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?
