Taiwan Part Two -- NOT climbing

Taiwan Part Two

The last few days in Taiwan have really educational and devoid of climbing. Joanna and I had spent the previous mornings eating copious amounts of bread but today we said goodbye as she went off to do her lecture for the law school and I went to the lobby to await my guide for the day. As promised, I was taking an arranged trip to Kaohsiung, “a city of glamour” as the promotional literature says. It is really one of the biggest industrial bases of Taiwan with what used to be the third largest port in the world, which is another way of describing glamour, really.

My guide was a law student and assistant for the professor who had organized the trip -- Tsai-wen, or 楊采文, in Chinese characters. We were taking the high speed train, which goes really fast, but is evidently not as well used as the slower trains because of the cost. Upon arriving in Kaohsiung we were met by a student from the local university and a hired tour guide. I have no idea why the extra student was there. Tsai-wen had said he had read my articles and had volunteered to spend the day with us as a local guide, but I think that was just flattery since he was in sociology and working on local issues of ethnic identity. In the network of contacts that has been mobilized to make this trip possible, I think this poor kid got dispatched by his professor to make sure nothing happened to us. Vincent, the hired tour guide, had two masters degrees, one in finance from the University of Florida. Evidently, he used to work in the tech industry, but found guiding tourists to be more entertaining.

Our little troup then commenced a driving tour of Kaohsiung. We saw the stadium built for the World Games in 2009 – it has solar panels for roofs and is shaped to evoke the idea of a dragon. We went to a museum with an exhibit on contracts – which seemed like a strange place to take visitors, but then I wasn’t the normal visitor. We saw the Love River, which runs through the city and everyone is really proud of. Then, we went to city hall.

[My entourage at the museum]

Professor Ching-Yi Liu who had arranged this trip has connections with the city here and if I were to figure out an underlying motivation for organizing this trip, it would have been to give me exposure to the pro-independence part of the country and to hear from those who are most avidly anti-Chinese state control.

So, the just recently re-elected mayor is evidently very popular, at least according to her supports. She had been imprisoned by the government because of her activism back in the 70s. I think I met her, but I’m not sure – we met a woman who may have been the major who was leaving the office on her way to a meeting. It is an understatement to say I was pretty out of what was going on most of the day since I had no decision making power or ability to make informed decisions.

We did meet with a woman whose business card only said “advisor” on it. At this point I had run out of the business cards I had brought with me – a horrific mistake given how important the exchange of business cards is here. It turned out she was a Taiwanese expat who was black listed for decades and makes her home in Belgium now. When the government rescinded the black list, she began making the trip back to Taiwan every year.

We talked in the office about local politics and political history and then it became apparent that she wanted to join our group to go see the Formosa Boulevard subway stop. In fact, she insisted that she be able to take us there. Now, I am used to wandering around cities all by myself, getting lost, and eventually finding my way home on my own. I am definitely not used to having four tour guides in tow. This is as close to an entourage as I think I will ever get.

We all trooped out of the mayor’s office and back to the car. Now there were five of us in the Toyota and I was hoping we didn’t end up picking up another person along the way. Our new companion was telling stories about the political tensions regarding independence. When we got to the subway station, Vincent dropped us off and went somewhere with the car. I think he might have been just slightly annoyed at having his job as tour guide usurped by a political activist from the mayor’s office.

The Formosa Boulevard subway station is dedicated to the “Formosa Incident,” also described by the powers that be as “the Kaohsiung violent rebellious incident.” The Formosa incident was a political protest on the part of those advocating for democracy that was crushed by the KMT (the political party that basically ruled Taiwan as a one-party state post WWII). Those involved were arrested, some were sentenced to death, though had their sentences commuted to life in prison, and the event serves as one of the markers of political resistance as well as a spark for the eventual democratizing of politics in Taiwan. It is now commemorated with the largest stained glass circular ceiling in the world. The tube station also has a center for human rights and a small open university space inside.


[My entourage at the Formosa MRT station]

After seeing the station, our political advisor guide was dropped back off at city hall and we went on to see the remains of a fort from WWII built along the beach. They have a black sand beach here which is quite nice and some cliffs. I, of course, was much more interested in the cliffs. Our final stop was to have dinner with a professor from the university (and the advisor for the student who had been with us all day). There was some connection between this professor and the one who had arranged the trip, but I am not exactly sure what the connection was and nobody said. As an introvert, I was about at the end of my ability to manage on the social front around new people. However, everyone was really nice and interesting to talk to and the food was great.

[Picture of the city from the ferry to the fort]


I recovered from having to interact with people all day by promptly falling asleep on the high speed train back to Taipei. Hopefully I didn’t snore.

Wednesday was to be my climbing day and the day I had been looking forward to all week. Nobody here understood why I would want to go rock climbing and everyone attempted to dissuade me from doing so. Of course I woke to pouring rain. The guide I had hired, an American expat named Matt, said that we should drive out there anyway. He picked me up at the hotel and we took the hour plus drive to the coast where it was raining harder. He claimed it would be possible to climb the wet rocks in the rain – that the friction would be good – but suggested we walk the cliff line first and I could check it out. So we did that – getting soaking wet.


[This is what the rock looks like]



The tide was really high and so at one point we had to do a bit of boulder hopping (my least favorite thing to do) while timing it so the waves wouldn’t sweep us off the rocks. Matt said if I was pulled in that I should just stay calm because I would eventually get pushed back (it had happened to him once). There was also a really fun traverse about 30 feet above the crashing waves along a rock ledge. Some of the normal way was under water so we did get to do some mini-bouldering. We had lunch in a cave, finished the walk of the cliff line, then hiked up to the top to see the view and walk back down the managed trail. While this took about three hours – Matt was talking about the climbs and stories about climbers most of the time – it was pretty clear that climbing was not going to happen. He kept saying it was up to me, and I kept thinking I am not nearly hard core enough to climb in the pouring rain on wet rock, even though I had engineered my entire trip around these two days. In the end, I basically paid a guy to drive me to look at rocks and talk to me all day. It sounds kind of pathetic, really.




[we crossed down there]


[It seems like there should be a big circle with a red x through the picture]

The original plan was two days of climbing, but of course Thursday was pouring rain as well. I spent the day convincing myself I did NOT need the really cool Japanese-made laptop backpack for $400 US I had seen at the designer mall. Instead, I convinced myself I really DID need to save my money to buy a washing machine for about the same amount when I get back home. Thus, I went to the contemporary museum instead which cost the equivalent of $3 US to see. There were some really interesting exhibits of modern Chinese and Japanese artists, including an installation I could only call 1970s fluorescent soft porn. I also went to the climbing store conveniently located only a few blocks from the hotel where I got a guidebook for Taiwan. I may not be able to climb here, but I can look at the pictures!

For my final evening in town, Professor Liu took me to the hot springs. Now, my vision of a hot spring are pools of hot water outside, sometimes requiring a hike to get to them. The hot springs here are really spas… hotels where the water is piped in. Thus, we really went to the spa. Not having any idea what to prepare for, I did not come with a swimming suit. As we neared the hotel, I was wondering what the convention would be – in terms of what you wear in these hot springs. It turns out to be nothing. They are, however, divided by gender, so we were in the women’s public bath – which included pools of varying degrees of hotness, saunas, and this really cool rain pool which was like standing in a warm rain shower. I can now check hanging out in a public hot spring with a bunch of naked Taiwanese women off my list of things to do in life. Given that hot tubs are one of my all time favorite luxuries, this was a fabulous way to end a cold and dreary day.

The spa experience came with dinner where Ching-Yi talked about taking constitutional law from Obama and the current political situation in the U.S. We drove back to the hotel by one of the night markets, which I never did get to go to.

I’ve had an amazing time, learned an enormous amount, and promised all my new Taiwanese friends that I will take them climbing if they ever come to Hawaii – which may not actually be an incentive for them, given their reaction to my sport of choice. Of course, this morning as I pack, the sun is out and the rain is gone. I can hope, however, that I will be able to return to Taiwan someday and actually go climbing.

And I still have a business class return trip to look forward to.

Taiwan

It has been a bit of time since my last trip update. I think after the North Pole, it was difficult to figure out how to make my travels around the world sound interesting, given that much of my time was spent in conference halls, on planes, in hotels, and other such generic spaces. I did manage to traipse about this summer just a bit. I ended up in England for a week to attend the awards ceremony for the North Pole race, but also managed to go pub crawling during the world cup with what were most likely local football hooligans, if I understand that term correctly.

I also managed to get to Rio de Janeiro for a week during the World Cup where the conference I was attending had to be canceled the afternoon Brazil played Chile. Instead some of us ended up watching the event on a giant screen at Copacabana where I asked stupid questions like how many innings there were in a soccer match. Aside from many days in a copyright conference, I was also able to spend a couple days climbing Sugarloaf – one of the granite multi-pitch features located directly in the middle of Rio.

Given these trips happened so close to the North Pole trip, they didn’t seem all that interesting. Taiwan, on the other hand, has been nothing but interesting and as I sit in the executive lounge posing as an important person and waiting for the free cocktail hour (life at the top is very demanding and difficult), I figured I would use my spare time and free Internet connection to ramble on about my trip so far.

Several months ago, I was invited to attend a conference on Traditional Knowledge and digital archiving in Taiwan and of course said yes.

Evidently in Taiwan there is a level of respect for academics that simply does not exist in the U.S. because they flew me here business class, which has completely ruined me for economy air travel. I would like to think of myself as a cosmopolitan international traveler, but in reality I am more what Douglas Coupland has called a poverty jetsetter. It turns out that I am very easily impressed by things like real silverware, cloth napkins, seats that go all the way flat, and my own personal movie screen while sitting on an airplane. I was flying Korean Air and the airline attendants were very concerned when I ordered the bibimbap. However, after assuring themselves I could eat my food without too much help, they let me have my order. Despite being deemed incompetent to eat Korean food, I tried to pretend I fit in up in the elite section of the plane, but aside from the mother with the kid wearing gold Mickey Mouse ears, there were no other women in Business class. Actually, there was hardly anyone in Business class. Needless to say, the flight was so enjoyable, I didn’t really want to get off the plane when we landed – how often can you say that?

Arrival in Taiwan made me aware of an entirely new level of travel support. I cleared customs and headed towards the front gate assuming that my ride to the hotel would be nowhere to be found. In most cases academics are left to fend for themselves upon arrival – when I landed in Brazil, for example, the local organizers had sent us all instructions for how to take the public bus across the city to a different airport where we were to take a cab to the hotel. Here, not only was there someone to meet me, but I was immediately whisked away in a hired car to the hotel, ushered through the doors, taken to the executive floor where I was very quickly checked into my room. I managed to insult the guy helping me with my luggage by giving him a tip. I was given fruit. This all happened before I even had time to register that I had arrived. I then spent the next 30 minutes trying to figure out how to make the toilet work – it is a very sophisticated piece of electronics that seems destined for greatness. Also, as I learned the hard way, it only works if the lights in your room are turned on.

Our host, Professor Chris Huang, had made dinner plans for us and there wasn’t enough time to walk around too much so I stayed in my very luxurious hotel room. Chris took us out to dinner to a restaurant where I was able to try pork intestines for the first time. The dinner was excellent and we also were able to try the local beer – called Taiwan beer – to keep things simple.

The conference itself would only be of interest to those of you who care about intellectual property, which in my circle of friends is no one. So, I’ll skip the conference. My presentation was not that good, certainly not worthy of business class travel. I slaved for months on the presentation and practiced this thing multiple times. However, it turns out that if I slow down so that I can be translated, I loose my rhythm and forget what I want to say. Both the other speakers gave very nice presentations. We also were able to listen to translations of the papers delivered by people working on the issue locally, all of which were really interesting.

Our hosts took us to the banquet facilities on the research site for dinner. Taiwan is interesting politically because of the layers of colonization that have occurred here and the ways in which Taiwanese people are seeking to construct their identities in relation to these different occupying forces. There was an early period of Dutch colonization – and I always thought of the Dutch as such peaceful people. Actually, no one is trying to use the Dutch in their identity politics. Then, Japan controlled the island before China took power. Prior to Chinese political control, generations of Chinese-speaking people had already made the island their home. There are of course aboriginal people here (hence our conference) including 14 recognized ethnic groups, and up to 24 different languages. They have a place called the Taiwan aboriginal park where evidently you can learn about all the different cultures. However, much of this diversity is overshadowed by the presence of China.

Needless to say, I am not providing my novice/wikipedia Taiwanese history lecture for no reason – it relates to our dinner.

I give this background because I actually am not sure how to describe our food – it seemed like Chinese food, but it might be better to call it Taiwanese food. However, in terms of presentation and approach it was quite similar to fancy dinners I have had while visiting China. I am hoping this is not an insult to people from Taiwan. There were somewhere around 12 dishes brought out, no rice was served, and there were all sorts of interesting things to eat. The crispy duck skin that you put into a sort of rice tortilla was very tasty. I can now say I have eaten jellyfish and chicken testicles. I didn’t even really think about chickens having testicles, let alone things that were as big as what we ate, but there you have it. They didn’t really taste like chicken and I will add that none of the men ate the chicken testicles – some sort of statement of solidarity with the male chickens it would seem.

It turned out that the foreign speakers were not invited to attend the conference the next day because they had not ordered translators for that part of the event. This meant that the three of us who had been invited to speak had a day to do something in the city. Actually, our hosts decided we probably should not venture out on our own. Thus, a student was taken from what might have been her otherwise enjoyable Sunday and forced to go to the National Taiwan museum with three western academics. She was very good about it.

The museum was great. It had scores of Chinese art treasures – many of which were brought to Taiwan when Chiang Kai-shek (you should have seen my initial spelling of that one) moved part of the Chinese government to Taiwan, creating an incredibly complex political situation that has resulted in today’s cross cutting issue – independence from China. The museum houses enormous numbers of Chinese paintings, sculptures, bronzes and such. Much like visiting a museum on mainland China, I was struck by how advanced Chinese art is compared to similar periods in European history.

The museum was very crowded. According to our student guide, Emily, (not her real name, just her English name since westerners are hopeless at Chinese pronunciation), everyone at the museum was a tourist from China. The big and most famous piece on display was a jade cabbage. We were not able to see the jade cabbage because the lines were so long and the crowds so big. However, it seemed to be a huge draw – and there were lots of replicas of the cabbage in the gift shop.

Despite our failure to see the jade cabbage, walking around a museum with thousands of tourists was quite tiring. We headed back to the hotel and thanked Emily for her kind hospitality. Then took a brief rest before heading out into the streets on our own. Brad, a law professor from Australia, who had been here a few days prior to us knew the lay of the land and thus walked us through how to use the subway which saved a lot of time looking lost. Our goal, such as there was one, was to go to the Eslite bookstore by Taipei 101.

Taipei 101 used to be the tallest building in the world. It looks all the taller because there are absolutely no other buildings even close to its height anywhere around. It has, sadly, lost its status as the tallest building in the world. However, for a brief moment it helped define Taiwan as the place where the tallest building in the world is. It has also become a center for really fancy shopping.

We were going to a bookstore in the shopping district close to Taipei 101 – a bookstore that really turned out to be a shopping mall. It was the kind of shopping mall where, if I knew even a bit about fashion, I would probably have been impressed by how cheap I could get all the cool designer stuff. However, I know nothing about fashion and everything seemed really expensive. Joanna, the other IP law professor in our group teaches fashion law and knows all about these things. She was having a great time checking out all the different designer labels. Because we are all interested in intellectual property, we cannot go through a space like this without discussing all the trademark related issues. Nerds are nerds, even if they are looking at expensive fashion.

The bookstore ended up being a couple floors above the shopping mall. The other thing nerdy academics do is go to bookstores, even when the books are not printed in the language they read. I was successful in finding a few books by Taiwanese authors printed in English, which I bought for the plane ride home.

Brad unfortunately had to leave for home yesterday. Joanna was taken on a shopping trip in the city and I went to the National Chengchi University (NCCU) to give a lecture to a law school class on intellectual property related issues. The students were all very polite, but asked no questions. The faculty members who attended did ask questions, which was very nice of them. We all went out to lunch at a French steakhouse after the lecture that evidently has served all the important “blue party” officials. As I mentioned before, independence from China is the key issue and members of the blue party are pro-China. We had a good lunch talking politics and comparing university policies. The Taiwanese scholars at lunch, almost all of whom have degrees from elite U.S. universities, are puzzled by Sarah Palin, the tea party, and the current trajectory of American politics and were interested in my opinion about the wikileaks issue.

The lecture, lunch and getting back to the hotel took up the vast majority of the day. As part of the incredible and never ending hospitality of our hosts, another professor and co-investigator for the digital archive project has helped arrange a trip for me tomorrow to the southern part of Taiwan. Thus, I will be getting up early to take a bullet train to Kaohsiung, spending the day there, and then returning by bullet train late in the evening. I am really excited by the entire prospect and I am sure will have much more to write about that trip and my climbing (weather permitting) in the days to come.

Part Three: The Race to the North Pole Begins ... and Ends

To the astonishment of the race organizers, we had all made it to the starting line and there was nothing to do but begin the race. The morning of the race there was lots of hugging and taking pictures and saying goodbye as if we were not actually going to see each other as we trudged north. Actually, the organizers had said that we most likely wouldn’t see other teams after the initial three hours of the race. Much like the claim we wouldn’t see polar bears, this wasn’t exactly true.

While we had been preparing for the race for some time, it seemed a bit surreal to be standing in the middle of nowhere with a start line constructed for us to go over. It raised questions as to the appropriate way to begin a 280 nautical mile race.

Scott, the media guy for the race, whose words of wisdom about “mind over matter when dealing with the cold” had stuck with me from our Norway trip because he had delivered them while walking us to the train station in a toga at night in the snow, had said that teams took a variety of approaches to the start. Some ran screaming towards the north, others milled about for a while before getting underway, others just meandered off. I was hoping for the mill about start – this seemed most suitable given our team’s strengths.

We were all waiting for Tony to fly in from Resolute to formally oversee the start.


[Photo: Plane coming in over the start line]

The plane finally arrived and then in a piece of cinematographic deception, Scott filmed us all crossing the start line, but pretending to cross the finish line, because he wasn’t going to be at the finish line and it was a nice day. I can guarantee that none of us looked so energetic when we did actually cross the finish line. Also, the winning team crossed in the middle of a really huge storm, so no sunny celebratory pictures during that finish. Besides being at the start instead of the finish, the terrain looks mostly the same.

Finally, we were ready to go and all lined up under the Extreme World Races banner waiting for the gun. Minutes before the start, Ellen’s pulk trace (the rope holding the pulk to the backpack) broke, solidifying our start plan. The gun went off, we all cheered, and then, sort of anticlimactically, everyone just started walking or skiing away. Strangely, one team headed immediately southwest and I wondered if they had been given some sort of insider information about going in the wrong direction. We, on the other hand, took up our position in last place, walked about 100 meters and then stopped to fix Ellen’s pulk, thinking we should at least make it over the starting line and away from the race organizers before making our first stop.



[Photo: Start of the Race]

Sixteen Days, Nine Hours and Twenty minutes later we finished the race, at least that was the official time. I’m not exactly sure how they calculated this time down to the minute, given nobody had a digital watch and there was no race clock, but I will take their word for it.

That is really all you need to know, so feel free to stop reading here. However, if you have nothing better to do, read on. I could, of course, at this point provide for you a detailed account of each of those sixteen days but really, after about the first four or five days, pretty much everything that was even remotely interesting had already happened at least twice and all we were doing was walking slowly north across sea ice. Not that the sea ice didn’t provide its own unique challenges, but we left the only bit of actual topography that required navigation on day four and then it was far less easy to get lost.

So, I will provide only the highs and lows of the race itself and not the daily details. Even so, this will still take somewhere around ten or so pages I imagine.

As we had been told, all the participants quickly turned into little black dots on the horizon going in a variety of directions. Strangely, despite the fact we were on sea ice, we spent the entire first day feeling like we were walking up a long sloping hill. I am not sure if it is possible for the ocean to freeze in an uphill direction, but if so, that is what happened. Other race participants confirmed this feeling later. Gary denied that the ocean had frozen, or could freeze, uphill. I’m sure this is some sort of arctic novice faux pas to even ask such a question.

Our team had painstakingly created over 20 waypoints to keep us on track over Batthurst Island, which turned out to be a good idea because we were never lost, never ended up falling off a cliff, and generally knew where we were at all times. Actually, a lot of sentences involving the map began with, “I think we are here….” Then, assuming that assumption was correct, we could pretend we knew where we were going next. Everything was much bigger than it looked like it would be from the map.

[Photo: Batthurst Island]

[Photo: Batthurst]


While the best teams only took two days to cross the island, those of us in the back spent considerable time on land. We had a couple meet and greets with each other along the way. For example, my team had mapped the exact same route as James Hooley (the only solo racer) and we saw his tent the first two nights before he just left us in the dust (snow in this case).

[Photo: Arctic Landscape]


The race organizers had warned us about following ski and snowmobile tracks because they were not necessarily going in the direction we would want to take. This is easier said than done when you are going in the same direction. Given we were the slowest, we were always seeing tracks. James’ were a case in point – we honestly were not following him, but it was hard NOT to follow his tracks. We decidedly DID NOT follow him when, for all intents and purposes, it looked like he had jumped off a cliff to his death. His pulk tracks just ended at the lip of this really steep cliff. Fortunately he survived and told me later that trying to descend there had been a very bad idea. We, I thought wisely, chose an easy descent into the same valley.

On the following track business, somewhere between checkpoint two and three we came across what could only be referred to as the Polar Challenge freeway – at least five or six of the teams had just joined the line and followed the tracks. We were not an exception. Who knows how many miles this could have added to our trip, but it sure made it easy not to think about navigation for a day.

We had a happy reunion with Team Shepperd and the Cheeserollers on day four. Their trip across Batthurst had been considerably more interesting. With only four waypoints, they spent one day going only 5 nautical miles as they tried to navigate around the considerable topography. They spent another day being followed by a baby Musk Ox for 11 nautical miles, listening to its plaintive bleats until it just laid down in the snow. In fact, it is my assertion that the Cheeserollers would have been contenders for first place, but for the navigation issue. Also, they stopped to role cheese down some ice features and I’m sure the first place team didn’t do this. You can watch the arctic cheeserolling on YouTube. Evidently, while a traditional practice in Gloucestershire, it has been outlawed for health reasons. No such constraints exist on international waters, so they cheese rolled away.

[Photo: The only color I saw the entire time]


Once the Cheeserollers passed us, they left us nice messages in the snow, not that we saw all of them because of course we were not following their tracks. However, they had clearly taken the highway too. It was fun to get the messages.

Our days fell into a routine. After quickly and efficiently setting up our tent (Dell and Ellen’s job), I would get the stoves going and begin to melt ice for water and food. We would eat dinner, melt our water, make our scheduled call to the race organizers, and be in our sleeping bags by about 9:00. We would get up at 3:00 am. I would then make breakfast, boil water for our hot liquids for the day, and melt more ice into water. We would pack up and be on our way, usually about 6:00 or 6:30. After pull pole at 6:00 (or so) we would proceed to walk very slowly for the next twelve hours, or sometimes thirteen, with breaks that just got longer each day. We would then repeat the process described above.

I spent all my time while in the tent sitting by the stoves. I learned to enjoy watching steam rise, ice melt, and water boil as the primary forms of evening entertainment. I also said, “what did you say?” a lot because the stoves were really loud and most of the time I couldn’t hear what was going on in the rest of the tent, meaning about six inches from me since the tent was pretty small. I managed not to burn any meals and only burned a small hole in the tent itself. I did, however, melt the lids off two nalgene bottles, rendering one of them unusable. We had been issued dog bowls to eat out of and one of these broke before checkpoint one, but I’m pretty sure it wasn’t my fault – they were cheap dog bowls.

During the days, our travel schedule initially followed a 90 minute walk, then 3 minute break routine. We would then stop and drink and eat things. We also ate while we were walking, so drinking liquids was the primary goal of the break. We were supposed to be very militaristic about the timing of the breaks, but we never accomplished a three-minute break. After about day four, we kicked it up to a two-hour walk and a six-minute break, but even then we were not particularly militaristic about it. Finally, except for really bad weather days, we gave up on timing the breaks all together and I’m fairly sure they were about ten minutes. Finger numbness was generally the motivating factor to get moving again. Each break required about 10 minutes of finger warming afterwards.

Our general pattern of travel tended to be single file with each of us alternating with navigation and taking up the bear watching position in back. However, it became clear that our differential paces were gong to make travel incredibly arduous. For the faster walkers it was difficult to go slow and wait. For the slowest person, the days were a challenge of keeping up and only getting the scheduled breaks instead of the multiple waiting breaks we were enjoying, not that standing around getting cold is enjoyable. Depending upon who was leading, the distance between us would grow to such a degree that if a polar bear were to wander by, we would have been helpless to do anything about it. I spent considerable time in the back of the line in order to ensure that at least two of us were together, even though we were only armed with the bear sparklers. Dell usually scurried off well beyond earshot with the gun.

We found out later that Team Global Village had seen somewhere between 9 and 11 polar bears, been followed by the same baby Musk Ox as the Cheeserollers for 2 days and saw a slaughtered seal. The Cheeserollers and other teams had seen polar bears too. Team 1010, we found out, was charged by a polar bear and had to shoot the gun at it. We managed to navigate through what is called “polar bear alley” without seeing any polar bears at all. We did see a herd of musk ox moving quite quickly in the distance. Fortunately, they didn’t come near us since we had not been trained on what to do if stampeded by a musk ox herd.

I enjoyed navigating across Bathhurst and while the slowness of our pace was frustrating, it was off set by the fact there were hills to climb up and down and the map to check. I had known coming into the race that we would never win or be competitive, but I had thought we would race, meaning that at least some effort would be put into competing, which would inevitably require some amount of discomfort. Not so.

On day four, having only covered half the distance to Checkpoint One and needing to cover a bit over 50 nautical miles to stay in the race, we experienced a bit of a Lord of the Flies moment where the frustrations of going so slowly were openly vented. This happened during the middle of a steep descent into a gully. I am sure that courses teaching interpersonal team relationships could use us as a case study on how not to handle conflict.

I have empathy for being the slowest person on a trip, given that I spend a considerable amount of time climbing with people that are faster than me and am used to statements such as the following: “Debbie, if you move faster, we will get back to the car before tomorrow.” Or “Debbie, try to move your body in a forward direction instead of flinging your arms and legs sideways. It is more efficient.” Or, “Debbie, it hurts the same amount if you go fast or slow.” To which I tend to reply, “just leave me here,” because at the point these statements are typically uttered the idea of sleeping in the middle of the trail is quite appealing. While I am sure my many climbing partners have been tempted to do just that, they have all patiently waited for me to scuttle forward at an agonizingly slow pace. To them I apologize for my slowness and have a new appreciation for their torment. As a result, I tried to keep my comments during the team melt down to the more fact based ones. My contribution went along the lines of outlining the math. While I am not being very good at math, especially story problems, I figured that if it took us 4 days to go less than 50 miles and we still had over 50 miles and three days, things did not look so good for our ability to make it to Checkpoint One. Furthermore, if we had to melt ice for five hours a day, that meant we had to sleep less, walk more, or walk faster. We ended up walking more and sleeping less for the next few days.

As a result of the team melt down, I abandoned any pretense that this was a race or that I should try to compete as if it was. Instead, I decided that I was on slow amble to the North Pole. While the pace remained slow, at least the stress of having to try was lifted.

[Photo: Bathrooms at Checkpoint One]


After the team melt down, Ellen decided my nickname would be “JR” for “just right” as in “not too slow,” and “not too fast”, but “just right.” The three bears analogy also meant that I was “baby bear,” assuming baby bear is part of a dysfunctional nuclear family where papa and mama bear don’t really talk to each other and instead rely upon their child to mediate all communication. I preferred to also think of it as in I was always correct.

Given weather and terrain considerations, we spent a lot of time walking single file.

[Photo: Walking Single File]


You would think that spending time walking slowly north would provide ample opportunity to discover the meaning of life, your place in the universe, or puzzle through the big life decisions you need to make. Perhaps some people did these things.

For me, the internal conversation went something like this:

I’m so bored.
We are walking so slowly.
How could anything be more boring than this?
I need to think about something.
I know, I’ll think about the public policy syllabus I have to write.
…
That was boring.
Ok, do I have anything interesting to think about?
…..
Evidently not.
My life is a failure…
That is simply not an uplifting thing to think about.
…
I’m so bored.
Let me look behind for polar bears.
Nope, no bears.
Maybe I’ll drag my ski poles for a while.
….
That was boring.
Ok, I really should think about that syllabus.
….
I have an idea for the first part of the class.
I can’t stop and write it down.
Perhaps I’ll remember it.
….
Nope.
How many minutes until the next break?
Yay, boredom to stop in twenty minutes.
Let me see how long I can make this piece of candy I just pulled out of my pocket last.
I’m so bored.
I know, I’ll write a song describing our trip.
….
Crap, now I have a song that I made up making endless loops in my head.
It is a horrible song.
I’m so bored.
Are there any polar bears behind us yet?
Nope.
Maybe I’ll put on a different hat.
That took five minutes.
Wow, this fur microclimate thing really works.
Now I’m too hot.
I’m so bored.
Oh, there is an interesting piece of ice.

[Photo: Interesting Ice]

…
I’m so bored.
Now the clouds have flattened the light.
I didn’t see that hole I just fell in at all.
Now I’m bored and I can’t see where I’m going.
If I break my leg I wouldn’t have to continue.
But then I would be a quitter and I’d still have to walk to the next checkpoint with a broken leg.
I’m so bored.
Only 200 miles to go.

It went on like this for days. Literally.

That is not to say we didn’t talk. While Dell and Ellen didn’t spend much time talking to each other, I would spend time talking with both of them at different points during each day. Ellen and I talked about a lot of things, including the social construction of beauty, political philosophy, art, music and politics. We tried to tell each other in as much detail as possible the plot lines for movies we had seen and books we had read, which is much harder than it sounds. She told me The Shining with lots of little extra factoids. I told her the plot to Buckaroo Banzai: Across the 8th Dimension. I also told Ellen the basics of Plato’s Republic and promised an entire series of lectures on Western political philosophy. Rest assured, this did not make us move faster.

I also tended to go on in great detail about climbing trips I’ve been on or specific climbs I’ve done. I am sure this was as boring to Dell and Ellen as Western Philosophy. Unless you are a climber, hearing someone describe the moves to this really cool climb they did is probably up there with how to wire a house or do plumbing, except way less practical.

We did make an attempt to incorporate Dell into the story telling idea, but he had no interest in talking about the plotlines of fictional works. He preferred to tell stories about himself, he said. Dell’s primary communicative topics included his job, his life, beer, how much pot he smoked, how much things cost, and the fact global warming doesn’t exist. At the end of sixteen days, I had heard all of Dell’s stories more than sixteen times. Dell and I had basically the same conversation every day in my own personal version of Nietzsche’s eternal return, or the movie Groundhog Day, whichever reference you prefer. I think this probably had to do with how much pot he had smoked.

There were moments of epiphany during the trip that made for a better experience. At some point I realized that the lecture on how to dress for arctic conditions doesn’t have to be followed step by step – you can mix and match your clothing options. After that I wore more clothes.

One of the more significant epiphanies occurred during a break when I complained that we couldn’t really drink our drinks because they were too hot and we were burning our tongues. I was devising a complex scheme, involving heating liquids to different temperatures designed to have cooler drinks in the morning and the hotter ones that would cool during the day. Then we looked around and remembered what we were sitting, walking, sleeping, and sometimes skiing on – ice and snow. Problem solved.

A different problem emerged when the wind picked up, the clouds come down, and visibility was limited to a couple hundred yards. During conditions such as these, it was difficult to find something to point to for navigational purposes. One day, somewhere around day six, we were struggling forward under these conditions using the GPS, which tended to send us in big s-curves because of its sensitivity. Finally, we discovered that given the fact we wanted to head north and that the wind was coming from the north, it made much more sense to just point our heads into the wind and go. Problem solved.

Our days of walking did have some fairly nice moments. The sun never sets this time of year and instead circles around all day. In the mornings, the sun would be to the east, by mid-day it was behind us, in the evenings to the west, and then during the “night,” it was in the north. On a sunny day when you could see the snow and ice features, it was a beautiful and stark landscape.

I remember one moment when the clouds had lifted around mid-day. I looked behind me and the entire world was sparkling. The sun was hitting the snow just right. There was a different morning early on where the air was sparkling because the sun was catching the ice crystals caught by the light breeze. I saw for the first time ever a perfect snowflake – like the kind we make paper cut outs of but don’t ever really get to see. Furthermore, while ice rubble could be frustrating to get through, it was often beautiful and provided for interesting formations.

[Ice Rubble]


[More ice rubble]


Of course, not enough nice things can be said about the taste of a toasted cheese sandwich or the people who made these at each of the checkpoints.

Our days continued in the same general pattern with the exception of the two-day storm, which we hit right before checkpoint two but the forward most teams hit at the finish line. Because we were not racing, we had two very short days with high winds and no visibility, this wasn’t so bad because we just spent more time in the tent sleeping. We continued to slog forwards very slowly day by day, bringing us closer to the finish line.

Finally, we had about 26 miles to go and two days to finish the race. We had been navigating over the last bit of island and were getting ready to finish the day. Our path had taken us through this valley on a windless sunny evening and as we considered stopping for the night. Dell argued we should keep moving because it was so nice but Ellen wanted to stop because she was tired. I wasn’t tired and had been enjoying the weather, but I was also trying by this point to not win the race, since this was the only thing I could conceivably try to do. Thus, I was truly ambivalent about the matter of continuing versus stopping. After a rather tedious discussion, we decided to pack it in for the day, but then to try to finish the last miles in one long walk that would include putting the tent up for a dinner break. If we decided we couldn’t make it, we would just camp a few miles from the finish line and get there in the morning.

The fastest teams had crossed the finish line around the time we had arrived at checkpoint two. However, Team Global Village was still somewhere around because they kept camping within sight of our tent. They seemed to be on a more night-based schedule than we were, so they would show up after we went to sleep and we would be gone before they would get up. We preferred the “day” for walking. Another rather unexplained arctic condition is that even though the sun never sets, it is decidedly colder at “night.”

On this last day, Team Global Village passed us while we slept and we ended up converging at the magnetic North Pole. It was pretty fun to hang out on a beautiful sunny day at the North Pole, which was otherwise a very anti-climatic place. Given that its location is currently on ice, there are no markers or indications that you are actually there. I planted my ski pole in the ice to serve as something to take pictures of. It probably was not on the exact location, but close enough.

[Photo: Me at the North Pole]

[Photo: North Pole, perhaps]


After about an hour of hanging around (neither team was particularly time conscious at this point), we all set off together for the finish line which was still about 14 nautical miles away. We stayed together for about five hours, but then Team Global Village decided to head off and refused our offer of dinner. They went on to finish the race while we set up the tent and cooked dinner. At this point we realized we probably should have been having our dinners for breakfast the entire time – they provided more energy and didn’t burn off after an hour like the oatmeal we had been eating for 21 days. Also, we should have tried this setting up the tent for dinner thing more often. This epiphany was a bit too late to implement.

By 9:30 we were back on the ice for the final six-mile push. For us, this meant six more hours of walking at one nautical mile per hour (though we did end up doing it in five hours). Since we had been up since 3:00 am, this was turning into our longest day. In order to get us through the next few hours, I embarked on a lecture of western political thought. Since I had already told Ellen all about Plato, I began with Aristotle and two hours later had made it up to Locke. We were having a discussion about the labor theory of value and the meaning of private property when it was time for a break. Upon resuming our walk, both Dell and Ellen decided they preferred silence to my lecture. Understandable, really.

We finally reached the finish line at 1:30 in the morning and crossed over it before anybody noticed we were there. Then we sort of stood around waiting for somebody to realize we had arrived. Global Village had made it in a few hours before us and were asleep. There were no cheese sandwiches because the plane had forgotten to bring the bread. I was crushed.

We learned upon our arrival that all the rest of the teams had only just left that morning. The storms had made flying impossible and while we had casually been walking towards the finish line, all the rest of the teams had been sitting around waiting for a plane. Fortunately someone had brought a deck of cards. However, all of a sudden our trip didn’t seem so bad – much better than doing nothing for five days.

Not that there wasn’t anything to do – there was a nice peak I wanted to climb the next day, but we didn’t have time. Dell went out to see a wrecked plane. There was the abandoned “weather” station, meaning cold war military installation that we could look at. We had to walk through the installation to get to the runway and it was quite interesting– they left everything when they departed, the trucks, the buildings, the refrigerators full of food.

Unlike the other teams, we got a plane ride out the day after we arrived and were back to Resolute and real food that evening. More than the food, the shower after 21 days was divine. It was still another two days before we were able to leave Resolute for home, but these days went fast. Finally, after 30 days away from home, and 21 straight days of camping in the arctic, I landed back in Honolulu where life quickly got back to normal.

It has taken me some time to process the race and figure out how to tell the story. I had gone in thinking I would be physically challenged, which was disappointingly not the case. However, I had also gone in with an interest in confronting my fear of the cold – and came to realize that the cold is not that big a deal. Of course, as we all know, the temperatures were unseasonably warm.

People often ask what motivated me to do this race. One might ask, why bother racing at all. I thought about both these questions in my attempt to think something interesting while in route to the North Pole. As to my motivation, that is easy – if given the opportunity to do something new and see a part of the world I have not been, I will say yes. Typically this means I have to write a conference paper. Furthermore, unlike Dell, I do believe there is significant evidence that human-made emissions are having an impact on global temperatures and I wanted to see a part of the world that we have forever altered before it is destroyed.

On our way to Resolute we traveled with a guy named Tyler Fish who was on the first American team to make it unsupported to the geographic North Pole. This means that they spent 52 days on the ice, carried much heavier pulks (280+ pounds) because they would not get resupplied, hit open leads they had to swim across, and had to deal with ice drift. Tyler gave us a slide show about his trip before we left on our own. As he depicted in his slideshow – the arctic ice has been slowly shrinking in recent decades with 2007 marking the least ice ever seen in the region. While 2008 had more ice coverage than 2007, it was the thinnest ice ever recorded. In 2009, he said, teams making this trip didn’t have to swim across open water until day 45. In 2010 they were swimming in the first two weeks. In other words, the landscape of the region is changing and, sadly, my selfish desire to see it has contributed to that change.

On the issue of why a race, I look at it this way. Numerous books have been written about the 19th century expeditions to the North and South poles and their spectacular failures or successes. While clinging to the belief that western technology and skills were superior to those used by the local population, many North Pole trips have ended in tragedy. It should be noted that without aircraft, these journeys were considerably longer and often included having your ship frozen in ice for more than one winter.

Today, you don’t have to walk to any part of the most northern regions – you can just fly there. Furthermore, if you do decide you want to walk north, you can catch a ride on a plane to come home, as we did. We also have way better gear. In other words, to make something extreme by today’s standards means increasing the intensity of the experience, given that everything else has already been done. We are still trying to find the edge, but all the geographic and tangible edges have long since vanished.

You can see this phenomenon in other areas as well. In my sport of choice – rock climbing, people are pushing both the grades and the experience. The Eiger, for example, used to be one of the mountaineering test pieces of the Alps. It was recently soloed by a climber named Dean Potter who climbed its sheer north face without ropes, all alone, with a small base-jumping parachute on his back. I could go on, but you probably get the point.

Even someone as ordinary as me can now be outfitted with the appropriate gear to survive the arctic. Racing, it turns out, is a way of keeping the edge and pushing that edge. It also turns the challenge inwards, making it personal. Of course this doesn’t mean I want to race everything, but it does provide some insight into why something like Extreme World Races exists and why people would want to participate. On a more practical level, mounting your own expedition to the North Pole requires lots of planning and organization. Doing it this way means someone else books all the flights and worries about the details. This in itself is a tremendous value.

So, the last question I am asked is would I do it again? The answer is of course, yes, but only if I could race it this time. However, I also am ready for something different. In all the excitement of getting back, I missed the registration for the Canadian Death Race – a 147 km race with 17,000 feet of elevation change. It isn’t nearly as far as the Polar Challenge and it involves mountains, which I like. Also, it isn’t as cold and I wouldn’t have to ski, but significant pluses. I think that might be a good challenge for next summer. Who is in?

Part Two: The Trip to the Start

THE TRIP TO THE START

At 10:30 the next morning we took our final group pictures, said good bye to the comfort of beds, heating and indoor toilets and set off for the starting line. I woke up with a sore throat, which ultimately led to a head cold and me loosing my voice for the first 8 or so days of the race. However, there was no way that I was going to let a head cold stop me from doing this trip, despite running on low energy for a few days. Leanne, who I blame for infecting me with this cold, and whose team “Bearbabe” came in third, ended up skiing the entire race with what turned out to be pneumonia – she is amazing. For me, once I got over the head cold part, having no voice was only a problem if I needed to scream at a polar bear, otherwise given that we often traveled single file, there really wasn’t much occasion to talk.


[Photo: Packing the pulks for the start]


[Photo: More Race Prep]

We skied out of Resolute on a cloudy but otherwise not so cold day, only around -10 degrees Celsius or so, which doesn’t even break zero on the Fahrenheit scale.

Photo: Skiing to the start

One of the challenges of skiing in the arctic is the way that light and the whiteness of snow and ice interact. When the sky was overcast and the sun was concealed, we entered a condition of flat light, which sucks the dimensions out of the world. As a result, it is very difficult and sometimes impossible to see the variations in terrain upon which you are walking, meaning that your risk of falling down a lot is exponentially increased. Conrad said that in conditions like this all the hunters stay home because it is too difficult to navigate. All of a sudden, I wanted to be a hunter. Besides, they get to ride what the Canadians call “ski doos” or what we call “snowmobiles.” Of course, riding on a ski doo in this kind of light is probably even more dangerous than skiing in it.

Only about an hour out of town, I had had enough of skiing and took them off, attached them to my pulk, and walked freely and with liberation for the remainder or the day. In fact, on the way to the start, while I didn’t walk as much as I would later do, I did spend some part of each day walking. Mostly I was peer pressured into skiing at this point since everybody else was going it. Given that we were almost always the last team, I also got lots of experience turning around and looking for polar bears – the job of whomever is last in line. The instructors alternated between being at the head of the pack with the front-runners and going at a skull crushingly slow pace like those of us at the rear. While I am sure it was incredibly boring for them, it did give those of us in the back an opportunity to find out more about their lives and adventures, which of course made this particular trip look easy by comparison.

[Photo: Team way in front of us]

The five days skiing to the start offered us a relatively strange wind – from the south and to our backs. While most of the race we would be fighting a northern headwind, we were literally pushed at times towards the start by this southerly wind. Aside from the wind, it remained relatively warm. Typically, the five days to the start is where the weak teams, like my own, would be weeded out by the cold and weather conditions. During our race prep, Tony told the story of one team that had burned a huge hole in their tent before getting to the start and then on a windy day it almost blew away, letting everyone see the big hole which evidently they had been trying to conceal. Another pre-start story involved a former competitor going for a quick bathroom break right before the start, but being in such a hurry that he ended up with sufficient wetness in a specific area that frostbite resulted and you do not want to see the pictures of the result. We, however, did not deal with these conditions and so were not weeded out before the start.

Photo: A really nice day in the arctic

Photo: Looking for Polar Bears meant looking at scenes like this.

Photo: You have to hang your sleeping bags out to "sublimate" meaning that all the moisture is frozen off.

On one of our final days, we were given our last polar bear shot gun-training lesson. After learning how to load the guns inside, we had got to shoot them at black plastic bags on the mini-exped. Now, we would pretend that a polar bear was actually approaching us. Our gun was always loaded and the safety was off.

The general theory went something like this: we would be skiing along, minding our own business, when suddenly a polar bear would come out of the white arctic expanse towards us, most likely from behind. We were to immediately take our skis off and begin clapping them together while yelling at the polar bear. If this didn’t work, we were then to produce one of the flares issued to us and shoot that in the direction of the polar bear. These flares were brightly colored and while making no noise, were very pretty. I liked to think of them as bear sparklers because at best they would give the bear something colorful to look at and perhaps distract them from attacking us. Once the bear sparklers didn’t work, then the person with the gun was to shoot it over the bear’s head, presumably making a loud enough noise that the bear would stop advancing. Of course, we had already learned that the sound of the gun is sort of like the sound of ice cracking, so bears are used to that sound. When shooting the gun over its head didn’t work, the idea was to shoot the gun so the bullet kicked up snow in front of the bear, thus startling it into stopping. When that didn’t work, well, if you had to, you could shoot the bear. In our imaginary training, the bear always stopped when we kicked up the snow in front of its imaginary paws. All the time, the people not holding the gun were supposed to be yelling insults at the bear and clanging their skis together.

In reality, the training went something like this – our team pretended to be skiing along without knowing we were soon to be accosted by a polar bear. I did put my skis on for this particular exercise. Gary, who ran the polar bear drills announced, “a polar bear is coming at you,” we stopped, I immediately fell down, and floundered on the ground trying to get my skis off. While I was doing this, Dell and Ellen got their skis off and Dell got the gun out. I managed to get back to my feet and began digging in my coat for the beak sparklers. Now, you would imagine that given I actually knew we were going to be doing this, I would have been more prepared. You would have imagined wrong. So, while the bear advanced very slowly, at a glacial pace really, I managed to get a sparkler out of the plastic bag, unscrew the little cap that was on it, load it into the bear sparkler launching device, and then shoot it in the general direction of the imaginary bear.

As was to be expected, Gary noted that the bear was still advancing, meaning that Dell, our designated shotgun user, fired a shot in the air while Ellen and I yelled insults and clanged our skis together. Then, as that didn’t work either, the imaginary bear got snow kicked into its face, which evidently was enough to stop it. Imaginary bear drill was now complete and we took up our place as last in line and continued to our next camp for the night.

The following video is of 1010 doing their polar bear drill. They actually did encounter a polar bear and had to use their weapon. Note the threatening nature of the bear sparkler.



Evidently, there had been a real polar bear in the neighborhood while we were skiing towards the start, but Phil, another one of Polar Challenge’s instructors who found the magnetic north pole not sufficient challenge and so was planning a race/trip to the geographic North Pole, chased it off on a ski doo. This sighting did of course make me look behind more often for a few hours that is before I forgot about it.

We did actually see a real dead polar bear on the way to the start…one night after we had all set up camp we were visited by a local polar bear hunter. The politics of polar bears is fairly complex and controversial. As one of the only charismatic megafauna (one of my favorite phrases) in the high arctic and a species that is threatened, if not endangered, the hunting of polar bears highlights the clash of traditional culture with efforts to preserve and protect a species from extinction. As a result, polar bear hunting is tightly regulated in Canada and each potential hunter must enter a lottery for a polar bear hunting permit. If the hunter is lucky enough to get a permit, they are assigned a 10-day window within which to hunt. If you planned to take your vacation to Florida during that 10 days, then too bad. If you don’t kill a polar bear within your ten days, too bad. You can use your permit to take a rich American hunter out to kill a polar bear and these trips are in the tens of thousands of dollars, but new US regulations are making it difficult to bring polar bear skins back to the US, so that option is being limited. If, after your 10 days you do not kill a bear, there is a chance to be re-entered in an end of the season lottery for people who did not kill bears and perhaps get a chance to do it again.

The hunter we encountered had killed, gutted and skinned his bear, so really what we saw was a bloody polar bear skin (fairly rough fur) and a skull stripped bare of its fur, thus making this charismatic megafauna anything but charismatic. It also had very sharp teeth. Personally, seeing the teeth up close reduced my desire to see a live polar bear, or to entertain the bear with the sparklers. We, of course, did not see any bears, but other teams did and fortunately survived to tell the tale.

Photo: Polar Bear skull


Perhaps the most exciting moment of skiing to the start was seeing the dead polar bear. We saw our first polar bear tracks about 20 minutes from the start line on the last day of our approach. We had seen arctic fox prints and a breathing hole for seals, but by far the polar bear tracks were the most exciting. Over the next 16 days we would cross paths with polar bear tracks periodically and became less excited when we saw them. After all, we were becoming much more advanced polar explorers by this time and something as minor as polar bear tracks just wasn’t all that exciting anymore – except for the fresh really big polar bear tracks we saw one day.

Photo: Arctic Fox tracks


Photo: Hole in the ice -- probably for seals

Photo: Polar Bear tracks

Photo: Polar Bear Tracks

The final approach to the start was through a fairly significant rubble field, giving us a taste for some of the rubble we would see ahead. I have to say, though, that if conditions were nice, navigating through the rubble was pretty fun – it gave you something to think about and was sort of like route finding on a mountaineering or climbing trip. Otherwise, all you really had to do was point your GPS in the right way and go. We all went to bed this final night excited to finally get underway.

Long Slow Trip to the North Pole Part One -- Pre-Race Prep

PREPARATION

As you can imagine, a month away from a computer spent in a part of the world where I’ve never been before is likely to result in a lengthy report, given that I can write about 5 single spaced pages about taking a train. I say this simply to prepare you for what will be a lengthy narrative and I will be more than astounded if anyone actually reads what follows. Of course, I was pretty surprised to find out that many of you actually followed the race online, so obviously, many of you need to find a hobby. As someone who has just completed what was for me the slowest thing I have ever done, I can only imagine the excitement of logging on each day to see that the teams had made their way incrementally closer to the finish line, with my team quickly falling into last place, thus making a slow race even slower.

So, let me begin at the end. With the passage of Team America over the finish line, 2010 became the first year that all teams both started and finished the Polar Challenge, a feat that the organizers are attributing to their skilled instruction, or possibly the fact this was the warmest Polar Challenge ever. Certainly, had it been actually cold, we might have been weeded out by the start. However, I am personally of the impression that the excellent cheese sandwich making abilities of the checkpoint workers had something to do with at least finishing each leg of the race. Also, while technically a ski race, many of us chose to walk the entire thing and simply lug our skis along so we could bang them at polar bears if we ever saw them. Perhaps past participants had not figured out that they could walk it just as easily.

Be that as it may, the Polar Challenge is billed as one of the world’s most extreme races – 280 nautical miles (plus the 40 or so from Resolute to the starting line) to the 1996 location of the magnetic North Pole. Fortunately, they didn’t make us go to the current location of the magnetic North Pole, because it was much further north. The geographic North Pole is even further away and given that the ice drifts 5 miles a day in the opposite direction of travel, our pace would have assured we never would have made it there and probably would have run out of food.

After months of preparation and a trip to Norway where our team decided that being really good at setting up and taking down our tent would be the key to winning the race, we finally began the long plane ride to Resolute. My personal journey took almost 24 hours to Ottawa and then of course beyond. All the teams met in the Ottawa airport and we had something of a brief reunion.

Now that the group was united, our first endeavor was to try on our boots. After much debating over the appropriate size for such a trek and hoping to pick correctly, we each were issued boots rated to -100 degrees that evoked the 70’s rocker. They looked somewhat like platform shoes and were all white. Imagine 19 people walking through the Ottawa airport dressed in these things with matching blue jackets. Sure, we were about to do a really difficult race, but in Ottawa we just looked like a really weird tour group.

After a night in Ottawa, we continued traveling on increasingly smaller planes and through increasingly smaller airports towards Resolute. Given weather conditions and other factors we were not told about, what should have been a direct flight to Resolute from Iqaluit turned into a multi-stop route through such small places as Pond Inlet, where for all intents and purposes the airport seemed to also serve as the town. After a long day of flying we touched down in Resolute, the city furthest North in what is now known as the territory of Nunavut.



[The way to Resolute as seen from the plane.]

Resolute only became a “real” city, meaning that it became inhabited by year long residents who were not in the military or with some sort of scientific expedition, after the Canadian government forcibly relocated a group of Inuit from northern Quebec in 1953 as part of their cold war attempts to assert sovereignty over the high arctic region. They told the Inuit that it would be like northern Quebec, which it most assuredly is not, and that they could go home after a year, which turned out to be a lie. Given that the cost of a plane ticket from Iqualit to Resolute is in the thousands of dollars today, it is doubtful that those forcibly located to Resolute in 1953 would have been able to move back on their own. The Canadian government did eventually apologize (in 2008) and provide reparations, but it was a bit late by then. You can read all about Resolute on Wikipedia, which is where I got this information, though unlike many students I am telling you the source and am not cutting and pasting it directly into my narrative.



[Photo Resolute]

Photo: Outside Resolute, evidently it it melts enough to use the boat]

Upon touching down, we were picked up at the airport and brought to the South Camp Inn, one of the few hotels in Resolute and our home for the next week. Resolute, despite having officially entered “spring” according to the locals, was still covered with snow and ice. We were told we were lucky not to have arrived the week before when temperatures had dipped to -50 degrees and several people who had begun their expeditions had to be rescued. Also, evidently a lot of thermometers broke.

The South Camp Inn is run by Ozzie and his wife Eliza, one of the preeminent polar bear hunters in the region. You don’t get keys to your rooms – everything is pretty open and in terms of accommodation, it is more a dormitory style guest house than a Holiday Inn. They had a dining area where all meals were served and we spent a considerable amount of time in a big room decorated primarily by stuff people had killed and then placed in action poses – a polar bear, a couple wolves, and a musk ox. Someone had put sun glasses on the polar bear and a princess tiara on one of the wolves which helped detract from their otherwise threatening demeanors. On the wall was the full map of our race course, which looked really intimidating when you looked at it all at once.



[Photo: Animals and race course]

Our first few days in Resolute were spent preparing for the trip to the starting line and of course the race itself. There was a lot to do and not much time to do it in. First, we had to pack and organize our gear. According to the race rules, we had to bring everything issued to us, but could supplement with our own gear if we were willing to haul extra stuff. Dell had spent a lot of pre-trip time getting outdoor companies to send him gear for free and he had brought all this extra gear with him to “try out.” I had brought an extra fleece top because I knew I would be cold. Ellen had brought her own pair of gloves because the ones issued had not fit her well. Dell, among other things, had brought what can only be described as fishnet fetish underwear, which he proudly modeled for anybody who would look and then proceeded to wear for the entire trip without ever taking it off. Evidently black fishnet made out of whatever this was made out of is supposed to provide better wicking technology. I will not provide an image of a scrawny 55-year old man in fishnet for you.

Second, in our rooms we found boxes of food that we needed to organize into the separate days of the trip and by checkpoint. This involved copious amounts of plastic baggies since to eliminate excess packaging we needed to put everything into different plastic packaging. Third, we were issued our skis and forced to go out and ski some more, though at this point it seemed unlikely that I would personally master skiing before the race. Fourth, we still had to learn how to shoot guns in case of polar bear attacks. Fourth, we had to learn to read nautical charts, develop our route to the finish line, and input our coordinates into our GPS units. Finally, we had to refresh our memory on such important and crucial items like, “how to dress yourself for arctic conditions,” and “how to put up your tent without it blowing away,” and “how to avoid getting frostbite on parts of your body you want to keep,” and “if the zipper on your tent goes, it is your fault for not knowing how to use a zipper correctly.”

The race is hosted by Extreme World Races and staffed by top arctic travelers who either work for the organization or are hired on to do this particular event. The manager of the Extreme World Races event, Tony Martin, evoked for me a real-life James Bond, if James Bond only ever wore ski pants, a fleece vest and a big fluffy white hat. Tony was a captivating speaker, even on such exciting topics as “how to use a cell phone” and “if you actually use this personal location beacon you had better be almost dead or dead when we actually find you.” Mostly, I blame it on the British accent, which makes everything everyone involved in this race say sound clever and witty.

Tony spent the training week wandering in and out of our preparation lectures most likely wondering if it was such a good idea to let our group go unsupervised into the high arctic. I am sure that one of the high points for Tony was the lecture provided by pre-eminent arctic explorer and instructor, Conrad Dickinson, after we had all been issued our tents and several teams had managed to immediately break the zippers on the vestibules. Conrad (who on one of his trips to the South Pole, kite boarded something like 1,000 KM) sternly lectured us that, “zips [how the British say zipper] go up and down, not in and out” and that if the zips failed, we are using them incorrectly.

My personal favorite of the pre-start lectures was watching Rob, a man who for fun will soon run across England, swim the English channel, and bike across France, show us how to put our long underwear under our fleece layer and Gortex layer. I’m sure that standing in front of a group of 19 Arctic novices in your base layer was a high point for him as well. Gary, a former competitor in the Polar Challenge who had retired from the British military, spent an inordinate amount of time trying to get all 19 of us to arrive to lectures on time. We were a continual source of frustration for him when someone would show up a minute late or during shot gun training when we failed to follow the military procedure of all doing the same thing at the same time and instead just started shooting the guns randomly and out of order. At this point the were of course unloaded.



[Photo: Staring at the guns]

Order, attention to time, and putting everything in its proper place were emphasized by all the staff. At first I thought this was because in sub-zero temperatures you want to remain as quick as possible with everything you do. Thus, your timed breaks every 90 minutes or two hours must be exactly 3-6 minutes because sitting around in the cold will just make hypothermia or frostbite more possible. Or, we all have to “pull pole” on command and at exactly the same time (meaning take our tents down) because otherwise we stand around waiting in the cold. However, I think it was also just a military thing and didn’t have anything to do with the cold. Once on our own we quickly lost our military precision and our breaks typically went on for at least 10 minutes and sometimes longer. Of course, we also came in last, so perhaps we should have kept our breaks to 6 minutes since over the course of 16 days we probably lost at least two hours to our dallying. In our case, breaks generally ended when my fingers went numb. Had we really been faced with cold temperatures, I’m sure our breaks would have been much shorter. As it was, after each break I spent the next twenty minutes trying to warm up my fingers again anyway.

All staff were quite insistent that the tent be well organized and that everything must go back to its same specific place. In fact, this became Ellen’s primary job – and we made an instructional video of it to demonstrate how to put things in their proper places. I had thought this was a military thing too, but it turns out that everything must have a specific place because the tent and our clothing are really part of a vortex to another dimension that periodically take as a sacrifice a mitten or shoe. These incidents then cause the inhabitants of said tent to spend the next hour looking for the lost item only to have it spit back out at them in some random place. For example, Dell had the spare battery packs for the satellite phone and the GPS units in a black bag. It went missing and we took the entire tent apart looking for it, only to have it appear right next to him on the sleeping pad that evening. I’m sure that if it didn’t enter a different dimension, it was probably stuck by Velcro to some part of Dell’s body – the Velcro on our gear was uncommonly sticky.

On a different night, as we were preparing to go to bed, I lost the eye mask I used. Yes, every great polar explorer I am sure comes to the arctic with a fleece eye mask because it is nice to simulate darkness when you are in 24 hours of sunlight. Again, we took a good portion of the tent apart looking for the eye mask and of all places, it turned up in my pants – the fleece layer I had put on for sleeping. I hadn’t thought to really look in my pants, given that putting an eye mask in your pants would be similar to putting your car keys in the refrigerator. However, there it was, in my pants, and I can only blame the tent vortex since clearly I didn’t intentionally put my eye mask down my pants.

Needless to say, whether they taught us to be militaristic in our timing for a reason or just because it is what military people do, we came to understand the value of military precision as essential for our survival in the arctic. While we did not encounter the types of conditions that would necessitate true swiftness in setting up the tent or taking a break, the harsh conditions of the area require a constant attention to the time you spend sitting still and standing outside exposed to the elements. Given we spent 16 days doing the race compared to the winning team’s 10 days, we clearly didn’t acquire much in the way of military precision.

Our first full day in Resolute was spent in refresher lectures and a brief ski trip in high winds and low visibility around the surrounding area. I was reintroduced to the pleasures of skiing and falling down a lot. As the storm that had arrived continued, we interspersed our indoor lectures with outdoor activities and once issued our tents (where we broke our first zipper before we even went outside), we then proceeded to put the tent up in 25 mile/per hour winds. Despite having hotel rooms to sleep in, we were issued our -35 rated sleeping bags and spent our second night in Resolute doing the equivalent of backyard camping. We were kicked out of the hotel at midnight and couldn’t come back in until 6:00 the next morning. Upon being allowed back into the hotel the next day, we learned that other teams had suffered zipper failure during the night as well, thus leading us into the zipper lecture.

Aside from the lectures and navigation training, we also had to prepare for a “mini-exped,” as the British called it, because who doesn’t want to include an additional 20 or so miles of skiing before beginning a 320 mile race? The exped involved some short days of skiing, but mostly focused on our camping routines – setting up the tent, cooking our meals, melting snow and ice for water, and gun training for any possible encounters with polar bears.


[Photo: Getting ready outside the hotel for the mini-exped]

We were assured we would not actually see any polar bears, which turned out to be not true for many teams, but were getting trained just in case. When we embarked on the mini-exped, I was under the impression that I would be skiing this race and so was still making an effort to stay upright on what I can only refer to as death sticks. However, I was not alone in falling down all over the place. You might think that sea ice would be flat, but if you think this, you would be wrong. It is of multiple layers, some snow covered, some very slippery, it comes in mounds and ridges and hills and valleys. There are spires of ice and piles of deep snow. We navigated over relatively flat but uneven ground and then through what are called rubble fields where sea ice has erupted into features of considerable stature that are difficult to ski over, around, or through. We encountered all these different terrains during our mini-exped, which was, as it turned out, great training for the race-related terrain we would experience.




[Photo: rubble – sure it is pretty but navigating it can be a challenge]

During the first day of the exped the naming of different ways to fall down on your skis commenced. Primary among these is “the Bambi” – which is relatively self-explanatory – it involves knees and arms askew as the skier falls to the ground in an uncoordinated heap. Also popular was the “WTF” which happened for no apparent reason whatsoever. Then there was the multitasking fall, one I was particularly good at because it happened any time you a) turned around b) looked at your GPS c) tried to eat something d) talked to anybody, or e) did any of the above simultaneously.

There were a variety of other falls not named here and, of course, there were combo falls. We intended to develop a rating schematic for the falls, but never got around to it. In addition to possible falls, were the almost falls. My personal favorite was the “There’s something about Mary” which involved teetering backwards, forwards, and side to side on your ski poles while never quite falling down. Ellen was more fond of “the genuflect,” which often did involve getting down on your knees, but was not considered a fall in its entirety.

There were many moments of epiphany on the trip both prior and during the race. One of my first occurred on day three of the mini-exped when we were making our way through a rubble field and I was becoming increasingly frustrated by trying to ski, haul my pulk, and get over the numerous features of rubble. It came to me that there really wasn’t a reason to actually ski through this and that it was time to try the experiment of walking. In Norway, walking was almost always impossible because the snow was several feet deep and powdery so you fell right through. However, here there was not as much snow and this experiment proved immediately that walking through a rubble field was much faster than skiing. In fact, I walked the remaining four or five miles back to Resolute that day without falling down once. I realized that while this might be a ski race, I was now intent on skiing as little of the race as possible.

After returning from our mini-three night exped we only had a little time left to complete or preparation for the ski to the start, a trip that would take us five days. We were not putting in the miles that we would need to do during the race, but we would be slowly adapting to the conditions and the staff and instructors would be providing less and less support as we moved closer to the start, thus giving us the opportunity to develop self-reliance skills. This was made very clear to our team when on day three or four of the ski to the start we broke our zipper (evidently we were not listening closely enough to the lecture on how to zip the tent up correctly). Upon notifying the instructors that our zipper was broken, we were told to fix it ourselves. We did this using some fishing line and a needle and basically sewing up that end of the tent so it was not usable. This meant we only had one side of the tent that could be used to access the tent. Thankfully, we never killed our other zipper.

Given that this was a race, all the teams had been pretty quiet and secretive about their proposed route over Bathhurst Island, our primary land obstacle and navigational challenge. After Bathhurst, it was basically a job of pointing North and trying to go in as straight a line as possible, but Bathhurst actually offered some topography that would take some getting around. We mapped our course very intentionally, using the following constraints: we can’t ski, we are slow, and we don’t want to go up hills. As a result, we plotted over 20 waypoints to assure that we would not end up in a deep gully or too off course.

Getting the food prepared was the other massive job.


[Photo: Team 1010 and their food prep]

We had been given dehydrated meals for dinner in assorts flavors, all of which were some sort of pasta or rice soupy thing. Breakfast was oatmeal and muselix cereal, which I personally accented with left over nuts from my day bag and candy bars. During the day we ate candy bars cut into bite sized pieces, tons of chewy candy, and nuts and dried fruit. We had been given somewhere around 280 candy bars to split up into the day bags and pounds and pounds of candy and nuts. We were also issued somewhere around 20 pounds of cheese and salami to eat whenever we chose. I ate mine during the day, as did Ellen. Dell ate his at night with dinner. There was tea, coffee, soup and hot chocolate for our “brew bag,” a bag that ended up weighing something like 20 pounds no matter how long we were out there and what we took out of it. While every night we would pull out our food bag for the evening meal and the next day Dell’s pulk would be about 10 pounds lighter – the brew bag never got any lighter. Much like the tent vortex, this was another mystery of arctic travel.

At the end of the process, we had our food allocated into days, divided by checkpoint, and ready to go. While I was working on the food, when not showing people his long underwear, Dell had been getting fuel and packing our pulks and Ellen kindly sewed on the Coyote fur ruffs that we put on our jacket hoods. As you all most likely know, I am not a fan of real fur clothing, but the fur ruffs were supposed to create a “microclimate” for our faces and keep out some of the snow and wind. While the fur ruffs tended to look like dead animal tails we had just laid across our necks, they did seem to actually create the microclimate and so mine stayed on as one of the first Darwinian choices made during the trip.



[Photo: Debbie with fur, pulk and oil barrels]

One of the primary sponsors of the race was Missing Link a clothing company that had produced most of our clothing. I spent considerable time over the course of the trip thinking they more aptly should have been named “Weakest Link” to truly evoke the Darwinian nature of this experience. More on this later.

It was not only the fur ruffs that were pause for moral speculation. As you also probably know, I am not a big fan of guns. Actually, after my weekend playing Army with an M-16, I think shooting guns is really fun, too fun really, which is why I am not a fan of them, but this is a different story. However, there were multiple occasions where I actually requested to be the one in possession of the shotgun. Though this never actually happened, I did find it somewhat strange to be actively asking to be given a gun. Generally, it is a good thing I didn’t have the gun because at the point we had embarked on the start of the race I had shot a total of 12 bullets out of the gun and none of them had come close to hitting the target.

The night before we were to embark, each team met with the race organizers and staff in a small briefing where we were given their assessment of our abilities. While they didn’t say it quite this way, ours amounted to – “We can’t believe you guys have pulled it together enough to function as a group. We were astounded that you managed to put your tent up at all and while it is clear you can’t ski worth shit, we doubt you will die immediately if we let you move forward from here. There is no chance in hell you can win the race, but there might be a chance you can finish. And, who knows? Maybe one of the better teams will burn their tent down, thus improving your chances of not coming in last. You have our permission to ski to the starting line. Any comments?”

After we thanked them for their vote of confidence, we went on with our packing and race planning. We all went to bed anticipating the departure from the hotel and the next five days of skiing to the start.

Stay tuned for the next installment of this exciting adventure.