by Chris Bray
Our problems, however, were far from over. The ground upon which we stood was itself a sloppy concoction of ponds, mossy tussocks and trenches. After less than two minutes of attempting to haul over this new variety of soggy hell, we again found ourselves un-harnessed and looking at each other, scowling vehemently at the impossibility of it all. ‘Maybe double-hauling will work here too?’ I suggested. ‘Let’s link them up.’
To our delight, we found that joined again as one enormous slug, the vehicle straddles the ups and downs with surprising ease, and the slight elasticity in our harness rope is just enough to smooth the lurching into one continual, sustainable motion. And—music to our battered ears—rather than the grating scrunching of ice, walking over this new marshy terrain is blissfully silent.
Over a very late lunch we reassessed our route to Hadley Bay to now avoid lakes at all costs. By the time we got under way it was almost dinner time, but we managed a cracking pace and squeezed out a total of 3.81 kilometres today, mostly during the final hour. It might not sound far, but after languishing a mere 100 metres from camp for most of the day, we are elated. Having cracked the secret to hauling over this ground, we’ll attack the kilometres ahead with renewed vigour tomorrow morning.
DAY 15: Our first river crossing
Last night was a scorcher! By the time we’d finished dinner and sent the website update, the baking sun had heated our tents into saunas. I opened my tent vestibule to try and tempt in a refreshing breeze, but the world outside was oppressively still and silent. Ridiculously for two people who only hours ago had to smash great hunks of ice from their shoes before then having to literally prise their frozen shoelaces apart using Leatherman pliers, we now sweltered on top of our sleeping bags, unable to sleep. Stripped down to our Skins half-tights, we just lay there while the orange walls of our tent irradiated us from above. Deliriously, I imagined sitting at a beachside café in Sydney, sipping a refreshing iced coffee—and then, on the spur of the moment, decided to make one.
‘Iced coffee, guv?’ We simply mixed up some water, instant coffee, milk powder and sugar, and lazily reached down to the ground and scooped up two mugfuls of perfectly granulated icy snow and poured the flavouring over the top. It was perfect. Crisis averted, we both fell asleep just as a slight breeze stole inside at last.
We awoke this morning full of energy to throw ourselves into our harnesses and make the most of the day. We got under way fast, and hauling dog-team style we managed a sustained, strong march: one foot in front of the other, for 30-minute intervals. We’d then take a swig of water, pop a piece of chocolate in our mouth, and get right back into it. Two weeks in, we’re feeling stronger and fitter now—my lungs feel like they have expanded to twice their old size, and my resting heart rate has dropped from around 55 to 39 beats per minute. For once, visibility was great today, allowing us to pick a point on the horizon, press ‘play’ on our amazingly engrossing Harry Potter audiobooks on our iPods, and completely tune out. The half-hour intervals slipped past without us even noticing them, and despite some modest hills and sections where we sank beyond our knees into slushy snow, we plodded ever onwards.
Our march across the tundra ended abruptly after lunch when the first flowing stream we’ve seen cut across our path. It was quite exciting, and evidently all the local birdlife thought so too: the whole area was crowded with geese and other birds, all admiring the chasm it had melted through the snow. It took us over an hour to individually struggle each PAC across and wade them up the deep snow embankment on the far side, but we managed eventually. As the GPS ticked over the 11-kilometre mark (a new record) we wearily climbed inside our portable un-motorhome and went to sleep, parked—for the first time—on soft, mossy, melted tundra.
DAY 16: Brunch at High Arctic Lodge
Progress was rather slow this morning through some deep patches of snow between sections of wet tundra. Without warning sometimes we’d plunge up to our thighs in snow, and, unable to climb out without sinking back down, progress then became akin to climbing an endless flight of steep stairs, towing a small car behind us.
Recharged by nut breaks, each hauling session typically starts with us taking our respective positions in our dog-team harness, me calling ‘Ready?’ from the front, and after receiving Clark’s ‘Yep, ready!’ confirmation, we then fling ourselves forwards with a hearty ox-like lunge—necessary to overcome the cart’s tremendous inertia—and grind our way forwards. Usually this technique works well, except on two amusing occasions today, when Clark forgot to actually clip his harness into the rope trace. The result was much like that game of trust we’ve all played as kids where you let yourself gradually fall backwards trusting implicitly that your mate will catch you, except that there is nothing gradual about the way we lean forward into our harness, and I didn’t so much ‘catch’ Clark, as feel him crumple headlong into my back. Hilarious. We both almost died laughing, but mostly because we were remembering an even more stupendous scene that occurred yesterday. We were bogged in a particularly soft section of snow, and having kicked solid foot pockets to brace our feet against, we were both giving it absolutely everything we had, grunting with the superhuman effort of trying to straighten our legs while straining almost horizontally in our harness when suddenly POW! POW! Both cords to my harness snapped in quick succession, and I quite literally launched myself spectacularly across the snow for perhaps 8 metres, arms churning windmill-style in the air as I desperately fought all the way along my runway to regain my balance and not face-plant into the sloppy snow.
Over a hill today we caught sight of a cabin—Fred Hamilton’s ‘High Arctic Lodge’—a summer fishing retreat that he flies keen anglers out to by seaplane. As the lakes are still frozen and the hut is partly embedded in a bank of snow, Fred’s first customers won’t be around for another month, but he’d kindly emailed us to say if we needed anything, to help ourselves.
Toiling slowly towards the little red shack, my mind was working overtime, inwardly debating whether or not we should allow ourselves to accept Fred’s offer and gorge ourselves on his supplies. We are both gnawingly hungry, but the big challenge of this expedition is to do it unsupported. If we caved in and ate his food, we might just as well pay for air drops every second week and do away with the PACs, making the whole trip quite easy. ‘I must stay strong!’ I kept telling myself, ‘I must stay strong!’
The hut took forever to get any closer but at last we were standing in front of the door, which was nailed closed with a protective fabric cover to keep snow from being driven inside during the long, dark winter. The ‘key’ was nothing short of a hammer, which was of course wedged under the doormat. Perfect. We creaked out the nails, pulled open the door, and walked inside.
As our eyes adjusted to the dark, we saw we were surrounded by everything you could ever want if you were living out here for a few weeks, cooking fish, and sleeping in warm comfort. Although only tiny, this little cabin in the middle of absolutely nowhere would be a lovely spot to enjoy in the summer. Gazing longingly at all the jars of honey, packets of jam, sugar and even sweets teasing us from every shelf, I found my stomach starting to grumble hungrily, and I caught a look from Clark that showed he too was teetering on the brink of temptation. ‘Let’s have lunch!’ he announced, and in response to my half-surprised, half-excited expression, hastened to clarify. ‘Our normal lunch, I mean, let’s eat it early, now, to stop us eating any of this!’ Laughing at what I’d thought he was suggesting, we hurried back to our PACs and returned with the usual ration of peanut butter and butter on tortilla flatbreads, and our thermos of coffee. We sat and ate inside Fred’s hut out of the wind, trying not to stare at all the wondrous flavours of food stacked around us, and, after taking a few quick photos, nailed the door back how it was and shackled up to our PACs. ‘I could so easily have eaten everything in there,’ Clark admitted as we toiled away, ‘I’m kinda proud we didn’t, though.’
We are camped only a stone’s throw away from Hadley Bay tonight, and
if we’re lucky, we might get there the day after tomorrow, which will be a fantastic milestone! Fingers crossed. After Hadley Bay though, we’re still not sure quite what to do. I think we’ve halted the wheel rims chafing the tyres, but the Kevlar covers are really starting to fail on us. Paddling across lakes or floating down rivers might soon be the only thing we can do without puncturing our tyres, so instead of our planned north-westerly route, we’re considering heading directly west after Hadley, in a desperate (and rather unlikely) bid to reach the headwaters of the Kuujjua river some 100-plus kilometres away. Rafting down this would help carry us a good deal westward (although southerly as well, but that’s fine).
The thing is, we are not sure what the river will be like at all. Is it dangerous? What if there are major rapids, waterfalls, or even canyons with deathtraps lurking at their ends? We don’t even know if there’ll still be any meltwater left flowing in it either, when and if we reach it—and we both admit that’s a rather unlikely ‘if’.
Still, those are problems for the future. Victoria Island has certainly taught us to live in the present, as who knows what might happen tomorrow.
DAY 17: Wet socks and repairs
We awoke to a beautifully quiet morning—not even a breath of wind to rustle the tent. With all the snow around now completely sloppy, there’s no noticeable ‘crisping-up’ effect during the colder nights at all, and so we’ve begun deliberately shifting the Chris & Clark Time Zone forward an hour or so each morning for the past few days. This is easily achieved, as all we have to do is ignore our alarms and sleep in for a while, which we seem to be doing of our own accord anyway. The only down side is of course that we have to haul for an extra hour or so into the evenings. We’re now waking at 10.30 pm and quitting around 10 am Cambridge Bay time. Pretty soon we’ll be merrily hauling during genuine ‘daytime’—we can’t wait!
After our usual delicious brekky of oats and coffee, we packed up and got stuck into some preventative maintenance on both our PACs—beefing up the front spacers which have started to fatigue and split, likely from the excessive loads of double-hauling. The repair consisted of drilling sixteen holes with an awkward hand-drill (that itself first needed fixing), then pop-riveting on two pieces of angle (which we first had to make from cutting and banging a flat strip of aluminium), and undoing and re-doing various awkward-to-reach bolts. The whole operation took much longer than anticipated, and it was almost lunchtime before we finished the repair on my PAC. Frustrated, worn out and irritable, it didn’t take much to convince each other that it really was best not to fix the other PAC today, but instead wait to see how this repair goes.
The highlight of our short day’s hauling was crossing a fairly major creek flanked again by deep snow. Rolling down into the semi-frozen waterway was the easy bit, but getting our PACs up the other side developed into an epic tug-o’-war between us on the far bank hanging onto a long rope, and the conjoined PAC sitting stubbornly midstream with hunks of drifting ice starting to build up against its side. As we strained and slipped all over the place in the snow, a stalemate was reached and as I angrily sloshed back down to the PAC and started to push it from behind, I felt icy water rush down inside my boots. An outburst of rage surged within me, but as I knew Clark’s boots were already swimming, I managed to bottle it up inside.
Meanwhile, Clark slipped for the umpteenth time in the soupy snow, twisting his already painful and swollen foot as he tried to haul the PAC up. ‘F#%K OFF SNOW! We have no use for you anymore!’ Clark shouted, adding with a chuckle, ‘Bring on global warming, I say!’ Right now, this snow is a nightmare, and just makes our days hell. We can’t wait for the sun to melt it all away.
Sitting on our respective verandahs this evening (the section of our hardtops that extends out in front of our tents)—having come a pathetic 4.1 kilometres—we both gratefully pulled off our hiking boots with a sucking, slurping noise, and wrung bucketloads of repulsive grey water from our two layers of Icebreaker socks. We must really stink by now, but thankfully as we both do, neither of us can smell it.
Despite the world turning slushy, it’s a pretty special time of year to be here. All around us as the snow melts revealing the tundra beneath, everything is suddenly bursting into life. Plants are vigorously growing and flowering and attracting huge Vs of geese and other birds streaming up here to mate and nest, which in turn has brought out the foxes and so on. The warmth seeping into the ground has lured the lemmings out of hibernation, and suddenly they too are everywhere, darting from hidden burrow to hidden burrow, or peeping up to goggle at us as we haul past. Tiny black spiders—no more than 3 millimetres across—clamber over individual snow crystals, and hundreds of insects are starting to whirl noisily in the sky. Huge bumblebees and flies zip hurriedly around as feathers and seeds waft past on the gentle breeze. The air is thick with scent and bird calls. We feel pretty lucky to be out here surrounded by all this. We’re just a little apprehensive about how long we have left before the infamous hordes of mosquitoes will arrive. It can’t be long.
DAY 18: Beneath the snow
We woke to find little streams of meltwater snaking right underneath our PACs, and with the temperature languishing around 0 degrees as we set off, we squelched our way through an increasing number of the same quicksand mud pits that traumatised us so deeply in 2005.
The most exciting part of the day was when we met the river that eventually empties into Hadley Bay. Flowing in quite a canyon here, it was a sight to behold—free-flowing water rippled across the bottom of the ravine, reflecting greens, blues, browns and yellows up against the snow-clad cliff face on either side. Pairs of geese loyally followed each other around, and looking up for the source of a shrill, screeching cry, we met the watchful gaze of a hawk suspended motionless above us.
‘I wish that thing would shut up,’ Clark frowned as it unleashed another piercing cry. ‘It’s just alerted our presence to every polar bear for miles around!’ Hadley Bay is apparently an important breeding area for polar bears, and the closer we get, the more likely we are to encounter one. Already many of the rocks around us are starting to look suspiciously like bears.
The squelchy moss-terrain is starting to give way to crumpled rock the closer we get to the coast and, unable to cross the river there, we soon found ourselves traversing fields of Death Terrain as bad as any we’ve seen.
‘Watch out—go left! Left! Left! STOP!!!’ We both looked back in horror as a particularly vicious 30-centimetre shard of rock passed directly under the front tyre, tilting the entire PAC as it rolled onto it and came to rest suspended on the point, pushing into the tyre like a pen thrust into a balloon.
‘Get it off!’ we shouted at each other, as I ran back to help take some weight while Clark hauled forwards. That was close. Now with the rock trapped between the front and rear tyre, we had to separate the two PACs. ‘Going solo’s the only way we can steer around the worst ones anyway,’ I said, shackling up.
Hauling gingerly over this sea of knives, it wasn’t long before we were peering desperately around for the sanctuary of the nice soft slushy melting snow that we have spent all week wishing would go away. There was no escape. Pausing to assess the damage over a nut break, I found one of my wheel covers even had a tear right through the inside layer of Kevlar, exposing the bare rubber of the inner tube underneath! How it didn’t puncture the tyre I have no idea. We deflated the tyre enough to slip in a small piece of spare Kevlar cloth to cover the wound, reinflated the tyre and cringed our way onwards.
There was some comic relief at the end of the day, however. When we checked our email, there was one from my dad—sent yesterday, just after the frustrating river crossing. Apparently, he’d ‘noticed’ via the satellite tracking that we’d spent a good 30 minutes midstream, and had started to become worried, until he saw us move across to the far bank, where he ‘noticed’ another delay, at which point it all made sense to him—the first delay was probably us catching a fish, and the second delay was us eating it! No
t only was this beautiful idea so far removed from the traumatic reality that we couldn’t help crying with laughter, but it was amazing to think that he’d literally been watching us. It’s as though our website updates—complete with daily photos, temperature information, and a live tracking feed—have literally turned this remote Arctic expedition into a spectator sport.
DAY 19: The last little bit to Hadley Bay
Today’s ‘last little bit to Hadley’ wasn’t anything like as easy as we’d anticipated—it took all day, and it was only the promise of our favourite dehydrated dinner that we’ve been saving that got us here.
The day started, as usual, one hour later than yesterday and we headed north, beside the river and watching for an opportunity to cross it. Eventually we found a stretch where the vertical canyon walls flared out a little into merely steep snowy slopes topped by a fortress of boulders, and where the width of the river narrowed to perhaps 15 metres. We lowered each PAC individually down the precarious slope into the river valley and waded into the freezing water as hunks of ice bobbed past. It turned out the river was rushing over a slippery ice bottom, and, while we struggled to gain any purchase with our wetsuit booties, midstream the PACs actually floated, almost sweeping us away.
During a nut break on the far side we wandered over to investigate the first stone tent ring we’ve found this trip. Smothered in millennia-old orange lichen, these boulders formed one of the most rectangular perimeters for ancient skin tents we’ve seen yet.
The second river crossing today was even less predictable, pretending to be far narrower and shallower than it really was, and we both ended up flooding our boots, which had only just started to dry out from our last river catastrophe two days ago. Adding to the ambience, snow started to fall in force, and visibility closed in. The terrain on the west side of the river was completely different—much flatter—a sea of dirt and pebbles across which thousands of pretty purple flowers grew, each only 5 millimetres across, hugging close to the tundra. We’ve started to see animals again too, herds of muskox dot our view forward, and one pair of evidently feisty, testosterone-charged bulls actually engaged in a battle for supremacy right in front of us. Facing each other and then thunderously charging headlong, they’d simultaneously lower their enormous horn-clamped skulls at the last moment, just before slamming together with a sickening jolt that stopped both mighty beasts dead in their tracks. With the echoing thunderclap of their collision still reverberating around us, they’d repeat the ritual, doubtless losing countless brain cells each time, until one seemed to lose interest—or perhaps couldn’t remember what he was doing anymore—and wandered off.
