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.