten-day packages so that we can’t eat too far ahead of ourselves, and this means that today we got to finish whatever’s left in each bag. So when it was time for our first nut break, instead of the usual precise handful, we poured the remaining glut of cashew nuts onto our PAC’s carbon fibre hardtop and split the spoils between us—almost twice the usual amount!

  We managed a welcoming 9.05-kilometre GPS direct distance today, and we’re almost across the last of the big lakes. It’s looking more likely that we may reach our goal of Hadley Bay after all. With our wheel covers deteriorating the way they are, though, I think we have both now let go of the idea of the far side of the island. Hadley Bay is about as much as we can realistically hope for, and that would be fantastic. Currently we’re waiting for our saucepan of snow and ice to melt so we can boil some water for dinner. We’re both starting to get seriously hungry already these past few days. I actually spent most of today thinking about a café I’d like to open, and wondering if we should have shot a ptarmigan that visited us around lunchtime.

  DAY 11: Billycarts and fogbows

  Despite keeping a keen ear out for approaching Hercules spotter planes all night, we neither saw nor heard anything. Actually, we did hear a jet roaring past and eagerly peeped out through the tent, only to realise it was just a passenger plane, so high in the infinitely blue sky that it was scarcely more than a silver dot scratching a thin white scar behind it. It’s strange how loud everything sounds out here without background noise; even our footsteps are sometimes so noisy—rasping against the snow—that it’s hard to endure. Anyway, no Herc visit—perhaps they couldn’t find us, but I prefer to believe that they just decided to practise on some target closer to home.

  Like yesterday, today too started out with brilliant sunshine, and inside our tent felt almost like a greenhouse—it was heaven. However, while we slept, the gloriously warm weather had seriously deteriorated the snow, and we toiled hopelessly for the first 300 metres, each footstep plunging through into ponds of water, trapping our snowshoes and twisting our ankles. Things looked very grim indeed, and after more than an hour of pushing ourselves to breaking point, we’d made almost no progress—we could still see our campsite just behind us. Hauling our PACs individually proved just as useless, but in a rare stroke of luck, we happened onto a region of firmer snow, and managed to tentatively double-haul across the remainder of the lake. Cresting the rise out of the lake, we eventually stood on what our map promised to be the start of a series of downhill rivers and lakes leading all the way to Hadley Bay.

  After lunch at 4 am (perfectly normal) we began our descent, double-hauling down quite a steep little slope. I suddenly felt my hauling trace slacken, and looking back, saw the PAC actually rolling slowly forward of its own volition! Both thinking exactly the same thing, we looked at each other and grinned. Like a bob-sled team we each hurried around behind a wheel and, pushing, built momentum and then sprang aboard as our giant 8-metre billycart trundled on down the hill. It wasn’t exactly high performance, but the huge thrill of gaining distance while doing absolutely no work took a long while to wear off.

  As we reached the first of the linked lakes, a heavy mist rolled over and visibility dropped to about 30 metres,which again made holding a straight course rather hard, until a rainbow (fogbow?) conveniently appeared in the mist ahead, guiding us onwards. For the first time in a few days we split our PACs in two again, and hauled the last few mini lakes independently.

  Pausing for a nut break on an island protruding through the frozen mantle, Clark made an important discovery—the jawbone of a rather large fish, presumably an arctic char! It’s the first evidence that despite the complete failure of our 2005 arctic fishing trip, there are actually fish out here. In completely unfounded anticipation, we’ve a
lready started hoarding the salt that collects at the bottom of our nut bags to sprinkle over all the fish we’ll catch when the lakes start to melt.

  All up, we stumbled to a halt after 10.25 kilometres as the PAC rolls today, and 10.03 kilometres direct by the GPS. That’s our second-best distance so far!

  DAY 12: Rubbish recycling

  Before going to sleep last night, we made the unpleasant discovery that—despite lowering the tyre pressure—our wheel rims have continued to chafe further into the thin rubber walls of our inner tube tyres. Some places look so deeply worn that I’m very surprised it hasn’t already cut right through. So we decided that first thing this morning we’d do whatever we possibly could to pad or smooth the rim edges before going anywhere.

  While formulating this plan of action last ‘night’, the sun was shining and the prospect of standing around this morning lining the edges of the rims with smooth duct tape sounded tolerable—guiltily lethargic even. Typically, however, Victoria Island had other plans for us, and by the time we woke, the temperature had plunged to minus 8 degrees Celsius, and the increasing windchill reduced it further to a painful minus 15. Snow set in too, and the accumulating spindrift completely buried anything we set down even briefly on the ground. Great. Just the day to stand around without gloves on doing fiddly work. Still, it needed doing, and it was the kind of preventative maintenance we couldn’t afford to delay.

  It was excruciatingly cold work, but looking on the positive side, inclement conditions are perfect for encouraging efficiency. So without further ado, we quickly unloaded both carts, deflated each tyre in turn and started lining the sharp rim edges with our roll of silver duct tape—only to discover after finishing rim #1 that we’d run out of tape. A quick mental calculation revealed we’d actually need almost 24 metres of tape just to go around both sides of each rim, once. Yikes. ‘What else can we use?’ Clark blurted out, frantically shuffling on the spot to keep warm, his hands shoved under his armpits.

  I looked wildly around for inspiration. ‘The labels on our drybags!’ I shouted, ‘They’re all duct tape!’

  We hastily peeled off the 20-centimetre strips labelling each of our sixteen identical giant yellow drybags, and having soon used all that up too, wondered what we could use next. We stood there in the cold, our minds slowly ticking over impractical ideas as the numbness advanced. We started hobbling laps around our PACs just to get some circulation and life-indicating pain back into our toes, and then, eureka! I had an idea. What’s like duct tape, that we have lots of? ‘Empty freeze-dried food packages!’

  It was a long shot, but it worked. We half-pitched the tent and wiggled our torsos inside to escape the wind and lay there—Leatherman in hand—slowly slicing our licked-clean foil packages from the last eleven freeze-dried dinners into duct tape width strips. Wedging these between the inner tube and the edge of the rim, they were squashed firmly in place and formed a perfect shield against the sharp edges. I knew there was a reason I was carrying all our rubbish with us.

  By the time we’d gotten under way the wind had died down, and the sun had burnt away the veil of clouds—once again we found ourselves hauling through that sparkling world of happiness, on perfectly frozen ground, loving life. Then, just as we were really starting to enjoy the sun, something odd happened. Another sun started to come up. What started as a sunrise-like glow on the skyline soon burgeoned into a full-on ball of bright light rising from the clear blue horizon a good 30 degrees or so below the real sun. Strange patches of light and even inverted rainbows formed above and to each side of the original sun. Caused by ice crystals in the sky refracting the sunlight, I’ve read about these ‘sun dogs’ before but never seen one—it was spectacular.

  Slightly blind from staring at all the suns, we hauled onwards. As we approached the far side of yet another lake, I kept squinting at the horizon ahead, blinking, trying to confirm what I thought I was looking at, before I finally stopped and called to Clark, pointing. ‘Is that a … a house?!’ Hauling excitedly towards it, it turned out to be an abandoned (at least for the season) metal frame over which a canvas cover could be thrown to form a small tent-frame cabin for the summer. Except for an old fuel drum, dinged and discarded, there was nothing else around, and after our nut ration ran out, we hauled onwards a little further before calling it a day. We didn’t get very far (2.9 km), but at least we still have four wheels, and with a bit of luck, our repairs may hold until we get to Hadley. We haven’t really discussed what we’ll do if we get that far—it’ll be a lot cheaper to get a seaplane out of Hadley Bay than to charter a Twin Otter to wherever our wheels finally die—if indeed we’re lucky enough for that to happen somewhere near where a plane can actually land at all.

  DAY 13: One giant Slushie

  According to one of our website comments last night, yesterday’s tent frame belongs to the seaplane pilot Fred Hamilton, who flew Clark and me out to our start point in 2005. Apparently these lakes between here and Hadley Bay are teeming with big lake trout, and if we dangle a lure into any open ‘leads’ or cracks in the ice, these hearty meals will attach themselves to the end of the line! For now though, beneath the slurry we’ve been hauling through, the surfaces of the lakes themselves are still well and truly frozen. I can’t wait. Now that we are in full-swing hauling each day, we are constantly hungry. Our days revolve around food: the motivation to wake is breakfast, we haul between nut breaks purely to reach them, and come mid afternoon, we start daydreaming about clambering inside the tent to rest our aching joints and muscles, wrap our frozen hands around a warm drink, and eat dinner. A fish or twenty certainly would not go astray.

  Rather than having to wait around for ice in a saucepan to melt, these days we can simply scoop water from wells trampled in the snow, and so our breakfast porridge was ready in record time this morning, and we set off bright and early.

  Although only one sun hung innocently above us in the sky, I have a sneaking suspicion that there might have been six or seven of them out blazing while we slept, because overnight it seems the whole world has melted into one giant Slushie. By the time we started hauling, the temperature dropped and lingered around minus 2 degrees—just enough to weakly clad the ocean of slurry with a deceptively thin layer of ice—and progress was torturously slow.

  We teamed up and double-hauled for as long as we could, but whoever was playing lead dog couldn’t help but collapse the snow crust on his way through, leaving dog #2 sloshing around helplessly in his swampy wake. So although it was infinitely harder, we were forced to separate into two individual PACs and fight it out ourselves. Virtually every step we took simply chewed away another chunk of would-be ground in front of us, dropping it into the ice bath now overflowing inside our boots, while behind us the PAC wheels hunkered ever deeper into their parallel blue-water troughs. Once bogged like this, it was impossible to free the PAC on our own, and it seemed we were perpetually walking over to help un-bog each other, only to walk back, haul twenty paces and have to call out ourselves. ‘Now me! Sorry, guv!’

  The only chance to cross these particularly slushy, lighter blue regions seems to be speed. We try to scurry across, treading as lightly as possible with our snowshoes, passing some of our weight forward through our outstretched hiking poles in our mad dash—but inevitably, we usually only get about halfway before we feel the ground turn elastic underneath us, sag and then utterly collapse. ‘NOOOooo! Dammit!’ Desperately trying to clamber out before losing momentum, our wildly splashing duck feet kick water right up our backs, where of course it freezes solid while we wait, beaten, for help to arrive.

  Still, such is life, and we are now finally back in the tent, utterly exhausted but warm, and about to enjoy a lovely freeze-dried dinner of Honey Soy Chicken, prefixed by an appetiser of hot chocolate, and followed by a dessert of couscous and a vanilla protein drink. Clasping my hot mug, all I can hear is the flapping of our tent, and the faint hum of the wind vibrating our polar bear tripwire alarm.

  DAY 14: Two
weeks in

  We woke to the unmistakable scream of our bear alarm. Yelling at each other between our tents we panicked to unzip our sleeping bags and poke our heads out either end to check if there was a huge white bear lumbering towards us or not. There wasn’t. Clark caught a glance of a seagull just as it disentangled itself from the tripwire and flew away. It took a long time for the adrenalin to settle enough to sleep, but no sooner had we drifted off when the alarm went off again; this time the tripod support had fallen over because the snow it was standing on had simply melted away.

  Morning came all too soon and we set off, already drained from yesterday’s over-exertion. As we splashed wearily around in 30-centimetre-deep water for over an hour, straining feebly left and right, and then trying left again, we felt our strength ebbing away. After a few uncontrolled verbal outbursts brought on by stabbing pains in our knees, we finally staggered into an upright position, regained composure and turned to look at each other. It was pointless and we knew it—the race against time had been lost.

  ‘Where’s the closest shore?’ I asked, peering ahead, but knowing full well the answer lay behind me. Dejectedly, we separated our PACs, bullied them with an effort to turn 180 degrees, and—with our tails between our legs—took it in turns smearing them one at a time all the way back along their wheel ruts to our campsite, and then onwards to the shore behind that. Gazing out over the lake as we sat licking our psychological wounds, we could see it was now interspersed with patches of blue-grey meltwater lurking beneath the surface. It seems our days of hauling across frozen lakes are over.