Thursday 18 April 2013

Some Highlights

Pressure Ridges
We have to deal with these on a very frequent basis. In fact, they are good fun and break up be monotony of just skiing on the ice. Some are easy with just a small amount of manoeuvering round football size blocks of ice, others are much more challenging requiring us to take off our skiis to clamber through or over the ice. 



Navigating
I became pretty uneasy shortly after we started skiing at the pole as we seemed to be walking towards the sun in general. When you are in the Northern hemispere, the sun is always to the South of you swinging from East to West during the course of the day and pretty much due South at midday. I was therefore expecting that we would have the sun at our backs as we were walking showing that we were heading North.
It turns out that in fact the helicopter drop off had not only taken us South but also around the world as we were now on the same longtitude as Australia and so we were actually walking at night local time but seeing the daytime sun over Europe - ie looking North up to the Pole and then past it South to see the sun.

Tough Day
Day 3 was a much colder and windier day and despite us all putting an extra layer on we were all struggling with the cold. The best way to deal with the cold is to simply keep walking and so we had a long day covering 12 nautical miles. It later turns out that Keith, our guide who has skied to the North Pole 11 times, put this in his toughest 5 days ever at the Pole.



The downside of layering up is the risk of sweating whilst dragging the sleds and warming up from the exercise and quite a few of the guys had problems with wet gear by the end of the day. Part of the evening is spent drying gear over the cooker - makes the whole tent pretty warm and a bit like a sauna!


Landscape
The polar landscape is at times beautiful and at others apocalyptical. There is broken ice everwhere with the larger pieces looking like collapsed buildings.




A decent sun dog







Food
Perhaps nowhere is it truer that we eat to live rather than eat to live than on expedtions - calorie count rather than flavour is the key attribute. But at the same time, a treat can make a big difference. Guy proved himself to be an excellent polar chef and prodeced superb tortillas and bagels and made excellent use of your dried meats to boost those dishes further for tough days.




Keiths' mum made a superb banana cake which weighed a ton whilst frozen (this provided stability for the sled) but came to life when heated with a bit of butter in a pan. The sugar caramelised, the flavour was released - ah, happy memories from cold, dark nights. Actually, the nights were very bright but very cold; at least you get my drift.
However, best of all was the tiffin that I brought along. Basically, chocolate with bisuits, dried fruit and brown sugar mixed in. Delicious and just what you need after cold day when smelly, wet gear is drying close to your head! Thank you very much Mumple for taking the time to make these for us!




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