Conquering the Impossible

by Mike Horn

  While avoiding any sudden movements, I continued to photograph them. One of them began to swing its head and I suddenly realized that, harnessed to my sled, I wouldn’t be able to run very fast. I immediately started inching away, and just then the herd began to charge at me. A few yards closer, the herd came to a halt. They had been bluffing just to throw a scare into me. It had worked perfectly.

  Since I preferred not to pitch camp among the musk oxen, I left the island and set up my next camp on Icebreaker Channel. The next morning I began to trek along the eastern and southern coast of Victoria Island. According to my information, I shouldn’t expect to run into any more serious obstacles between here and Cambridge Bay.

  * * *

  It was the beginning of summer, the season when Arctic explorers and other adventurers come north to launch their assaults on the ice. Cathy told me there were even two Norwegians retracing Amundsen’s route. They had started off from Copper Mine River and they were heading for Bellot Island. Since they had left Cambridge Bay three days ago, they were now in the Jenny Lind Island area and were more or less heading in my direction. They had told her that they would love to meet up, and I shared their enthusiasm. They were about sixty miles from Jenny Lind Island; I was north of it. They were making twelve and a half miles a day, and I was making almost nineteen miles. I suggested that we meet up in two days on Icebreaker Channel.

  Two days later, the Norwegians were just twelve miles away. We called one another constantly on our satellite phones to check our positions. And then at some point, two tiny dots appeared against the vastness. So slowly that it seemed as if time were standing still, their specks grew larger and took on human form. At last I could see their faces, as white with hoarfrost as my own.

  When we were finally face-to-face, one of the two men held out his hand solemnly.

  “Mike Horn, I presume?” he Livingstoned.

  “How ever did you guess,” I answered, in the same spirit.

  The meeting was dizzying, euphoric, and exciting. Their eyes glittered with the thrill of the adventure and the almost unbelievable joy that they were actually there in the Arctic—it was the special glow that belongs only to those who are living their dreams. I felt an immediate burst of fraternal feeling toward these men, the first Europeans and fellow explorers that I had met since the beginning of my journey.

  We pitched our tents close to one another, and Brent and Randolf insisted on preparing our first meal. I agreed, on the condition that I host them for the second meal. Since I had been making better time than expected, and I knew that I would be resupplied at Cambridge Bay, I calculated that I could spare fifteen days of rations. We could afford to feast and agreed to do so—until we had bellyaches. In their tent, which was bigger than mine, heated as if by a fireside with my extra fuel reserves, we shared our first banquet and then washed it all down with a bottle of cognac that they had brought all the way just for this occasion. The meal lasted the whole day, and the conversation never lagged. We exchanged contacts and tales of our adventures. Our discussions were the diametric opposite of those superficial conversations that you can hardly escape these days.

  Brent and Randolf planned to head toward Bellot Island, Gjoa Haven, and Igloolik, following a route close to the one that I had been unable to follow in the opposite direction. I recommended that they follow my course in reverse, and I gave them the various positions of my campsites, as recorded in my GPS. Moreover, I advised that they detour around Committee Bay and the Gulf of Boothia because their sleds weren’t designed for pack ice.

  Friendships develop very quickly in the Arctic, along with a sense of mutual assistance and fraternity. Brent, Randolf, and I might not be pursuing the same objective, and our paths might be leading in different directions, but we had in common the fact that we were all here at the same time. That was enough.

  After a final breakfast of coffee and muesli, a few souvenir photographs, and my promise to write an introduction to their planned book, we set off again in our respective directions. Two hours later I turned around and looked behind me. Their silhouettes had become specks on the horizon once again, and I felt a strange sense of sadness to be separated from these men. I had spent just twenty-four hours with them, but I felt as if I had known them for years.

  * * *

  It was still thirty degrees below zero, but in just a month the snow and the ice would begin to melt. I was now in a race against the spring thaw; I marched all night long to cover as many miles as possible. Heavy snowfalls slowed me down, but the favorable winds and terrain allowed me to use my kite—for the first time in quite a while—on the last sixteen miles before Victoria Island.

  One Saturday evening, three days after parting company with Brent and Randolf and thirty days after leaving Kugaaruk, I set foot on the island at last and pitched camp within sight of Cambridge Bay. I lined up the opening of my tent with the village, three miles away, so that I wouldn’t have to take my eyes off it. I had been dreaming of this place for six months; I had planned to arrive here by boat, but I was forced to come on foot. It was safe to say that I had earned my passage.

  If everything had gone according to the original plan, by now I would be somewhere in Siberia, about four months from the finish line. But I couldn’t say that I regretted anything about having taken that immense detour, which offered me an invaluable array of experiences and which allowed me to meet amazing men like Simon, Claude, Makabi, Brent, and Randolf.

  On my satellite phone I called Simon, and then Makabi, to tell them that, thanks to their help, I had finally reached Cambridge Bay. They shouted with joy like sports fans whose team has finally scored a goal after a long and hard-fought struggle. There I stood, all alone in a stadium all my own, champion of the world.

  5

  The End of the Earth

  ON A SNOWY SUNDAY MORNING, I entered the empty streets of “Cam” as if I were walking into a ghost town. One building served as a hotel, but it was closed, so I pitched my tent outside the front door. A policeman finally showed up and asked me what I was doing there.

  “I’m waiting for the hotel to open.”

  “That won’t be for three weeks.” The policeman called the owner, a certain Angela, who—when I offered to pay—gave me a suite free of charge as long as I wanted to stay.

  If I had listened to my own gut, which was urging me on to cover as much distance as possible before the thaw, I would have taken possession of the DHL package being held for me by Roger—and I would have high-tailed it out of town without wasting another moment. But I couldn’t come to Cambridge Bay without spending an evening with Peter.

  Peter was a fifty-five-year-old American engineer who specialized in radar and weather stations and worked for the DEW Line. A few months ago he had contacted me by e-mail and offered to help me out with my expedition in whatever capacity he could. After that we had been in regular contact, and he had proved invaluable in reporting on the condition of the ice, the strength and direction of the winds, suggesting routes, and so on.

  I had called him the day before I arrived in town to invite him out to dinner. Actually—since there was no restaurant in town—I prepared a meal for him myself. As soon as I was settled in town, I ransacked the local superette and prepared a small banquet for him, a fitting recognition of his help and his friendship.

  The next morning, while Peter saw to a few small repairs to my electronic equipment, I went to see Roger, the doctor. He was surprised to see me so soon, and he told me that my package had not been delivered yet—even though it had been shipped about fifteen days ago and DHL had promised to have it there on time. They told me it would certainly come in any day now, and I just needed to be patient.

  Days passed, and the food rations and the detailed maps that were supposed to take me all the way to Paulatuk still hadn’t arrived. And yet, Cambridge Bay wasn’t exactly cut off from the rest of the world. Supplies and freight came into the village on two weekly flights!

  At the end of my r
ope and running low on time, I needed to get off Victoria Island and back to the Canadian mainland before the thaw. I decided to do without the services of my courier. Combining the provisions I still had in my sled with what I was able to obtain there, I figured I should be able to stock up for the eight hundred miles between Cambridge Bay and Paulatuk. At Peter’s request, the directors of the DEW Line gave me a substantial supply of chocolate cookies. Chantal, Roger’s wife, worked in a plant where they made dried musk ox meat and smoked Arctic char, and she got me several pounds of each. And I finished obtaining my supplies with powdered mashed potatoes, chocolate, walnuts, and dried fruit from the corner grocery store. In any case, I wouldn’t be needing as many calories once the temperature started rising again. My metabolism would simply have to become accustomed to my change in diet.

  Peter and one of his friends, Anton, a military helicopter pilot who transported the engineers from one radar surveillance station to another, managed to obtain maps of the region for me. A relative of Makabi’s who also lived in town gave me a few tips for the next stage of my journey. Everything fell into place once again, thanks to the amazing kindness of the men and women I met along the way.

  I arranged for an additional supply rendezvous with Jean-Philippe Patthey at Paulatuk. We had originally been scheduled to hook up at Tuktoyaktuk, five hundred miles away at the mouth of the Mackenzie River, where the warm waters from the spring thaw would by then have partially melted the ice, turning the immense and unavoidable delta into a swamp—hence the need to replace my winter equipment with summer equipment, trading my skis and my sled for a kayak, my snow boots for neoprene boots.

  I asked Cathy to send some gifts to my friends in Cambridge Bay to thank them for all that they had done for me, and I set out once again, this time with the goal of reaching Paulatuk in one month. The thermometer had risen to about thirteen degrees below zero, and it felt as if I could see the ice melting beneath my skis. Now it was a race against the clock. If I wanted to be able to follow the southern coast of Victoria Island to its western end, cross Dolphin and Union Strait, and reach Cape Bathurst as early as possible while staying on the ice of Amundsen Gulf, I would have to maintain a daily average of twenty-five miles. It worked out to nearly a marathon a day.

  The immediate question at hand was whether to move forward on the dry land of Victoria Island or venture down immediately onto the ice of Coronation Gulf. On the ice I would be forced to take a longer route, but on the island, which was flat as a pancake, the blizzards would blind me and slow me down by burying me in spring snow.

  I decided to go back to the ice. The temperatures—around thirty degrees below zero—were tolerable, and my daily mileage was often higher than the allotted twenty-five miles. As the days passed, I noticed the daylight increasing and the temperature rising. The prevailing winds were no longer coming from the northwest but now began to blow from the south. I was ready for it, and all I needed to do was to adapt my methods of navigation—tell-tales on my ski poles and snow mounds—to take this into account. By this point, since the Arctic sun was visible almost twenty-four hours a day, it also served as my compass. I only traveled when the sun was visible above the horizon, though it never rose very high in the sky. At any given moment of the day, the sun was rotating around me as if I were its axis. Since fifteen degrees of angle corresponded to one hour of time, it was clear that the sun—wherever I happened to be—would always be due north at midnight, at fifteen degrees east of due north at 1:00 A.M., thirty degrees east of due north at 2:00 A.M., due south at noon, and so on. I divided up the sky into pie wedges of fifteen degrees, and then into subsections of one degree each in order to obtain the most accurate bearing possible. Imagining that I was at the center of a clock or a sundial, I would check my shadow to determine my course.

  This natural compass was more effective and more reliable than any other navigational tool at my disposal. At these very high latitudes, even my GPS indicated a distance to North Cape that was always approximately the same.

  * * *

  During my long days, which had extended to more than eleven hours, I never stopped discovering and learning new things. My daily observation of ice crystals, their size and shape, indicated the slightest temperature variations, and the shape of the clouds warned me of upcoming shifts in wind. My brain never stopped processing all of this available information. I spent part of these long stretches of time examining questions of course and navigation from every angle. I spent the remainder of the time thinking about things I had never had the leisure to consider in such depth in my daily life. Freed from the madding crowd, undisturbed by any distracting movement or visual stimuli, unhampered by material concerns other than my daily slog, my mind was completely open, and I used it to dissect or ruminate on this or that aspect of my life. Or else I became absorbed in more general reflection. My imagination was churning incessantly, and it kept me from losing my mind in the solitude and silence.

  * * *

  If I could keep up this pace, it might be possible for me to reach Tuktoyaktuk before the delta of the Mackenzie River became a marsh. If so, I might be able to traverse it on skis and put off my change of equipment until later. This would keep me from getting bogged down in a situation where the breakup of the ice makes cross-country skiing dangerous and where my kayak would risk being wedged and crushed between the surviving blocks of ice. This intermediate season is the hardest time to travel in the Arctic. For that reason, no one bothers to do so—no one but me, that is.

  Spurred by the prospect of crossing the Mackenzie Delta before the full-blown thaw, I put the pedal to the metal and really covered some distance—as much as thirty miles a day. One day, when I was able to use my kite, I beat my daily distance record for the Canadian segment of my trip—with fifty-six miles in a single day! That was in spite of visibility of almost zero and wind-induced spills that pulled me across the ice on my rear end.

  * * *

  I wasn’t the only creature anxious about the change of seasons. This was also the time of year when the caribou hurried to cross Coronation Gulf to reach their summer grazing grounds on Victoria Island before the thaw. Their long, single-file lines would run across my path until I got close, and then they would scatter in all directions. Thanks to my kite, which allowed me to move as fast as they did, I could follow them, catch up with them, and slide along next to them. I heard the clattering of their hoofs on the ice and their rapid panting, and I could see the uneasy gleam that danced in their round eyes and the effects of the breeze that played in the silky sheen of their hair. I was one of them. It was magical and exciting.

  But I stayed focused. In soft snow, with my heel not fastened to my ski, using a kite is a dangerous exercise—not recommended when traveling solo. If I slipped into a hole or hit a block of ice and dislocated my knee, it would be a catastrophe. So I decided to give up using my kite on days when the wind was favorable but visibility was low. The farther I advanced, the less willing I was to run risks that weren’t absolutely necessary.

  As I drew closer to Lady Franklin Point, the southwestern extremity of Victoria Island, the coughing noise of an engine announced the unexpected arrival of a helicopter. When the pilot spotted me, he veered toward me and set down a few yards away. It was Anton, my supplier of military maps.

  “I’m just coming back from the DEW Line station at Bernard Harbor,” he told me. “There is plenty of open water over there, and I don’t even know how far it extends.”

  I sighed unhappily. Bernard Harbor was very close, right across my route.

  But then Anton added, “There is a slim chance you can get through if you travel along the far southern edge of the strait. Unfortunately, the ice is very rough there.” I didn’t care. There was hope.

  The Bernard Harbor station lay a mile or two inland. It was one of the unmanned DEW Line monitoring stations that also serve as refuges and usually contain food supplies for those awaiting rescue. In order to encourage me to go that way, which I ha
dn’t planned to do, Anton had left extra provisions there just for me.

  “Have yourself a little feast and a good night’s sleep on me,” he said.

  * * *

  The closer I got to open water, the more worried I became. If I couldn’t get through, I would have to retrace my steps and head south until I reached the mainland, an enormous detour that would ruin all my plans for Tuktoyaktuk and the Mackenzie Delta. And God only knew what would happen after that.

  To keep these worries at bay, I continued to cover my daily marathon distance—and even more on certain days. I continued past Lady Franklin Point, and the route still looked fine. Pushing on, I camped right in the middle of Dolphin and Union Strait.

  At daybreak the seals had transformed the ice into a solarium. I had fun seeing how close I could get to them; it was difficult, because seals are highly suspicious. A quick inspection of the openings that they had made in the ice confirmed my suspicion: the ice was thin, which was how they had penetrated it so easily and probably meant that it ended not far away. Prudence suggested that I head south, but I couldn’t help being drawn northward.

  I continued on my way. Visibility dropped from hour to hour. Suddenly, when I was still two and a half miles from dry land, I felt that my skis were not supporting me as well, that they were strangely sinking beneath me. An instant later, chills of horror ran up my spine as I realized that I was no longer marching on ice—I was on a layer of snow “floating” on the water! At low temperatures a thick layer of snow doesn’t fully melt when it hits the ocean.

  I had fallen into one of the most treacherous traps of the Arctic! The transition from ice to snow was nearly unnoticeable—so subtle is the difference between the two. Usually, in fact, you don’t even notice that you’re standing on mushy snow until it is too late.