by Chris Bray
In addition to flowers and boulders, we have also started to see heaps of mountain sorrel growing all around us—an edible plant which was an important food for the Inuit. Back in 2005 our good mate Brent had told us all about these tiny little weed-like plants with their red-green (and rather fleshy) heart-shaped leaves which taste amazingly like a wild berry—sweet and flavoursome. We kept our eyes out and found none in 2005, but today we have been pulling off the odd handful of juicy leaves as we haul past, and enjoying the novelty of fresh salad with our meals.
Passing a large lake we’d noted on Google Earth, we have apparently left the safety of the green zone, and entered the beginning of the ‘whiteish’ region of potential Death Terrain. Strangely, in front of us, it looked like the green continued on indefinitely. Perhaps it was just snow covered when the satellite took the photo? We dare not hope—we know Victoria Island too well. With 220 kilometres to go, we managed just over 10 kilometres today, which, if we could keep that up, could even mean we’d be at the far side in little more than twenty days! Obviously that’s unlikely, but it’s these whimsical little dreams that keep us going.
DAY 47: Ditch Terrain
Frustratingly, the entire day from start to finish was an endless repetition of a routine that we now perform mindlessly and mechanically: both haul The Nugget for perhaps 10 metres, and then both unclip and walk around to the back ready to gradually ease it down into yet another ditch. Although only an average of 5 metres wide, each ditch is about 2 metres deep, making it quite a slope. Together we then dig our heels in, and with one drawn-out wince, we’re dragged down, trying to restrain the beast until it reaches the bottom, our pre-bruised feet slamming into rocks before we have a chance to spot and avoid them. Once at the bottom, we then walk around to the front, re-clip our harnesses in and haul for all we’re worth, front-pointing our boots into rocks and mud—even down on all fours—to try to get some kind of purchase as we inch upwards. By the time the cart is on the top of the crest, the person hauling in front is sometimes already partway down into the next ditch, unclipping to start the process again.
It’s a real nightmare—bad for us physically and mentally—and is also not great for The Nugget’s axles and wheels. The ground is increasingly spattered with large, ominously sharp rocks, forcing Clark—closest to the cart—to forever be calling out ‘STOP!’ and throwing his body against the wheels to prevent them rolling onto yet another lethally pointed spear. Crisis averted, but unable to steer the cart, we’d then kick, smash, or loosen the offending rock and cast it aside before proceeding. Many of the larger ones cannot be removed, and this requires us to roll The Nugget backwards—likely uphill—and perform a four- or even a six-point-turn, coaxing it to head gradually away from the rock as we push it forwards a few metres, then back, then forward, then back, all the while pulling it hard to one side. Ah, the joys of Ditch Terrain! We just coined that phrase today, elevating this special form of Victoria Island torture to join its compatriots Death Terrain and Mud Pits.
To add to our problems, our feet are now causing us some pretty serious grief. Apart from being generally pulverised, I seem to have pulled my Achilles tendon rather painfully, making it impossible to load my left leg unless I turn my foot out at right angles and side-walk ‘like-an-Egyptian’, putting the load instead on my heel (which itself has some interesting ailments, as do Clark’s). ‘We’re like a couple of old men!’ Clark snorted at our hobbling. I think I will join Clark in his morning dose of painkillers tomorrow, along with our daily multivitamin, vitamin C, vitamin D, zinc and calcium tablets that we take religiously. As we down this colourful array of pills each morning, we truly do feel like a couple of old men—we almost need one of those little weekly planner tablet boxes to keep track of it all.
Towards the end of the day we reached the base of a lake—which we had hoped to reach by lunch—and saw that the nice green tundra rim that we’d hoped to haul around was in fact made impossible by cliffs plunging directly into the lake a kilometre or so ahead.
Damn. With bitter scowls, we turned The Nugget hard left and heaved up a twisting route through still more rocks for over an hour, up to a ramp leading above the cliffs themselves, which we’ll have to try and haul across the top of tomorrow. What torture. Up and down, up and down goes our cart, and—accordingly—our positive energy.
DAY 48: Lesser of three evils?
Even as we set up camp last night, furtive glances around us revealed all was not well with our planned route for today. Matching up the terrain colours on Google Earth with what was around us, it seems the white area we have been aiming for ahead is actually an immense boulder field about 3 kilometres wide.
It was not even worth attempting. Our only option seemed to be to go all the way back down to the lake we’d just spent the previous afternoon climbing above, and just ‘somehow’ get around it. It was a depressing realisation. ‘Unless …’ I began, an idea forming. ‘Just an idea—not saying it’s possible …’
‘Go on,’ Clark urged.
‘I wonder if we could haul over the floating ice on the lake—go directly across the whole lake, rather than around the edge?’ Ice covered perhaps 95 per cent of this lake’s surface, and we had no idea how thick it was, except that it had already melted well away from the shore by about 50 metres on all sides, was littered with quite large meltwater pools into the shimmering distance, and the first 10 metres or so seemed nothing more than bobbing fragments of ice, a semi-fractured floating carpet of unknown thickness that wobbled, rose and fell with the surface waves. It seemed rather dubious, but we agreed that we’d at least take a look this morning as we started our solemn journey around the 15-kilometre shoreline.
So, sooner than expected, we found HMAS Nugget back in service, as we began wade-hauling her along the ‘shallows’ which were, in fact, quite deep. It was also rather cold, and the idea of hauling around the entire shoreline was becoming increasingly appalling.
At the point where the giant pancake of floating, rotten ice seemed the closest to shore, I unharnessed, and swam out the 40 metres to the fluctuating edge of the ice. The water was icy, but it was the clearest I have ever seen in my life—the bottom, way below me, was clearly visible and my legs seemed to dangle almost as if in free space. Towards what I hoped was the solid edge of the ice, I swam through the floating hunks and shards, scooping them away to either side as I went, the little pieces tinkling and jingling against each other like a glass wind-chime.
‘It looks good!’ I yelled back to Clark. ‘It seems to be over a foot thick, mostly.’ Thumbs up. I swam back, and we hopped aboard HMAS Nugget and paddled over to the ice edge.
The next dilemma was how to get ourselves from our floating raft—held out a good metre by our tyres—over onto the ice. With Clark paddling us hard against the edge, and me using the paddle as a bit of a crutch onto the mushy ice, I shifted my weight off HMAS Nugget and found myself standing on the swaying, flexible zone of almost-ice. It seemed to be holding my weight for the moment, anyway. I grabbed a hauling rope and held it in as Clark also leapt off, and together, we heaved with all our might, scrunching the front two wheels up onto the ice, followed, at last by the rear wheels. It had taken us over an hour and a half to get to this stage, but after a nut break, we were able to set off hauling over the ice, directly towards the far side, 10 kilometres away.
It was fast hauling: scenic, easy under foot and even though it was by now raining and windy, with the sky blanketed in grey clouds and the temperature a mere 3 degrees Celsius, it was just fantastic. In the first hour we racked up 3 kilometres! Some of the meltwater pools were quite interesting—spattered with gaping holes through to bottomless blue water beneath. As our mate Brent in Cambridge Bay would say, ‘particularly “religious” ’. Breaks were kept short by the cold, and by 5 pm we’d reached the far side—a total of 11.88 kilometres by the PAC-o-meter. We are so happy with that! Even if the lakeside hauling option had been viable, and even if it had been good terrain (it was
neither, we goggled up in awe at the cliffs and epic valleys that would have stopped us in our tracks as we hauled), even then, it would have taken a good two days to get around.
I just sent an update to our website, and as Day 50 is coming up and we want to cook an exceptionally tasty dinner to celebrate, we’ve posted a competition online for our supporters to come up with recipe ideas, using only the provided list of the ‘ingredients’ we have at our disposal. We’re really looking forward to this!
DAY 49: Valleys and more valleys—with lakes and more lakes
We knew today wasn’t going to be much of a winner: the trend recently has been ‘one good day, one bad’, and so as yesterday was surprisingly good, when Clark returned from collecting the water for cooking last night, he said, ‘There we go, guv, I got enough water to wait out tomorrow’s cyclone or whatever else Victoria Island has planned for us.’
‘Good thinking,’ I nodded, grinning.
Turns out it wasn’t quite that bad after all, but we did wake up to a depressingly glum morning. The thick grey blanket of cloud was more like a mattress, hanging very low, draping a heavy fog beneath it, and spitting rain. What’s more, after a good long stare at our topographic maps and Google Earth, we realised that there was no obvious route forward from here. Unfortunately, we did not anticipate being so far south on the island—the Kuujjua itself being a last-minute decision—so we never downloaded this part of the island on Google Earth at high resolution. Hence we’re stuck trying to interpret fuzzy pixelated daubs that cover hundreds of metres.
‘Do you reckon that’s a line of grass?’
‘Dunno. Might be a river …’ If only we had our good old super-dooper broadband out here—the idea of trying to download the local terrain images over Iridium’s 9.6 kilobytes per second is, unfortunately, not a realistic one.
Once we’d picked a route and headed off, the region of white assumed ‘boulders’ that we had planned to skirt right around turned out to be white pebbles, and so, shaking our heads with frustration, we turned 90 degrees to the left and cut directly over it towards a long skinny lake we had to get around. As we hauled, the ground ahead of us gradually drew away, opening up a gaping valley beneath us, at the bottom of which lay the thin lake we’d seen on the map. It was a dangerously steep descent. We unloaded four of our heaviest Ortlieb bags from The Nugget, and then gradually eased it down the hillside.
Amazingly, nothing went dramatically wrong—no wheels fell off, no broken legs, nothing—and we saved ourselves several kilometres of hauling around the lake! At the following lake, we re-enacted yesterday’s success by paddling over to what was left of the ice, and hauling across it—although more tentatively this time. At one stage I gave the ice a good hard stomp and my foot smashed right through. I guess being a smaller lake it’s more melted.
Getting up the other side of the next dramatic valley was a slog and a half—even though we took it at an angle. Eventually we stood on the ridge, looking down into yet another identical valley containing the next lake we needed to cross. We simply rolled our eyes, went to the back of The Nugget and began lowering it into the valley.
We’re now camped at the bottom, right in front of the lake, ready to paddle out to its floating icecap tomorrow morning. Unfortunately, while I wrote a website update and Clark busied himself with a bit of man-sewing—stitching up a tear in the tent—we heard a loud scrunching, grating noise. Poking our heads out, we watched, fascinated, as a huge region of the ice plate we were going to paddle out to tomorrow broke free from the main icecap and—swept by the wind—drifted over to the shore in front of us, where it smashed into a million pieces as it crumpled against the bank. I guess now we’ll have to paddle a lot further out tomorrow to reach the ice.
DAY 50: Half-century celebrations
Despite the weather gods’ decision to quite literally rain on our parade, we awoke determined to make today—the 50th day we’ve been alone out here—a happy, successful milestone. As we enjoyed an extra-creamy, extra-sugary bowl of oats, we listened to the rain spit and then spatter in earnest against the taut tent fabric as we clinked our (plastic) mugs of coffee together in celebration. ‘To Day 50!’ As we drained the last trickle of coffee from our mugs and wiped them clean and dry with a repeatedly licked finger (standard practice out here, I’m afraid), we prepared to face the weather.
Considering we had a lake crossing coming up anyway, we figured our drysuits were better than any raincoat we could wish for, and sealed ourselves inside. Being in a drysuit in the rain reminded me of that old Nordic adage: ‘There’s no such thing as bad weather—just bad clothes’, and we certainly have the best. The mozzies though—as we tried to pump up the two back tyres that had mysteriously deflated themselves overnight—were buzzing around in such incomprehensibly huge swarms that we couldn’t help but pause and take photos of the billowing, humming grey clouds. There were millions of them—more than I have ever seen in my life. Beating ourselves up, continually slapping our itchy faces and banging our hands to dislodge them made concentrating on pumping nigh-on impossible. As soon as the tyres were vaguely inflated, we quickly rolled away. The mozzies simply followed, and even climbed inside Clark’s mozzie head net, which soon filled up with squashed mosquitoes. From the next peninsula around, to our delight it was only a short paddle across to reach the ice, and, well practised at the manoeuvre now, we leapt onto its bobbing edge, hauled up HMAS Nugget and set off.
This ice was even thinner than the last, and we used our hiking poles as much for dubiously probing the ‘ice’ in front of us as for support and traction as we hauled. Several times we had to cross regions of ‘rotten’ ice that seemed to have been shattered into tiny fragments and were simply squashed back together by the surrounding pressure, giving the impression that if we were to dislodge a single piece of the puzzle, the whole jigsaw we were standing on would dismantle itself in a flash. Ominous creaks and groans sounded as we hauled. Fault lines shifted, cracks spread, and footfalls sounded suddenly hollow. It kept us on our toes for the full 3 kilometres across the frozen floating pancake. Then, when still several hundred metres from shore, not one but two gaping open-water ‘leads’ appeared in front of us.
We pushed The Nugget from behind until the front wheels broke through the thin ice at the edge, and we then rolled the back in after. The Nugget’s front was now only a few metres from the other side of the lake, and, noticing a few drifting chunks, I ice-hopped across from one to the next, as they bobbed and sank beneath my every step. Once over, I threw Clark the paddle I’d used as an ice-hopping-stick, and he hopped over to join me. Together we then heaved The Nugget up and continued hauling. The second lead was narrow enough for the PAC to form a bridge to walk over, and not long afterwards we paddled the final crossing to the lake’s shore.
I should explain the reason we are suddenly able to walk on these lakes again after they initially became too slushy when summer first set in. When we started out, everything was smothered in heaps of snow, and it was this snow cover on the lakes that melted and turned sloppy while deep underneath they were still almost solid ice. As summer progressed, the melted snow drained underneath the ice layer in the lake, allowing it to float to the top as an ever melting and thinning raft. Most of the lakes are ice free now, but the larger ones still have this thin sheet of ice floating in the middle.
We managed a respectable 8.2 kilometres today, and setting up camp beside some large, deep wolf tracks, I did another live TV interview with Sky News before our thoughts settled firmly on food.
‘Day 50 Dinner’ will go down in history as one of the tastiest meals ever prepared at these latitudes. We scrutinised each recipe idea sent in via our website, trying hard not to drool on the keyboard as our taste buds imagined all the vibrant flavours. In the end, considering some recipes cruelly required ingredients not on our list (like cheese and tomato), and others required—to be honest—more effort than we two weary explorers could muster, we selected ‘Spicy Speckled Couscous Bu
rritos’ as suggested by Raoul Kluge and Marketa Skala:
1. Rub butter in pot, fry six flatbreads (one at a time) until speckled with black flecks. 2. Melt 1 tbsp of butter and add salt, chilli powder, garlic powder and paprika to taste (but enough to make it spicy). Add ‘Miscellaneous Spice #1 & #2’ and fry spices for 1–2 minutes, then pour in water, bring to boil and remove from heat. 3. Add couscous, stirring constantly and wait for two minutes before adding the rest of the butter. 4. Spread couscous on burritos, sprinkle some nut-ration nuts on top, roll up and eat.
Next we moved on to dessert, ‘Peanut and Chocolate S’mores’, submitted by Nicola Craig:
1. Spread peanut butter on burrito. 2. Sprinkle peanuts and crushed chocolate ration over peanut butter. 3. Toast until chocolate melts and then eat.
This amazing dessert was perfectly accompanied by Jennifer Eurell’s ‘Mountain Mocha’:
Heat two cups of milk. Add 1 tsp of instant coffee and 2 tbsp of hot chocolate. Shave chocolate on top using Leatherman!
We went to sleep warm, happy, full and content in every way.
DAY 51: The Grand Canyons
In the morning, we quadruple-checked the GPS, and reluctantly gave in to its unflinching arrow, heading off towards the menacing, crumbling hills made purely from boulders and fragments of jagged rock. It grew steadily more horrendous as we drew nearer. By the time we got into the thick of it, we were not so much horrified as amazed. It looked like a cross between a rocky version of the Grand Canyon, an open-cut mine, and a scene from a Road Runner and Wile E. Coyote cartoon. There were boulders everywhere—some placed in impossible positions, propped up high, cantilevered out into the air by ludicrously small stones under one edge, or teetering precariously on the very brink of crumbling cliff faces. The skyline was a ragged mess of spikes, spires and angled blocks between which splits of grey light made the whole place feel like an ideal setting for the foothills of Mount Doom from The Lord of the Rings. There was no way around it. Valley after valley, we literally inched our way forward, heaving the PAC up bit by bit, and then once reaching each ridgeline, we’d have to spend half an hour scouting to try and find a plausible way down into the next valley without risking death or completely destroying The Nugget in the process. It was incredibly full-on.
