By day 16 we’d made it to an altitude of 2500 metres, near the summit of the Greenland ice cap. What an achievement.
And while it took a few more days of undulating ups and downs, it eventually became downhill from there.
9
THE NEW NORMAL
‘Morning!’ Eric would yell out every morning at 6 am, which meant it was time to get up. Unfortunately, he didn’t come with a snooze button. Dad would get straight up and start the stove. I would follow slowly, very slowly, not long after Dad to begin all the things that needed to be done before we could get skiing . . . as I mentioned, I am not a morning person.
First, the stove needed to be lit and the water put on the heat. In Greenland it was always still liquid from the night before, but if it wasn’t hot in our drink bottles when we got going in the morning there was a chance it could freeze during the day. This was my cue to get up. Once the stove is going the worst part of the fumes from the flame hang around the bottom of the tent so there was no chance I was hanging around down there.
Each night, the last task before jumping in the tent would be for one of us to take our big blue IKEA bag and a shovel and cut blocks of ice in the snow. Once we’d cut enough blocks for water that fitted neatly in the kettle pot, we’d take them back to the tent and place them next to the stove. From there, we could melt them on the stove. It would take around three hours each evening to melt enough ice to provide water to rehydrate dinner as well as for a cup of hot Milo and our drinking water for the next day. At home, you take it for granted that you turn the tap and water comes out instantaneously, but in Greenland (in fact, in all polar environments) we really had to work for it.
Seventeen days in and I continued to put one ski in front of the other, fighting the pain of sore muscles and blisters. It was relentless and, at times, very monotonous. The name of the polar-crossing game was to take it one day at a time, rest, refuel and repeat.
Sometimes performing the same movement over and over again became frustrating, but most times I managed to lose myself in the motion, which seemed to make the hours pass much faster. When we stopped, though, it was apparent my body had been performing the same movement for hours on end. When I stretched, I could feel how sore all my muscles were. But there was no avoiding the aches and pains.
Because we’d hit 2500 metres above sea level, I had started to feel the altitude a little, too. The air is thinner the higher you go, so there’s less oxygen to fuel the activity. I had periods of feeling incredibly light-headed – it was especially bad when I stood up suddenly or bent over to fix the bindings on my skis. I also had a couple more of my big nosebleeds. I knew they were caused by breathing in cold, dry air through my nose, but I’m pretty sure the altitude didn’t help.
Eric was still worried about our progress. I was still having issues with privacy during toilet breaks, and he had issues with my need for privacy causing delays. I came up with the solution of stopping for my toilet break a few hundred metres before where everyone else was stopping for break. Then I would catch up and have my break. This seemed to work well, but it meant that in harsh conditions, my breaks were a lot more crammed than the guys’.
Eric’s concerns about pace were justified, and I understood he was thinking forward to our Antarctica trip, which was only around six months away. It was going to be tougher and much longer, so I needed to be able to perform efficiently even when I wasn’t feeling efficient. He wanted all of us to keep our fiddling – putting on mittens, getting headphones in our ears – to a minimum. It was a little hard to believe that 10 seconds here and 30 seconds there would make that much difference to our progress, but Eric had done a huge number of these expeditions, so I took his advice and tried harder.
It had been a pretty rough few days and I was feeling quite low emotionally as we reached the highest geographical point of the whole journey. It helped to take a few moments to remember the enormity of what we’d achieved already, climbing upwards for 300 kilometres.
To make it to the coast in 27 days still looked remotely possible, but we’d need everything to go right from here. No bad weather, no injuries and everyone giving it their best shot. But conditions were still not great – visibility was very low and, although we tried to stick to a straight course, in a white-out the lead person would snake around, often having to turn behind them to use the line of our single-file team to understand if they were heading straight or not.
Plus, unbelievably, the weather just kept getting warmer. The temperatures of around 0ºC were the same as those we’d encountered when we started on the coast. We were wearing caps to protect our faces from the sun and often ended up stripping right down to our thermals. The worst bit was sweating while we were moving along. If there was even a little bit of wind, it was so painful when we stopped – the moisture would chill almost instantly and we’d end up freezing cold, making it even harder to get moving again. At breaks we’d need to slather ourselves in sunscreen. It was also making the going very heavy in the slushy ice. Add the melting effects of the sun’s rays with the fact we’d had a bit of snowfall over the previous few days and it made for hard work moving those skis and dragging the sleds behind us.
Life on the ice had become the new normal for me by then and my previous life at home in Melbourne seemed as though it were a dream. Getting closer to being back there had made me start to think of what I was going to do when I arrived. Of course, first on the list was a hot shower that I was sure would be the best shower of my life. A home-cooked meal was a close second; I was thinking specifically of poached eggs and bacon. In the tent that night I made a list of all the things I now realised I take for granted at home. In no particular order, they were:
• running water
• Mum’s home-cooked meals
• a shower and soap
• heaters
• a bed with pillows and a doona
• a toilet with a door
• internet
• electricity
• fresh milk
• clean clothes
• clean sheets
• clean smell
• darkness
• tables and chairs
• dry shoes
• family and friends
• cars and roads
• sleep
• a variety of foods.
I vowed I would never take them for granted again.
Because mornings are my least favourite time of the day, I realised that I needed to turn this around, crank myself up and really go as hard as I could in the first two sessions. It worked, too. When I used that time to push myself, the rest of the day felt much easier. On day 18, we managed to cover a total of 26 kilometres, which was a new record for us. Dad gave me a hug to celebrate and, because he’d taken his skis off but I still had mine on, I was finally taller than him!
It was the following day when it really felt as though we were beginning to move downhill. Overnight the temperature had dropped to –20ºC, and it felt like we were going to be able to move fast on the hard surface. In the first session, we covered almost four kilometres in just over an hour, which was a fantastic pace. The cold temperatures overnight made the ice solid and that really made a difference to how fast we could go. We hoped it was an omen for the rest of the trip.
Dad and Eric took the lead, with Fred keeping pace. Heath and I skied along together a short distance behind them. As we all came together during one break, Eric told us he could see the colours of our suits imprinted against the white background when he looked back over his shoulder, which was a sure sign we were really kicking in to the downhill. It couldn’t have come at a better time. By then, Dad and I had really horrific blisters. One of mine ran right down the outside of my big toe all the way onto the ball of my foot. Dad had one on the bottom of his foot that just seemed to get bigger and more grotesque every day. There was no way he could adjust how he skied to put less pressure on it.
Whenever we’d feel a new hot spot
or blister, we’d put some sports tape on it to stop the friction, and by then our feet were more plaster than skin. At night, we’d clean them with wet wipes to make sure they didn’t get infected and then cover them again. There was no other way to describe it than absolutely disgusting. We’d followed our packing lists, which said we only needed four pairs of socks, and we were wearing through those pairs fast. And the insides of them were caked with the glue from the previous day’s tape.
While the mornings were cool, the afternoons were insanely hot in the sun. We’d take our boots off during the lunch break. It was so weird to be sitting in the middle of Greenland with bare feet! Dad was skiing in a t-shirt with his polar shell pants rolled up to his knees, and I was getting head spins every time I stood up. Our feet were squelching inside our ski boots. I was craving a day at the beach. When I’d been psyching myself up for this trip, I never expected that the two biggest challenges would be rain and heat.
We were deep into day 20 when Heath said to me, ‘There’s no place I’d rather be right now.’
It was so true. Being immersed in nature on a grand scale with hardly any other humans gives you a feeling and a perspective you just can’t explain. I felt as though I had forgotten my old life and become used to a new one and it would be this way forever. I wrote in my diary that night my new thoughts:
• Your limits are not your limits. There are no limits.
• You can’t always control other people.
• So much is taken for granted.
• The mind is the most powerful tool.
• You can learn so much from other people by listening.
• Keep an open mind.
• Pain is temporary. Glory is forever.
Dad later explained to me that this last quote, which is famous, is a great one for pushing through discomfort, but it’s wrong. The glory doesn’t last forever and it’s not what’s important. What does last, and what is of true value, is what you learn from the pain and who you become from pushing through the suffering. The suffering wasn’t something to avoid, but to relish as an opportunity to reinvent ourselves.
The unseasonal warmth meant we had some unexpected visitors. There was one little bird that decided it was going to follow us and would shelter near the sleds during our breaks, hoping for some crumbs. Occasionally we’d also see flocks of birds flying in formation just above the surface of the ice. It had been a while since we’d seen other living creatures apart from each other and it was a beautiful and freaky sight.
Even freakier were the huge polar bear tracks we came across on day 21. They were the tracks of a mother and her cub and, just like the tracks we’d seen on the North Pole trip, I could put my whole hand inside one of the mother’s paw prints. Eric was surprised to see evidence of polar bears this far inland, and mentioned that their only sources of food here were us and the Norwegian team crossing at the same time. Dad joked that Australians are probably more of a delicacy in these parts than the Norwegians. He wasn’t helping.
Both Eric and Heath thought the tracks may have been there for less than 12 hours, so we went into high alert. Of course, we had a firearm with us, but that was purely to scare the bear and would only have been used as a last resort. We were in the bear’s territory, and if you get to the point where you have to fire a gun, you are in big trouble.
We were told that if a bear came anywhere near us, we should make a lot of noise by banging our ski poles into the ice or onto our sleds. It makes a similar noise to walruses banging their tusks on the ice to scare the bears away. We were also told to make ourselves look big and threatening by waving our poles in the air and jumping on top of our sleds. Loud, obnoxious noises were good, too. Dad told me that if we came across a bear I was to get behind him, as Mum had told him not to come home without me.
When we set up camp that night we also made a fairly basic early-bear-warning barrier that would hopefully wake us up if one entered the camp. Ski poles in the snow were made into corner posts and we strung rope between them. We then leaned our skis up against the rope, so that if a bear hit the rope during the night the clattering of skis would hopefully wake us up. Dad and I slept with a shovel and ice axe beside us, just in case . . .
We survived the night without the polar bears coming anywhere near us. We had been lucky. It was a pity we weren’t having the same luck with the weather conditions. The heat continued to swelter. We were down at around 2000 metres above sea level now and it was only going to get warmer.
Every part of my body was so sore; my back was spasming, the blisters on my feet were getting worse and any part of my body that was exposed to the elements was sunburned – including the roof of my mouth – from the sun’s reflection off the ice.
With only five days to go, I was also starting to worry that I had been wishing this expedition away. The trip to the North Pole had been and gone so quickly, it was over before I knew it. We’d been on the ice in Greenland for three weeks already and I wanted to make sure I took in every minute of it.
In the tent that night I opened one of the letters my best friends had given me – the last one left before we finished. My two best friends had written around 10 letters for me to open and read along the way as a bit of motivation. In this one were the lyrics to ‘Ice Ice Baby’ by Vanilla Ice, which I was challenged to learn before I finished the crossing. I thought it was hilarious. I missed my friends so much while I was away. I spent the rest of the night driving Dad mad trying to rap the words to the song on repeat.
We really had just one big push left to get to the end, but we were all struggling, including Frederique, who had a hacking cough. Eric had warned us we might need to have a rest day for Fred to recover. Dad, Heath and I did not want to take a rest day. Heath was having real trouble with his leg but he’s insanely tough and I knew he would have rather crawled to the coast than slow everyone down. Stopping again would mean we definitely would not make it to the East coast by day 27 and we’d probably miss our flight home. We compromised with Eric and finished skiing a bit earlier on one day to give everyone a bit of a rest.
We had 72 kilometres to go to reach the ice fall and three days to get there. That meant we needed to cover 25 kilometres each day. It was a big ask, but on day 24 we smashed out 26.9 kilometres.
The mental exertion of the long expedition was messing with all of our heads. Long days of sameness meant there was nothing much else for my brain to do apart from run away on strange trains of thought. I would think about whether I was ever going to do anything that would make a real difference to help others. And if the world was going to end eventually anyway, what was the point in even trying? Luckily, each evening, I had Mum on the other end of the phone, and she reminded me that life is life and I just had to live mine as best I could and enjoy it.
The next couple of days were a blur. We were punching out the target distances, hitting all the goals Dad and I had set ourselves, and our strange moods came and went. Dad and I had a few clashes in the tent, but I knew we only had a little bit longer to keep it together. I was tired, but so was he. I made a pact with myself that I was going to dig deep to make the last days as emotionally painless as possible.
We awoke on our last full day on the ice to one of the coolest things I’ve ever seen. It was windy and cold when we stepped out of the tent. The sun was visible but there were also puffs of low cloud sitting on the horizon. It looked almost like smoke from a distant bushfire. I turned my attention back to the tent we’d just packed up and within a matter of seconds the wind had stopped. I looked back at the cloud as it rushed towards us and immersed us in a white mist.
Heath explained that anabatic winds go uphill and katabatic winds go downhill. In this case, the katabatic winds were stronger than the anabatic ones and they were holding the cloud low on the horizon, but when the anabatic winds became stronger, the clouds basically flew over us and blocked out the sun. For quite a while we were walking into cloud and I quickly lost sight of Dad and Eric. I felt alone, but
calm. Beams of light struck through openings in the clouds around me and it almost felt as if I was floating.
Once the cloud lifted, later in the day, it became incredibly hot and I could feel my racoon tan around my eyes getting even worse. We ended up on some quite steep downhill stretches, so we all got on our sleds and tobogganed down as best we could in the slushy ice. We could see the coastal mountains in the distance, over the dip of the horizon. It was a relief to see a feature on the landscape after spending weeks looking at nothing but endless plains of white.
It was the last night of the trip, and instead of rushing to set up my side of the tent as soon as we’d assembled it like normal, I sat outside on my sled in the warmth of the sun gazing over the mountains, the ocean and icebergs in the distance. It was honestly like something out of a movie. I just sat there for ages, thinking about nothing and losing myself in the moment.
We were only a day away.
We began our final day with a safety briefing from Eric on how to sit on our sleds and ride them down steeper sections like responsible adults (we’d gone a bit crazy the day before). He didn’t want us to injure ourselves so close to the finish, so he showed us how to use the rope attached to our sleds as a brake, as well as how to turn the sled with our skis on the snow. ‘Don’t be afraid to bail out if you have to,’ he said. ‘And don’t anyone fall into a crevasse. It’s not good for my reputation.’
We took a long snack break overlooking the rocky shore that ran down to the ocean. We luged some of the bigger distances and covered them with speed. Eventually, we could see where the snow finished and where the rock started. Finally, our objective – Isortoq Hut, which marks the East coast and our end goal – came into view.
My Polar Dream Page 8
