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.