The 1000 Hour Day

by Chris Bray

  DAY 63: Suspiciously easy

  Rain made breakfast a subdued, inside affair today, and after swallowing all our multi-vitamin tablets and cleaning our teeth, we ran out of procrastination ideas, looked at each other, groaned, and clambered out to face the day.

  While the weather is again atrocious—raining and blowing 40 kilometres per hour—the terrain is still wonderfully agreeable. It has plenty of ups and downs, but most are rather gradual and rolling. The ground underfoot is mostly a hard, compacted earth, carpeted with a patchwork of green tundra clumps. Each little clump is perhaps only 20 centimetres across, yet contains an amazing array of tiny flowers. There are so many different colours—all sprouting through and around bright green moss, lichen, mountain sorrel, yellow poppies and more. Most plants are now starting to seed, and many of the flowers have started to wither and die. I guess the short Arctic summer is already on its way out. In fact, tomorrow at around midnight, the sun should dip below the horizon for the first time this summer—the end of our first ‘day’ that began the day we arrived in Cambridge Bay. It’ll get chillier now at night, and the hours of daylight will reduce rather smartly, which isn’t all bad—we might get a chance to see the Northern Lights if we’re lucky.

  We passed 6 kilometres by lunch, and everything kept going well all afternoon. Suspiciously well, in fact—what is Victoria Island playing at? I even undislocated my foot by accidently slamming it against a rock while lowering The Nugget down a hillside. Something structural has been hurting inside my foot for the last few weeks—enough for me to have developed an awkward limping gait to my hauling—but today whatever it was popped back into place. I’m cured!

  Clark tells me we’re only 82 kilometres from the end now. It’s getting closer! But almost just as fast now, we’re getting wearier, finding it harder to focus, harder to stand and continue after a nut break … So close—yet still so far. One day, (someday soon?), we are longing to catch a glimpse of the ocean on the distant horizon, beyond the never-ending hills.

  DAY 64: Let off lightly

  It was a chilly start today: 3 degrees Celsius with windchill down to minus 2, and the usual delays didn’t see us out of bed till about 8.30. My morning visit to the open-air toilet-with-a-view was somewhat more interesting today. Partway through I was interrupted by a giant arctic bee—like a normal honeybee, but bristling with fluffy hairs—buzzing agitatedly around my foot. As I looked down, it was joined by another. And then, another. Uh-oh! Then a fourth crawled out of a dark entrance hole under the very rock I was crouching on! Abort! Abort! It wasn’t a dignified departure, but when you’re caught with your pants down, escape is rarely a smooth operation. Peering back from 3 metres away, I saw that, thankfully, the gathering of bees hadn’t attempted pursuit.

  So much for our ‘downhill from here’ theory. It just means that there’s slightly more downhill than uphill, but there’s still plenty of both. Today started with a 3-kilometre uphill, and, reaching the top, we then looked down over 5 kilometres of gradual downhill—at least that’s what our topographical map said it would be. A ‘gradual sloping region of hills’ might be a better description, however, and as we hauled along, up and down, I spotted an odd ridgeline running along beside us, drawing closer, in and out of view. While all our hills were a lovely, radiant golden colour—a mixture of earth and tundra—this ‘other’ ridge sidling up next to us was black. We thought it must have just been in shadow, but as it drew nearer we could see it was comprised entirely of large, dark, lumpy boulders poured on top of each other, completely obscuring whatever ground may have lurked beneath. It was incredibly ominous, and with the clouds above reflecting its drab gloom, it looked positively evil. Rather symbolically, a few black crows wheeled sinisterly above and with several boulders protruding tombstone-like against the skyline, we half expected a hooded figure holding a scythe to float past.

  Inevitably—as we feared it must—the black ridge swung across our path, and there was nothing for it: we had to cross it somehow. Like all good traps, we were lured into it gradually. The boulders began as scattered obstacles, but increased in number until, almost before we knew it, we were trying to haul The Nugget over an ocean of the biggest boulders we have ever attempted—far worse than those which smashed our rims last time.

  Pausing and looking back, I shook my head in disbelief at Clark harnessed in behind me—one corner of The Nugget was embedded against a bench-sized boulder, and the other corner tilted way up in the air at an absurd angle rolling on top of another. As I watched, the wheels of the cart passed over a giant protruding boulder, which scraped hard against the netting and drybags underneath, contorting and skewing the entire metal frame before the front left wheel slipped off its current pedestal and the whole cart sprang down, jolting Clark off his feet.

  Ahead it just got worse. The Nugget hated it, the wheels hated it, and we—well, we were lucky to get through without breaking at least one of our legs. These huge boulders were simply jumbled upon others below, and it was a case of trying to hop from the random corner of one to the next, while trying not to slip down into gaping black voids between them, all the while attached to a lurching 300-kilogram cart by a length of quite elastic rope. I’d get one good footing, heave, remove my back foot, go to swing my body weight forward and just at that instant The Nugget’s bulging tyres would usually absorb into the face of some other boulder and rebound, flinging us both off balance and bending our hiking poles. Ridiculously, we were even below The Nugget sometimes, while it clambered over boulders behind and above us. Occasionally it totally bottomed out on rocks and I’d have to sneak underneath and push upwards on the underside to free the netting while Clark kept hauling. It was full-on, and when we got to the far side, we could not believe we only had two punctures.

  After crossing the black hill, the terrain mercifully returned to our favourite golden tundra. Shaken a little by this unexpected deviation from the ground we’ve come to know and love over the past few days, we hauled onwards until at last, up a few more hills, we arrived at a large river in our path. The GPS and ‘topo’ said it was 160 metres wide. We had been dreading it, but as we hauled down towards it, we found a crossing point where small rocks formed an ankle-deep path all the way across! I guess that’s our trade-off for being smacked with the boulders. I’m happy with that.

  DAY 65 (1 August 2008): Eclipsed

  We woke this morning to a crescendo of multiple alarms all set for 5.30 am, wolfed down a quick brekky and set up our cameras ready to witness the near-total solar eclipse due to occur at 6.15. The sun was blazing clearly in the sky as we set up, and we were pretty excited about what it would be like to experience our first bit of real darkness in 1800 hours since the perpetual daylight started when we flew into Cambridge Bay.

  ‘I wonder what all the animals will do,’ I said, looking around excitedly, ‘and if we might even be able to see the aurora briefly?’

  With about two minutes to spare, the sun suddenly dived for cover behind a thick blanket of dark cloud. Typical! We stood there, cameras rolling for about half an hour, and although it certainly became a little ‘overcast’ while the sun was behind the clouds, that seemed about the extent of our eclipse. Perhaps we got our time wrong or something? To be honest, we’re pretty confused about what the ‘real’ time is these days, after so many clock adjustments.

  ‘Oh well,’ I shrugged, ‘we’ll just have to eclipse our hauling record instead.’ Clark nodded with a ‘you’re on’ kinda grin, and with nothing else to do, we packed everything away and were hauling by 7.15—well before we’d normally even hear and ignore our first wake-up alarm.

  Extending our hauling day by two extra hours meant we’d naturally have to borrow some extra nut-break rations from some unfortunate day in the future, but it was definitely worth it.

  We’d covered 8 kilometres by lunch, which we ate sitting atop a huge isolated square boulder that had inexplicably found its way to the very top of an otherwise perfectly rounded grassy hill. Aft
er that, it was up and down again, around this lake, along that ridge, down into that valley, climb out through the saddle to the left, skirt along the sloping side of the next mountain to the next lake, and so on. It was a real maze today, but picking our own path out here is part of the joy and freedom of it all. We are perpetually surrounded by this endless rumpled expanse of possibly unexplored land, dotted with lakes and animals, and we are free to go wherever we wish—so long as it’s the fastest, straightest route possible to the far side, of course!

  The excessive climbing today took its toll on my feet, and by mid afternoon I was hobbling around in my harness using both my hiking poles more as crutches than anything else, limping rather pathetically and wincing and grimacing with every step. With about half an hour still to go before our usual quitting time of 6 pm, I could haul no further, and we set up camp.

  I was quite surprised at how debilitating what I assumed just to be a blister in the making felt—but when I at last eased my boot off, I discovered my foot had bypassed the blister idea. Instead, a wide region around the back and sides of my heel has been rubbed totally raw of skin, exposing that wonderfully sensitive, weeping base-layer that burns like fire when you touch it. I delved into our extensive first-aid kit—mercifully for the first time this trip besides for painkillers—and now just hope that the injury miraculously will have healed by the morning when I have to wedge my feet back into my boots and start hauling The Nugget up more mountains.

  The PAC-o-meter reads … wait for it … 15.02 kilometres!! That’s almost 2 kilometres further than we’ve hauled in a single day ever, and this was across the most jumbled set of contour lines we’ve faced yet. We’re stoked with that. Eclipse hauling record—tick.

  It’s rather amusing to remember that 15 kilometres per day was the ‘easy average’ that we predicted in 2005 should get us to the far side within our guesstimated 65 days. I remember writing ‘Hauling at a snail’s walking pace of 3 kilometres per hour even for just five hours a day (which we could do before lunch if we really wanted to), should easily get us there in 65 days.’ Ha ha! Yup, whatever you reckon, little boys! If you include those 58 days from 2005, we’re now 123 days into the island, and we’re still not there. If we’d been using PAC-1 today, though, we’d still be stuck back at the first few boulders near camp. We live and learn.

  We’ve seen no sign of Inuit artefacts, stone tent rings or anything else for many days now: this really seems to be an untouched area, and the maze of hills might explain why. It’s pretty cool pondering that we really could be the first people to ever walk through some of these valleys.

  DAY 66: A sight for sore eyes

  After sending our update last night and finishing our various chores, the weather remained so pleasant, and the view outside so spectacularly beautiful, that we were both lured out for a few lazy hours of soaking up the experience. Lying down on the tundra, we watched the late evening sun cast its long golden rays over the strangely sculpted mountains around us, and the clear blue sky reflected vibrantly in the myriad of lakes below.

  ‘Imagine having a house here,’ Clark mused. It certainly was a million-dollar view, and we continued to watch as the odd herd of muskox trundled past on a distant hillside. While we have been absorbing and ‘taking in’ these scenes around us as we haul, up until the last few days we’ve always had that pressure in the back of our minds, forcing us to keep going, forcing us to keep trying—if only to convince ourselves that hope was not yet lost. Recently though—while we know it’s not over till it’s over—we are feeling, at long last, confident. It’s hard to explain, but for once this confidence is no longer just a brave facade we display for ourselves and for each other to keep up morale. We now genuinely believe that, barring a serious accident, we will reach our goal. A huge weight has begun to lift from our minds, allowing moments like last night, where we were able to genuinely relax and properly absorb the serenity and splendour of it all.

  Ever since about a week ago we have had the very real—and very tempting—option to dismantle and cache The Nugget, and simply walk to the far side of the island in a few days with only what we can carry. We have even gone so far as to write up an exact list of what we’d take with us. It’s been a constant mental battle, but we have managed to resist the temptation to ‘cut and run’ and are determined to carry on as normal. We both know that as soon as we get back to civilisation, it won’t take long before we just want to be back out here anyway.

  After yesterday’s epic efforts, we didn’t manage to pull ourselves together until 8.30 am, so our day began a little late. Quite seriously, our Kevlar wheel covers are now beyond all help—they are nothing more than a series of rotten, frayed, torn scraps of fabric all bunched and wedged together, held vaguely onto some parts of the tyre by no less than eighteen bandage tourniquets. We have long since run out of spectra cord and webbing to make any more straps, and so the inner tubes bulge horribly in so many places. There are huge areas as big as a dinner plate of raw, exposed, abraded rubber, and with the low PSI pressure we need in order to not buckle the rims, all this hilly terrain makes the ‘covers’ slide around, overlapping the rim on one side and revealing a whole section of bare rubber on the other.

  If we deflate, rearrange and reinflate the tyres, it takes at least half an hour per tyre, and about one hour later it’s back how it was anyway. So for the last few days we’ve adopted a new tyre care strategy—the ‘I don’t care anymore’ strategy—and we’ve been amazed at its success. In fact, the rubber holds its own so well that we’ve even given up trying to guide the immovable PAC around the more obvious rocks! Sure, we suffer the odd puncture, but they are few and far between, and being so close to the end now, we don’t feel we need to conserve our puncture repair patches. So the secret to our improved kilometres for the last few days is not only the firm terrain, but that without having to avoid rocks and fix the covers every hour, we get so much more time to haul!

  By mid morning, the weather had cleared into a perfect Arctic summer’s day, and by lunchtime we even had our shirts off for the first time in ages, soaking up all the beautiful warmth. It was one of the most relaxing and pleasant lunch breaks we’ve ever had. Instead of mozzies, the air is now filled with fine tufts of cotton that are being released from billions of fluffy arctic cotton grass plants growing everywhere. We watched some rising and wafting around on invisible air currents until they disappeared from view.

  We took a bit of a gamble with our route today. We had planned on a rather weaving, inefficient route that avoided some of the contour lines (thus hills and valleys) on our map, but instead—after cross-referencing with Google Earth—we decided to attempt a much more direct but hillier option. The gamble paid off, big time. There were some epic sections lowering The Nugget down mountainsides, and some trying climbs, but all were manageable, and it was interspersed with long open expanses of our favourite, firm terrain.

  The kilometres flew past. As we lowered The Nugget down a particularly long hillside at some speed, a large boulder just in front suddenly transformed into a bull muskox that hastily stood up, shook himself, and then expressed his severe annoyance at being woken up by commencing the usual ‘rub-eye-on-foreleg’ warning manoeuvre as we bore down upon him, desperately trying to dig our heels in to stop. Seconds later, upon his realising that The Nugget was rather a lot bigger than he was, and that gravity was potentially going to make it a rather one-sided contest, he abandoned his warning and thundered off. ‘That was lucky!’ I panted, as the cart finally came to a stop.

  Cresting the largest major hill between us and the end point, just above 300 metres high, Clark suddenly pointed to the horizon. ‘Look! Is that … is that the ocean?!’ Right in the distance, a thin blue band stretched behind the mountains.

  ‘It is!!’

  What a moment that was. The GPS indicated we had just over 50 kilometres to go. We’ve now descended the last epic slope, and are camped down beside a gurgling, crystal-clear stream. Ahead, the terrain for to
morrow continues to look ideal, and the weather is still perfect.

  DAY 67: Getting there …

  We adopted another last-minute route-plan change today that was again more direct but hillier, and again, it seems to have paid off—at the cost of only two punctures. Twice during the day we heard the distant roar of a passenger jet passing way overhead, and both times we paused and looked up wistfully. Soon, my pretty, soon … Well, actually, we still don’t have a confirmed pickup option, but like everything else at the moment, we’ve adopted the Inuit attitude that ‘it’ll be okay’.

  To be honest, we’re getting mighty sick of peanuts and cashews now. Nut breaks are no longer the radiant lights that once split up our days. We are starting to crave different foods now. Brekky, lunch and dinner are all still very much enjoyed, but oh, what we wouldn’t give for a pizza, or a steak, or … trust me, there is a written list, and it is almost endless, under the heading ‘Vancouver’ in our notebooks. It won’t surprise me if we gain 15 kilograms in the week or so we have planned in Vancouver before flying back to Australia!

  There was one big surprise this afternoon, just after punting across another beautiful, cotton-lined stream—the far bank consisted of trees! Well, they were only perhaps 75 centimetres tall, but by Victoria Island standards, these were giants. We had to haul right over a full-on jungle of them—it was genuine old-growth scrub.