by Chris Bray
Jasper’s and my decision to spend two weeks hiking in Tasmania would certainly be taking this style of adventure to a new level, but I had no idea just how profound this trip’s impact on me would actually be. Looking back on it, I think our innocent little holiday was a major turning point in my life. Objectively, it was nothing special—we spent six days walking the popular Overland Track (an 80-kilometre tracked route through the Cradle Mountain–Lake St Clair National Park in Tasmania’s central highlands), sharing the trail with countless others—but that was all it took to revitalise the travel bug in me.
I found hiking a very satisfying way to travel. It was wonderfully simple—I enjoyed bringing only what we absolutely needed (although for some inexplicable reason we brought an entire bottle of honey we never even opened). It was refreshing to find myself unburdened by many of the things I never actually realised were cluttering my usual daily life—things like mobile phones, emails, alarms, TV … Out on the trail I woke each morning with a simple purpose: to shoulder my heavy hiking pack as far as I could, taking in all the new sights and experiences along the way. I had started to form a nagging suspicion that ‘purpose’ was somehow lacking in the busy daily routine of my normal life, and it felt good to now have a simple, solid objective to work towards each day.
When I say the hiking lifestyle is simple, we did not find it easy—it involved extended sessions of some of the hardest physical work I’d ever done—but this only served to amplify the sense of satisfaction at the end. The dictionary definition of ‘accomplish’ is ‘to gain with effort’, and we all know this to be true. Very little satisfaction can be derived from doing something that is easy, while much pride can be taken from completing something that was truly hard to achieve. The tangible rewards at the end of each day were meagre at best—some pasta followed by an uncomfortable night’s sleep in a wet tent—however, come evening, I found this was all I wanted. Simple pasta never tasted so good, nor was lumpy ground beneath my sleeping bag ever so desirable. Back at home, I’d never known myself to involuntarily grin from simply being able to lie down and straighten my back.
On top of the travel itself, the unforgettable experiences, the purity and immediate reality of life, the fresh air and the excitement, I enjoyed the challenge of hiking. What particularly captivated me was that it seemed to have no limits. Unlike school, for example, where I found I could achieve full marks without having to really push myself, when hiking, I got out exactly what I put in. If I pushed myself further, the results just got better—the longer I walked uphill, the better the view; the more hills I walked up, the more vistas I experienced. The only ceiling—besides money and time available—was how much I could endure, how far I could push myself, and for how long. I found the challenge irresistible.
I was awarded a scholarship to study Electrical Engineering, with the only down side being that I’d have to work my summer holidays at various sponsor companies. These sneak previews into what my working life as an office-bound engineer could be like were nothing short of terrifying. Each day I’d head into work and sit among employees who’d proudly clocked up 25, 30, even 40 years of employment in the same firm. I’d ask these more extreme cases what they intended to do when they retired (soon?), and after hearing of my hiking adventures, they’d sometimes say that they too had always wanted to do something like that. ‘Absolutely, there’s always time,’ I lied. I have often thought traditional working life is the wrong way around: working in offices when we are fit and young enough to get out there and enjoy life, only to be freed by retirement later—by which time all that some people manage is to sit and dream of what they would do if only they were twenty years younger. Discussing this later with Australian adventurer Don McIntyre, he told me of a more profound experience he’d had at one of his first jobs. He’d asked an ageing man resembling Sir Francis Chichester if he’d ever done any sailing. In reply, the man led him back to his workstation—in front of a photocopier—and proudly showed him two ruts his feet had actually worn into the concrete after eons of standing in front of the machine. By the end of my first placement, I’d made a promise to myself to find a ‘job’ that in itself fulfilled my dreams—because they might not be still within reach at the end of my working life.
THE GRAND PLAN
Fast forward to Clark’s email of June 2004. Greenland it was, and we started planning right away. How, When, Where and Why? ‘Why’ was a given. ‘Where’ began with the aim to cross the whole island at the 80th parallel. Deciding ‘When’ took a bit more thought. I was now heading towards the end of my third year at uni, after which my scholarship dictated that I take the following year off to undertake two six-month industry placements before returning for my fourth and final year of studies. If we didn’t want to enjoy temperatures of 40 below zero and perpetual darkness in the Arctic, we’d have to go in summer—which of course is winter in the Southern Hemisphere. Starting my first six-month placement as early as possible, and leaving the second one as late as possible would open up about six weeks in between—midsummer in the Arctic. Bingo. And for the final piece of the puzzle—‘How’—standing on skis and being pulled across the giant icecap by a huge kite sounded like fun.
Having not even met each other yet, Clark and I plotted away via email for some time, and unfortunately the problems mounted almost as fast as our excitement. Firstly, Clark wasn’t too sure how well his parents would react to the whole idea. To be honest I hadn’t broached the subject with mine either. Ignoring these towering hurdles, I casually unveiled our grand plan for the first time in the closing lines of a graduation talk I gave to students back at my old high school. To my horror, I didn’t realise my dad had snuck into the audience until I bumped into him on the way out. As we walked home together, our conversation danced through every conceivable topic, except Greenland. Could it be that he had fallen asleep during that part of my speech? He must have. Brilliant. That was close.
Late that afternoon Clark and I discovered another problem, and one that we couldn’t overcome. In the peak of the Arctic summer—the only time I could get off from work and uni—the surface of Greenland’s icecap starts to melt. Temperatures climb above even 10 degrees Celsius—this must be the reason most traverses seem to occur in April or May! We were shattered. Visions of us gliding over pristine snow-covered ice were replaced by scenes of toiling across the top of a giant, half-melted Slushie.
I was a bit despondent over dinner that night, and something was evidently concerning Dad also. Eventually, he carefully put his fork down, and asked, ‘In your talk today, what was all that about going to Greenland?’ His eyes met mine.
So, he hadn’t been sleeping at all. Rather conveniently, I was able to tell him the truth: ‘Oh—ah, yes. Yes, I was planning on that, but just this afternoon I realised it’s actually not possible. So don’t worry about that.’ While my parents have always been very supportive of all my projects, they have a knack for worrying, as all good parents do. The prospect of such an expedition was something that needed to be strategically introduced, and backed up with conclusive evidence that it was well thought out—not casually brought up over dinner without even a supporting ‘Safety Considerations’ document!
As Greenland wasn’t going to work for us, we had to find somewhere that would, and fast. We opened our respective atlases and began pointing randomly at bizarre corners of the globe. Namibia? Siberia? At one point I got an SMS from Clark saying: ‘Hey, do you want to walk across the Great Sandy Desert instead?’ It wasn’t your average SMS.
We thought of everywhere, even crossing Alaska, south to north following its Canadian border. I had often wondered how countries decided where to draw their boundaries, and now I know. If you look closely, they run right through places that neither country wants. Alaska’s follows a horrifying trail of peaks and glaciated, crevasse-filled valleys. We might have been crazy, but we weren’t mad.
A couple of days into our research, Clark stumbled across ‘Victoria Island’, a funny-shaped
island tucked up away in the Arctic Archipelago—that tangled mass of islands above Canada. Despite its being the ninth-largest island on the planet, neither of us had ever even noticed Victoria Island before. The more we looked into it, the more excited we became.
Not only did it sport an enthralling array of wildlife including polar bears, muskox and arctic wolves, but the landscape was also incredibly diverse. There’d be no endlessly pursuing the same barren white horizon for weeks as we’d have endured on an icecap traverse. In the height of summer we’d experience everything—both frozen and liquid coastlines, lake-strewn tundra, swampy grasslands, expanses of ice-shattered shale, plateaus, and even massive rivers just starting to thaw. Better yet, the island is largely unexplored. It was absolutely perfect. I stuck in a Post-it note to mark the page, and snapped shut the atlas. At last we had something real to work towards.
By now it was early November 2004, and I was just finishing that third year of uni. We had nine months to go before summer would make its brief appearance in the Arctic. While that may sound like a lot of time, the amount of work involved in organising an expedition of this scale is actually mind-boggling. The dreaded To-Do list which would dictate our lives from then on began to get out of hand and kept on growing. First things first: for the sake of formality, I decided I should probably at least meet Clark … Everything so far had been conducted via email, SMS and phone calls.
I stood atop the Opera House steps in Sydney, and cast my eyes out over the sea of milling people. My mind kept cycling through the photos he’d emailed me, trying to marry them up with one of the figures below. Bingo—this was him—striding very purposefully up the … up the … no. Okay, that wasn’t him. People look so different when not posing for a rock-climbing photo, or on holiday, as he was in most of the photographs I’d seen. Okay, this guy’s walking right up to me—this has to be Clark. Unless it’s some guy about to ask for directions? No, this was definitely him. Clark kept advancing up the stairs, and at last our eyes drew level. Then he walked up the last two steps. Dammit—why is it that all the people I team up with for expeditions have to be so much taller than I am?! Just like Jasper, at over six feet tall, Clark was a comical six inches taller than me. We grinned, and shook hands.
Next up was to find a decent map of the island. The Arctic Archipelago, we’d found, was virtually ignored by just about every atlas we had. Occasionally, some of the islands would creep in at the top of maps of the Canadian mainland, but that was about it. Minutes after our first meeting, we walked into the Reference Section of the State Library of New South Wales—and pulled out their biggest atlas available for public viewing. When it came to Victoria Island, though, again the atlas contained scarcely more detail than my one at home. Clearly we were going to have to call in the big guns.
We walked over to the elderly lady behind the ‘restricted viewing’ counter and put forward our case. She slid her glasses further down her nose and, peering over the top of them, whispered, ‘Come with me …’ Feeling rather important, we followed her into the ‘special’ part of the library, where she dug out a prehistoric-looking atlas of Canada and placed it on a huge table. Under her watchful gaze we carefully opened it and stared in disbelief for a few seconds before running to the photocopier. Pages of graphs showing average temperature and precipitation for the various Arctic islands, extent of sea ice for each season, even approximate distribution of different animals … It was all there.
We retired to a side room with our wad of photocopying and fell upon it. ‘Hey, look at this—it says polar bears range over the whole island.’ ‘Yeah, but no walruses …’ We could scarcely contain our excitement at this glut of information. I glanced at my watch—still another 30 minutes before we had to head off. Plenty of time for a preliminary budget. We brainstormed every conceivable cost, and tallied it up: $15,000, so that’s $7500 each—we nodded in agreement; that was expensive, but achievable. Sure, we only had $5000 between us, but we could raise the rest through sponsorship. Too easy. If we’d known back then the final budget for the journey would actually be closer to $250,000 by the time we got to the far side, we’d have immediately gone back to the atlas in search of a more realistic destination. Ignorance is bliss, however, and we shook hands, slapped each other on the back, and went our separate ways home, full of enthusiasm.
Within a couple of weeks Clark left on a short hiking and mountaineering trip in New Zealand with some mates. After undertaking a guided training course, their goal was to climb Mount Aspiring, near Mount Cook in the Southern Alps. I was anxious to see how things would pan out; it would, after all, be his first real taste of serious expeditioning. Clark’d spent much of his childhood growing up in a small mining community in the Great Sandy Desert of Western Australia, and he—like me—retained a love for the outdoors that had surpassed conventional limits and was fast becoming a passion for adventure. He and I both, it seemed, suffered continual gnawing from the ‘Why not try something bigger?’ bug. So while Clark busied himself gaining a healthy fear of mountains in New Zealand, I kept researching Victoria Island, and two weeks later we both had good news. Firstly, Clark was still alive, and secondly, I hadn’t uncovered any impossible hurdles we wouldn’t be able to overcome—besides the obvious ones of money, time, logistics, and parents. We were still good to go.
My confidence in Clark had been boosted also—having successfully completed their training course in New Zealand, he and his mates had on the day made the difficult decision not to attempt Mount Aspiring under the conditions then prevailing. Careful risk management and being able to back down when required are probably two of the most important skills to have in this kind of game. To our horror, just a few weeks after Clark returned, news headlines told of another young climber from New South Wales who had just attempted Mount Aspiring and, tragically, fallen to his death. It was both a reality check, and reassurance that Clark had definitely made the correct decision.
Notebooks literally filled with pages of To-Do’s were multiplying on my desk like rabbits. There was just too much to do. Every day we’d chew through as many tasks as we possibly could, only to discover that by the time we fell into an exhausted sleep, we’d have added almost twice the number of tasks as those we’d managed to tick off. Reflecting this, our anticipated costs grew to around $25,000—still only about a tenth of our final budget—and already the magnitude of this undertaking was starting to concern us. We now had six months to get it all together, and we were already feeling pushed for time.
We decided to collate all our thoughts into one epic ‘Expedition Document’. We fed this beast with every scrap of information that came to light, and gradually our expedition started to take form within the pages. The document was immense, and covered every aspect of the journey ahead—equipment lists (with an exact weight down to the gram for each carefully selected item); first-aid equipment (from the basics through to the inhalable painkillers used in ambulances, and—although we really hoped we wouldn’t meet any polar bears this close—‘abdominal pads’. Enough said); route maps; descriptions of expected terrain variations and how we’d deal with their ramifications; electricity calculations to determine the size of solar panels we’d need to keep all our electronics running, using NASA data on average cloud-cover and solar energy at those latitudes; search and rescue procedures; a detailed daily meal menu; and so on.
Firstly, we had to decide on a route to take. We figured if we were going to try and cross the whole island, we might as well do it properly, and start from the most easterly tip and head for the most westerly. We wanted to strike a balance between taking the most direct route the terrain would allow, while also visiting the most interesting areas. Our proposed route would take us just over 1000 kilometres—past a frozen coastline, then inland over the tundra, up onto a plateau, down a massive river and, ultimately, across to the far side. Although the prevailing winds are westerly, we opted to start on the eastern side and head into the wind, as partway through we would link up with th
e extensive Kuujjua River which ran south-west and would, if we brought kayaks, help us greatly on our way.
Victoria Island appears innocuous enough when you first glance at a map, but when you peer closer, the entire island is absolutely littered with a myriad of little lakes. How could we lug all of our food and supplies across this tangled patchwork of land and water? It really was a bit of a conundrum. Ideally, we’d use a kayak for the wet bits, and some form of cart for the dry bits—but clearly we couldn’t take both. What we needed was a kayak with wheels. However, as is the problem with such unique expeditions, there was a decided lack of ultra-strong wheeled kayaks on the market—in fact, there were none.
‘Take a look at these,’ Clark said, pointing at a wheeled kayak cradle in an outdoor catalogue, ‘they look like toys!’ It was getting ridiculous; all we could find were pathetic little plastic wheels that looked like they were designed to help frail old men roll their kayaks from the garage to the car. Clearly we were going to have to buy a kayak and build the wheel system ourselves. ‘No biggie,’ we assured ourselves.
Next item on the list was food. Every day out there we’d be burning enormous amounts of energy, and so we’d need ridiculous quantities of food to fuel our bodies. Bringing the right type and amount of food was critical. Unable to afford professional advice from a nutritionist, we went right back to basics. Most importantly, as with every item, we had to keep the weight right down. Per gram, fat gives you the most energy, so it’d be great if we could just live off slabs of butter. Realistically, though, humans can only digest around a 50 per cent fat diet, and we had to balance out the rest with some carbohydrates and protein. An active man burns around 3000 calories per day, and someone hauling a sled to the North Pole consumes more like 6000–8000. This increase is partly in response to the exercise, and partly burnt by the body just to stay warm in the bitter cold. Clark calculated that we’d need about 4500 calories each per day, as we anticipated a similar workload as that of a polar trek, but it wouldn’t be anything like as cold, perhaps only down to minus 5 degrees Celsius or so.
