Conquering the Impossible

by Mike Horn

  “Where you come from, like that?” yelled a man who was busy hauling a boat up onto the beach.

  “From Tuktoyaktuk!”

  “Impossible, with all that ice!” he replied. So I gave him a brief account of my most recent adventures, and I asked him if he could show me the way to the house of a friend of the Norwegians I had met near Cambridge Bay. I hoped to ask their friend for a place to stay. Unfortunately, the house was locked up, and the owner had left on an expedition along the Colville River.

  Leonard, the man I met on the beach, and his girlfriend, Caroline, generously offered to take me in. The next morning, a little repair shop that fixed road-maintenance vehicles helped me to get my kayak back into shape. The owner, a master handyman, carved me a new rudder out of a piece of sheet metal and made me a new float arm out of a length of pipe.

  On the fourth of July I celebrated Independence Day with residents who were handing out Coca-Cola and hot dogs in the streets of Kaktovik.

  The next day, forty-eight hours after I arrived in town, I picked up my refurbished kayak and went back to sea after informing local authorities that I had entered American territory.

  * * *

  To the west of Barter Island, the water was partly clear for about twenty miles, and then it was frozen again. I set up camp on the ice after a day wending my way among the blocks of ice. The next day things looked bad because the fragments of pack ice were too small to walk over, too big to push aside. I retreated to the beach and shifted back and forth between sand and ice, depending on the state of the terrain. Most of the time I used my kayak as a sled, which didn’t help the rudder any. When I was able to cut over dry land, I would roll my boat over lengths of driftwood, much like the builders of the Egyptian pyramids. It was daunting labor, and it didn’t yield much speed. I was progressing at a rate of less than one mile per hour.

  When I was fifty miles from Prudhoe Bay, I noticed a pair of barracklike tents, surrounded by tools and oil-exploration equipment, evidently the property of an oil company. I arrived, soaked, at two in the morning after a lengthy battle with the pack ice that resulted in numerous plunges into the water. Despite the midnight sun, there was a light on inside.

  I yelled, “Is anyone there?”

  Three round-eyed, tousled heads poked out of the tent.

  “Who are you? What are you doing here?”

  The three men were ornithologists who were studying the effects of oil exploration on the nesting of birds. Their names were Eric, Craig, and Craig. They helped me repair my rudder and offered me a camp cot for the night.

  When I opened one eye in the middle of the night, a violent wind blowing out of the north had shoved a veritable ice field against the shoreline. It would be impossible to make it all the way to Prudhoe Bay hauling my kayak over those blocks of ice.

  The next day nothing had changed. I took advantage of the opportunity to go for a hike on the tundra. My three guides, excited by my accounts of my adventures, reciprocated by showing me all the secrets of Arctic birds, including the habits and customs of each species.

  I was especially astonished by the amazing habits of the eider ducks. I knew that in summer eider ducks migrated to the Far North to lay their eggs. I also knew that the female eider ducks shed their feathers and used them to keep their young warm—hence the trademark Eider for my ultraprotective insulating winter suits. But no one seemed to know where the mysterious eiders traveled for the winter. Only recently had someone attached homing devices to a few individual ducks and discovered their incredible secret. When winter comes, they do not fly south. Instead they settle on the water, right in the middle of the Bering Strait! There, millions of them cluster together side by side in a compact mass, and they prevent the ocean from freezing over with their own body heat and the incessant paddling of their webbed feet. They dive to the ocean bottom—they are capable of descending to depths of one-hundred feet—to catch shrimp and mollusks. And this goes on all winter long! During that whole time, the enormous quantity of duck droppings enriches the seabed, and thus helped to nourish their marine food sources—a perfect natural cycle!

  * * *

  The ice was showing no signs at all of opening up, so I decided to start off again despite everything. Eric and the two Craigs recommended that I warn British Petroleum that I would be arriving in Prudhoe Bay, where the company had built a huge car-accessible causeway jutting out into the ocean about five miles. That jetty, whose pipelines hooked up with the main Alaskan pipeline, was called Endicott, and access to the area around it was strictly prohibited without special authorization.

  I was determined to get a permit for myself. So I called a certain “Joe,” who was in charge of security for the oil company in Anchorage. He refused my request brusquely. I told him that my kayak was damaged, that it needed urgent repairs, and that I needed supplies. If I was forced to choose between the danger of dying at sea and the risk of arrest, I would land on Endicott property, with or without his permission. I added that my crew was going to meet me in Prudhoe Bay and that it needed to have authorization to meet me on the jetty. I also mentioned that I was planning to alert the press to my arrival, which I thought might give him a little extra incentive.

  “Joe” wound up authorizing me to come in. His men would pick me up at the end of the jetty, and they would take me back to the same place when I was ready to leave. However, my crew was forbidden to approach. I asked again, but he wouldn’t budge. This obstructionist cop put up a wall of stupidity and treated me like garbage.

  * * *

  I continued to grapple with the pack ice, and the gusty winds made my progress even more difficult. Finally, though, I saw on the horizon the characteristic flame of deep-sea drilling platforms. I had reached the famous causeway.

  I climbed up onto it and walked calmly between the pipelines. There was no one in view in any direction. I had just entered a supposedly high-security area, and there wasn’t a guard anywhere in sight to ask me who I was.

  Finally, I chanced upon a panel with a number to call in case of an emergency, so I got out my satellite phone: “Hi, this is Mike Horn. I’m on the causeway. What are you waiting for? Come on out and arrest me.”

  There was panic at the other end of the line: “What? Where are you, exactly? How long have you been there?”

  A few minutes later, a team arrived in a truck and picked us up—me and my kayak—and took us back to Prudhoe Bay.

  The town was not a town at all, not even a village, but rather a cluster of barracks where about thirty Inuit lived, surrounded by employees of the oil company. A hotel had been built to lodge them, and an airport, served by Alaska Airlines, to bring them in and out. The place was vaguely sinister, and its second name seemed to suit it well: Deadhorse.

  There I met up with Jean-Philippe, Sebastian, and Raphaël, who had arrived before me to bring supplies of equipment and food, and to film me as I arrived and left. Sebastian had called the notorious “Joe” to request authorization to travel with the guards who had been sent to pick me up at the end of the causeway. Just long enough to take a few pictures. “No!” the head of security had answered, brusquely. Could he go back with them when they took me back out onto the jetty? Same answer. Sebastian asked if they could meet me somewhere else along the coast. “No!” yelled Joe before hanging up on him.

  It was very obviously prohibited to access the sea where the petroleum facilities were located! As for sneaking past security and reaching shore, that was out of the question. There were surveillance cameras and guards all along the coast. If I had managed to slip through the net on the causeway, it was only because I had arrived by sea.

  Frustration and anger reigned with my team members. After looking at the matter from every angle imaginable, we finally decided that my three teammates would fly to Nuiqsut, a small village located farther south on the Colville River, and there they would hire an Inuit who would take them in his boat around Prudhoe Bay, and then return along the same path as me. It would take
a day. And then they could at least film my arrival … or my virtual arrival.

  I carefully “forgot” to report this project to the guy in charge of security at Prudhoe Bay—a warm and understanding fellow, unlike his boss—when he accompanied me back to the end of the jetty.

  * * *

  When I got out to the causeway, though, it was impossible to leave. The wind blew so hard it would have driven my kayak back against the rocks.

  Wrapped in my sleeping bag, I waited in the lee of the causeway for the squall to die down. Without having planned to do so, I gave Jean-Philippe, Sebastian, and Raphaël, who had already left Nuiqsut, enough time to catch up with me. Via satellite phone, we arranged to meet up. The next day, without any difficulties, they arrived from the sea at the same place that they had been forbidden to enter, and were thus able to film my “arrival” and follow me for two days.

  * * *

  I spent a last night in the cabin where we had all camped together on the banks of the Colville River (also off limits, by the way), and then I headed back out to sea. The ice had all melted at last, and despite a slightly stronger wind, I sailed straight for Cape Barrow. I camped on the tundra not far from the shore, near streams that had become, along with the rain, my sole source of potable water. The sky was clear, the sea was calm, and the summer temperatures—between fifty and sixty degrees—allowed me to wear shorts and a T-shirt. In these conditions kayaking was a picnic, an outing that I could have shared with my daughters.

  The next day, July 16, I would turn thirty-seven.

  “Mike, what would you like most for your birthday? A day of rest, when you wouldn’t have to do anything but sleep, eat, drink, and stroll around to restore the circulation in your legs, all cramped from being in the kayak?”

  I answered myself that this was certainly a tempting offer but that I would hate myself the next day for having failed to make any progress.

  I had a better idea. I had been born on July 16, so I would paddle for sixteen hours on my birthday. I was born in 1966, So I would cover at least sixty-six kilometers, or forty-one miles, that day. It would be a practical, superstitious birthday gift to myself.

  * * *

  The next day at dawn I wished myself a happy birthday, gobbled down my breakfast, and hopped into my kayak. In a state of euphoria, I put my pedal to the metal, taking risks by crossing bays on a straight line from one cape to the other, which sometimes took me as far as sixteen miles from the shore. I was fortunate enough to escape the wind’s punishment. After sixteen hours, I angled in to the mainland. When I finally reached shore, my GPS told me that I had covered forty-two and a half miles, which worked out to sixty-eight and a half kilometers! My personal best in the kayak, and a birthday present that I had really earned.

  I fell asleep, exhausted, with a smile on my lips.

  * * *

  Obsessed with the fear of arriving too late and having to wait until the end of winter to cross the Bering Sea, I slept less and only ate when I was hungry. I paddled with all the energy that came from being in shape again. My kayak was lighter and lighter, and the wind sometimes helped by allowing me to hoist sail. Without repeating my birthday record on a daily basis, I still managed to make an average distance of about thirty miles.

  The nights were filled with caribou silhouettes. One of them woke me up with a start when it slipped its head into my tent. Then we posed together for a photograph.

  Less amiable were the clouds of mosquitoes, so dense that you couldn’t open your mouth without swallowing a handful. It was a relief to escape them each morning when I paddled out onto the water.

  To save time I would sometimes sleep in the kayak. Lulled by the immense peace of the ocean, I would set down my paddle when I felt sleep coming on. The Beaufort Sea is muddy and shallow. You can even sometimes touch bottom three miles away from shore. The currents are weak, too, so only a violent storm could blow me out to sea, but the gales would wake me up from my drifting sleep before that could happen.

  * * *

  On July 21, two days away from Cape Barrow, my GPS indicated that I was exactly midway through my trip. I had covered 6,200 miles, out of the 12,400-mile distance of my complete circumnavigation of the Arctic Circle. It had taken me nearly a year to get this far, and it might take me that long again to finish the trip. The only thing that I knew for sure was that starting from this point and this moment, I would be on my way home the rest of the time.

  I memorialized the moment by taking a picture of my kayak resting on a sandbar. While taking the picture, I noticed two eider ducklings about to be attacked by a bird of prey. I couldn’t help myself. I hurried over to scare the predator away and to get the ducklings to shelter. Let’s just say that I saved two little lives to celebrate my triumph.

  * * *

  The thirty- and forty-knot winds blowing west for the next two days would normally have prevented small craft from venturing out to sea. But my kayak was so light that it just went faster, and my sail worked perfectly. Pushed along by the tailwind, I had the time of my life surfing over the waves. I wouldn’t have traded those days for anything in the world. When I thought back on the winter months I had just endured, I felt as if I were on vacation.

  * * *

  Located on Cape Barrow, the little town of Barrow is a typical Arctic cluster of boxy houses, whipped by high winds and snow squalls. At seventy-one degrees north latitude, Cape Barrow is the northernmost point on the mainland of the continent, America’s North Cape.

  I reached Barrow at one in the morning. The first two inhabitants that I met were Inuit, and they were both falling-down drunk, but that didn’t keep them from generously offering me the hospitality of their sofa for the rest of the night. Just before collapsing into sleep, we celebrated my arrival by opening a bottle of wine.

  The next day Cathy reported a wonderful coincidence: Vagabond was in Barrow! Vagabond was the sailboat on which my friend Éric Boissier had, just the year before, navigated the Northeast Passage, which was the water route along the northern coast of Europe and Asia between the Atlantic and Pacific oceans. This year he was attempting to complete what he had already started and become the first man to sail around the Arctic Circle in two seasons by sailing the length of the Northwest Passage.

  For the past two years we had known that, since both our expeditions were planned for the same period of time, we might be able to meet up somewhere in Alaska—without knowing where, of course.

  Éric and his girlfriend, France, introduced me to Christine Lambert, who was in charge of the housing construction program for the entire North Slope. When Vagabond tied up in Barrow, Christine got in touch with the sailboat’s occupants and offered them a place to stay. With the same spirit of generosity, she offered me accommodation as well. And so I left the sofa of my Inuit friends and moved into her house. Her older children had moved out some time before, and she adopted me immediately. She fed me, helped me with my laundry, and took me to see the only dentist in town to have a molar taken care of that had been bothering me ever since I cracked it on a frozen chocolate bar four months earlier. While I was there, I asked the dentist to take a look at an old crown that had come loose a few weeks before. I had stuck it back into place with superglue.

  Truly a guardian angel, Christine Lambert even called up the governor of Alaska and asked him to intervene with the Russian authorities to try to facilitate my passage through Chukotka. When I told her about how important it was for me to have a weapon when crossing the Russian steppe and how much trouble I had had in procuring one, she promised me that she would look into the problem.

  * * *

  I had hoped to swap my kayak for my sailboat in Barrow. It was clear that I would need a boat because I would reach the Bering Strait in August, and therefore would not be able to cross it on foot. My boat was finally freed of the ice north of Baffin Island, but I couldn’t arrange to get it transported to the west coast of Alaska in time for my departure. Threrefore I was in the market for a new
boat. Since I was already familiar with the Corsair Marine trimaran, I purchased a twenty-four-foot model at the recommendation of the company representative. I had it built in San Diego, taken by trailer as far as Seattle, and then loaded onto a barge run by the Bowhead Transport Company, which was supposed to deliver it to Point Hope on the west coast of Alaska on the first of August.

  However, because of the bad weather that was causing all sorts of problems with cargo routes, Bowhead was running late. I could have them transfer my trimaran onto one of their barges running the sea lift, which is the annual resupply of all the villages along the north coast. The sea lift would arrive in a month. Since I was ahead of schedule, I could afford the delay. But I had ants in my pants, and the urge to get across the Bering Strait was driving me crazy.

  I would pick up my boat as scheduled at Point Hope.

  * * *

  A series of bad storms blowing out of Russia battered Barrow for eight days running, and the weather forecasts predicted that there would be weeks of this. There was no chance of setting out in my kayak in sea conditions this rough.

  But if I couldn’t go by boat, I could still go on foot. A fan of my adventures, the local manager of an air-freight company, Hagland Air, offered to ship my kayak anywhere I asked free of charge. I told him that I would be very grateful and assured him that Wainwright, a village located 125 miles away, would be more than sufficient. I should be there in four or five days. If the weather improved, I could pick up my kayak and proceed by water from there.

  I shipped most of my gear and supplies with the kayak, and I carried with me a sleeping bag that a friend of Christine had sent me from Anchorage. I marched along the Skull Cliffs, behind which stretched a marshy tundra crisscrossed by streams and rivers and studded with lakes that were hard to cross. Ocean inlets regularly forced me to take detours around them, and there were plenty of large bays that lengthened my route. It was easy to understand why people preferred to travel by boat and by plane around here.