by Chris Bray
All I can say is that I’m glad this didn’t happen yesterday, in the pouring rain.
DAY 31: Resurrection
‘I reckon it was the bulging, non-round wheels that did it,’ I confided to Clark when he woke. I was feeling a little guilty that my engineering calculations on the axle had failed. ‘It should easily have been able to handle the weight, but I guess with our grossly lopsided wheels, the whole thing was bouncing up and down, and those dynamic loads …’
‘It’s okay, guv!’ Clark laughed. ‘It’s not your fault—it was just … Victoria Island doing what she does best, trying to stop us getting to her far side.’
It rained this morning as we finished off the repairs, re-strung the netting and re-loaded everything. It turns out that the good end of the mangled axle was also bent, but, unable to narrow the cart any further, we’ll just have to cope with our back right wheel leaning out at a bit of an angle.
It was 3 pm when we finally finished shifting the bag weights around and stood back to admire our sleek new aerodynamically narrow Nugget. We collected all the metal off-cuts, picked up all the little shards of carbon fibre (well, those that haven’t embedded themselves into our skin, itching like fire), and set off through the rain towards the first of the big hills—anxious to leave Ground Zero of yesterday’s calamity behind, along with its depressing thoughts of failure.
We have just set up camp in what has to be one of the most beautiful campsites we’ve seen so far. Just 20 metres away is a lake, frozen over except for its vibrant blue perimeter of clear water, from which Clark just scooped enough water for dinner and breakfast. The terrain is now wonderfully firm—a pebbly tundra that could almost be a farmer’s well-kept meadow. It looks, as Clark pointed out, exactly like that default Windows XP desktop background of rolling hills against a summery blue sky.
All our clothes are finally starting to dry, and the bits of mud caked all over us, our clothes and our cart are starting to desiccate and break off as powder. For dinner tonight we are enjoying our favourite Mexican Chicken and, very best of all, we still have a functioning cart with four wheels and room on top for our tent, and we just got the cart up some killer hills. We are in top spirits, and riding the high that comes from having foiled yet another of Victoria Island’s attempts to ruin our plans.
DAY 32: Into the hills
Only partly full of brekky, we set off on our first solid day of mountain hauling, determined to make a dint into the kilometres separating us from the Kuujjua River. It’s slow going around here as we can no longer just pick a point on the distant horizon and march towards it. With so many hills, ditches, rivers, sections too steep to haul up or too steep to descend, too muddy or too wet or too rocky or too lumpy to negotiate, and all of it hidden behind the present hill anyway, progress is a jolting stop-start affair. Typically, we pick a route up the hill that is immediately before us, grunting our way to the top, and there we pore over our maps and even the GPS sometimes, to try to decide the most efficient way down and up the next. It’s a compromise between not going too far out of our way, and not giving up hard-earned altitude by going directly down into a valley only then to have to fight back up the other side. Annoyingly, going downhill is quite an effort now, too. Gone are the innocent, carefree days where we’d just hop on top and billycart-ride down. It seems grossly unfair, though, that we have to expend energy not only going up hills, but down them too!
For smaller descents—perhaps up to 5 metres long—we usually just try and outrun the cart because it takes so much time to unharness, walk around to the back, and so on, and every delay adds up out here with so many hills. This technique works well, until the ground turns into concealed mud, and our continuing to outrun the freight train hot on our heels suddenly isn’t an option. After some painful trial and error, it seems the most humane way to stop the cart is for both of us to dive off to one side and let the huge tyre grab and wrap around Clark’s hauling rope, dragging it—and sometimes Clark—under the wheel, which then eventually stops. The wheels are big and soft so there’s no physical scarring, only psychological.
The climax of our day came after easing The Nugget down a ludicrously deep valley and then having to haul back up what was, by Victoria Island standards, the side of Mount Everest. No explanation can do it justice—it was the hardest prolonged outpouring of energy either of us have ever done. We were on our hands and knees for most of it, frantically scrabbling for purchase—groping in the mud for rocks to hold as The Nugget kept starting to slide inexorably back down the near-45-degree slope. It was genuinely frightening at times, our overpants filling with mud and rocks forced up from the bottom as we were dragged helplessly backwards on our chests, clawing for support as The Nugget tried to gain speed. It took over an hour, and for the first time ever, Clark actually opposed my suggestion that we should try and set up a photo. It was that scary.
When we collapsed on the ground at the top, we baulked at the view down into the next enormous valley where a horribly similar snow- and mud-clad wall leered across at us, waiting. But that’s for tomorrow. We live in day-tight compartments out here; the enormity of the bigger picture is just too much to deal with.
DAY 33: Missing something?
We managed a spirited 7.68 kilometres today as the PAC rolls, and to our great joy, we finally crossed the last contour line on our topographic map, meaning there can’t be any serious hills left between us and the Kuujjua River. More excitingly still, the first little stream that flows into the Kuujjua is a mere 6.4 kilometres away. After we reach that, logic and gravity tell us that it must all be downhill! So unbelievably, we have survived the mountains and got up onto the plateau itself, with one, two, three, yes, four tyres!
This morning’s snow-covered mountainside shrank in scale to a mere hillside as we marched defiantly towards it, and then just a fifteen-minute snow slope. I love it when that happens out here—good old zero sense of scale. We clocked up a few more uneventful kilometres, pausing to put another bandage on our ragged tyre covers during our second nut break. Setting off once more, we then headed down a steep valley towards a forked river crossing. Unharnessing and walking around to the back of The Nugget, I began helping ease it down the hill for a second or so, before I suddenly froze.
‘Clark! Where’s our tent?’ We both stared in horror at the vacant place in the middle of the hardtop where our tent lives by day, folded up and tied down inside a blue tarp, with our sleeping bags, Thermarests and other important items all inside it. It wasn’t there. As one we turned around and gazed behind us across the endless rolling expanse of nothing. It wasn’t anywhere to be seen. The wind has been blowing like stink here today and I guess somehow while hauling, the tent must have undone itself and been blown off onto the ground—somewhere between last night’s camp, and where we now stood, rooted to the ground in dismay.
At once we slung shotguns over our shoulders, snatched up the GPS, put in a waypoint marking where we stood so we could find The Nugget again, grabbed a spare set of batteries for the GPS, a satellite phone, EPIRB, camera, video camera—and a square of chocolate—and started walking back the way we’d come, trying hard not to dwell on how incredibly serious this would soon become if we couldn’t find our tent package with everything in it.
For once, we appreciated the mud. Our footsteps were not hard to trace, and after passing our nut break #2 spot and still having found no sign of our tent, our minds were racing, and the idiocy of it had well and truly rammed home. How could we not have noticed it was gone? Fools!
The ground was firmer in some places, and without the mud, we soon lost the trail. We kept walking. Over more hills. It all looked so different. ‘Which side of this mountain did we go?’ Then Clark spotted it—a table-sized blue package—sitting there like an abandoned airdrop. We let out a whoop of relief and sloshed over to it, and began the arduous job of heaving this enormous ‘sail’ all the way back to The Nugget in the howling wind. Replacing it onto the hardtop, we lashed it down extra se
curely and promised ourselves that nothing like this would ever happen again. It remains a mystery how it managed to escape, but a bent tent pole implies the wheels must have actually driven right over it when it fell off. Foiled yet again, Victoria Island! Ha ha!
DAY 34 (1 July 2008): Mud like we’ve never seen
I’m currently listening to my iPod, sitting on the front of The Nugget, legs swinging idly, wearing nothing but Icebreaker leggings and a pair of warm, dry socks. I’m enjoying the feeling of the glorious warmth of the sun soaking into my rather pale skin. At the other end of the cart, Clark has the vestibule folded right back, transforming the dingy little kitchen into a platform commanding a splendid view down over the Arctic tundra towards the apparently limitless blue horizon. The looking ‘down’ part is significant—we are at the top of the plateau; from here, we’re only about 1 kilometre from the little stream (which is downhill from us), that flows downhill (surprise) into a lake, that flows into a river, that flows into more lakes, which flow in turn into … the Kuujjua River, which flows downhill for over 100 kilometres! Against all odds, it seems we have made it. Our spirits could not be higher. The ground around here is firm, and we even set up the bear alarm in bare feet, the sensation of texture beneath our feet (well, the parts of our feet that aren’t numb from being squished in waterlogged boots for the last month) wonderfully welcome. The sun is toasty, the air is still, and the almost complete lack of clouds looks so promising that we have spread all our clothes out on the ground to dry for the first time in days.
The day didn’t start out so well though—not by a long shot. We headed off slowly, our feet aching alarmingly from blisters and twisted, sprained muscles no doubt exacerbated by heaving The Nugget up so many hills over the last few days. Clark’s feet are especially bad, and after he’d downed some painkillers we hobbled onwards, limping and grimacing.
Within about an hour, our hopes for a productive day came crashing down around us as we rounded a hill, and suddenly found ourselves in a rather nasty region of mud. Our feet swam in the muddy slurry, until, sinking deep enough (almost half a metre down), our boots started skating on a layer of what felt like pure ice, providing absolutely no grip. It was by far the worst mud we have encountered, including the horrors of 2005. We tried everything to reach the drier terrain ahead—both hauling; one pushing, one hauling; both pushing—but it was futile, exhausting, and back-breaking work. The wheels weren’t even turning, just smearing and sinking deeper.
We tried and tried for hours as nut break came and went unheeded, and so did lunch. At last, beaten and fed up, we unloaded The Nugget, carrying one heavy bag at a time across the mud to the ‘safe zone’ and sloshing back for the next. Each step sucked down into the mud so deep that withdrawing almost sucked our boots off, rubbing horribly into our inflamed heels. Even when it was completely unloaded, it took an almighty effort to drag The Nugget out and across the mud, where, after our having gone virtually nowhere in the last two hours, a mosquito—the first we’ve seen—hovered symbolically in front of my face before I clapped it angrily in my muddy hands.
‘Oooh, you shouldn’t have done that,’ Clark said, grinning. ‘He’s going to get his friends onto us now! You just wait!’ Any day now we’re expecting the infamous plague of mozzies to rise from the swampy tundra.
The rest of the day wasn’t so bad. We crossed the last two streams in our way with Clark only being completely dragged under the cart’s wheel on one of them, when it steamrollered his hiking pole and he couldn’t free his hand from the wrist-strap fast enough. Ouch. We even negotiated a few boulder fields today with only the odd spine-chilling, grating reminder of our low ground clearance. Dinner just now was to die for, and we ate it actually standing outside enjoying the view and the weather, and the satisfaction of standing on top of the plateau, at long last.
DAY 35: Ten miracles
Was Victoria Island actually kind to us today? Surely not. But, we can’t ignore it—we can’t stop grinning—everything went suspiciously in our favour. We woke on time (first miracle), and ate brekky outside enjoying an unheard-of continuation of yesterday’s perfect sunny, summer weather (miracle two), and set off towards the creek, downhill. The downhill was just steep enough for The Nugget to hold its own momentum but not accelerate, allowing us to walk freely with almost slack harnesses for much of the way. When we got to the stream, it was the kind that could be crossed without even flooding our boots.
At the crossing we watched, transfixed, as a caribou in the distance leapt and sprang around as though mad, and then bolted, streaking across the tundra unnaturally fast, pausing only to resume its bizarre dancing, as if it were being driven insane by unseen tormentors. As we hauled on, the terrain changed dramatically, and we found ourselves hauling through the Sahara Desert. Sand, all around. Not the soft sink-in type of sand, but compacted, firm sand designed to be hauled over (miracle three).
With the sun still smiling down upon us, we reached the intersection of the rivers, and in doing so, we crossed the state/territory border, crossing from Canada’s Nunavut into their Northwest Territories. If that’s not reason enough to celebrate by breaking open a second daily chocolate block ration, I don’t know what is. We drew a line in the sand, scribbled NUNAVUT and N.W.T. on their respective sides, and savoured the creamy richness of the melting chocolate, which tasted even better than normal because a) the temperature was now 10 degrees Celsius and below that temperature chocolate starts to lose its taste, and b) we knew we really shouldn’t have stolen the extra ration. What a moment. A few puffy, cotton-wool clouds floated around idly as we walked over to the union of the two streams.
With the increased volume of water, the stream picked up its pace, deepened, and snaked off westwards, the sunlight dancing on the gently rippling, sandy bottom. ‘I wonder if there are any—’ At this moment a tiny fish darted across in front of us, from one shadowy pool to another. Miracle four, and five—the prospect of being able to fish as we cruise down the river is surely worth two normal miracles. Loving life, we enjoyed our nut break, debating excitedly whether we could possibly try and go river-mode from here on. We decided to do it. However, as there was only half an hour left before lunch, I thought of a great delaying tactic: ‘Let’s go for a swim!’
Clark looked at the patches of snow on the banks, and sensibly decided to abstain, generously offering, ‘If you want to, by all means go ahead, and I’ll film it.’ So I pulled off my extra warm jacket, beanie, thermals and, after explaining to camera that having not had a shower in over a month I was going to take a quick dip, I plunged into the river in my Skins half-tights. ‘Quick’ dip was certainly the key word, and watching the video replay in slow motion it’s quite amazing to see that I managed to bounce right back out of the water and almost run across the surface to shore before my initial splash hit the water. It was invigorating to say the least. Once hypothermia set in and I became immune to the cold, I had a quick rub-down in the stream again and spent the next ten minutes leaping, prancing and running frantically around trying to dry off. My uncanny resemblance to the insane caribou did not go unnoticed by Clark.
We found something else to celebrate during lunch (reaching the river?) and decided we deserved an extra peanut butter wrap each. Bliss. We dug out the drybag with our ‘river gear’ in it—most importantly our Gore-Tex drysuits, wetsuit booties and cool Neoprene ‘glacier gloves’, and converted ourselves to water mode, zipping our drysuits closed with a satisfying click. It’s an awesome feeling, being in a drysuit: we felt utterly impenetrable as we harnessed up and marched directly into the river.
At first, the river wasn’t deep enough to float The Nugget and we simply hauled it along, sloshing our way through knee-deep water until, around a corner, the bottom shelved off and we found ourselves bobbing around like marshmallow men, buoyed by all the air in our drysuits. The Nugget rose off the bottom and together we all drifted westward. That is to say, both Clark and I, as well as all our 400 kilograms-ish of gear, moved we
stward—toward the far side of the island—without us having to burn a single calorie of energy. Miracle six! We hoisted ourselves on board, got out the paddles, and spent the next fifteen minutes trying all sorts of different configurations and techniques for paddling, punting the bottom, half hopping off when it got shallow, and generally learning how to control and manoeuvre our giant amphibious beast around shallows and bends.
The river was a little too shallow on average, and for the first section the wheels were rolling annoyingly on the bottom almost half the time. However, we laughed triumphantly when we came to our first mini rapid, something that would have forced a kayaker to tediously drag and portage, but we simply hopped out, clipped back into our hauling trace and The Nugget just rolled up out of the water behind us like a giant salamander, over the dry bits, and slipped back into the flow on the far side. Never has our PAC acronym (Paddleable Amphibious Cart) felt more appropriate.
The river spat us out into the first lake, leaving us with a kilometre or so of flat, still water to somehow cross before it flowed onwards again on the far side. We had been secretly dreading this part, fearing we’d have to haul around the convoluted shoreline at wading depth, because actually paddling The Nugget through still water was as yet untried and likely a slow torture. We stayed clipped in and walked boldly out towards the centre of the lake. The icy (literally) water rose to our waists, and then rose no further. We looked around suspiciously but kept hauling, ignoring the inevitable. But it just never got any deeper. We soon found ourselves in the middle of the lake—perhaps a kilometre from shore—still hauling through waist-height water. Miracle seven. When I say ‘hauling’, The Nugget was just bobbing obediently behind us as we barely tugged the hauling ropes at all. In fact, it made so little difference that we actually took turns hauling, while the other waded around taking photos. We strapped our Citizen watches to our harness so we could just glance down to see the time, and, when we noticed it was nut break, an island popped up out of nowhere just to our side (miracle eight) and we simply waltzed over to it until we grounded, and ate some peanuts.
