Conquering the Impossible

by Mike Horn

  Upernavik was a legend to me. It was part of my personal mythology after reading, among the many books I devoured while preparing for this expedition, The Ghosts of Cape Sabine, which tells the story of Lieutenant Adolphus Greely. The American explorer attempted in 1881 to reach the northernmost point of the American continent. The members of his expedition, after committing a number of blunders, ran short on food and wound up resorting to cannibalism.

  Upernavik was their last known port of call.

  The place was certainly charged with history—with all the histories of polar exploration, stories that so often ended in tragedy. I wanted to set foot there myself, if for no reason other than to catch a whiff of the adventures and legends that still float in the air there.

  After just a day and a half on the ocean, I dropped anchor off a fishing village that was even more modest than Angmagssalik. It wasn’t even a port. It was a cove where the wind that gusts constantly had wrecked a great number of old steamships, whose carcasses blended into the gray haze of water and sky.

  Two Greenlandic helicopter pilots, surprised to see me there, asked me all sorts of questions and told me they couldn’t take off. “They are forecasting winds at fifty to sixty knots,” they told me. “It’ll be impossible to take off from Upernavik for at least two days.” Fifty-knot winds with all those icebergs—I wasn’t very eager to set out in those conditions, either. I decided to wait for a day and see how things would develop.

  I had barely fallen asleep when I was jolted awake by ocean rollers crashing against the hull. My anchor was dragging! Arktos was in danger of being hurled onto the shore and winding up like all the other ship skeletons, which had certainly met their fates in similar conditions. I had no choice but to weigh anchor entirely and put out to sea where my boat would be safer than in port. Running on autopilot with only a storm jib the size of a sheet of writing paper rigged, being tossed over mountains of water, and then plunging between them into troughs that looked eager to swallow me, I slalomed crazily between icebergs. It was never completely dark, but visibility was sharply reduced by the heavy fog that had set in.

  The storm forced me to stay at the helm for forty-eight hours straight, without a minute’s sleep. Then things calmed down.

  * * *

  In a sense, the weather forced my hand and obliged me to forge ahead faster than expected. Rather than return to Upernavik, I crossed Viscount Melville Sound and Baffin Bay, where icebergs were fewer.

  After a few days’ sailing, I arrived at the mouth of Lancaster Sound.

  This was the beginning of the famous Northwest Passage, which then follows the Bellot Strait, runs around King William Island, passes through Cambridge Bay and Amundsen Gulf, curves over the top of Alaska, and runs through the Bering Strait. I had planned to be able to sail at least as far as Cambridge Bay, to the large island of Victoria, before my boat became trapped in winter ice and I would have to continue on foot.

  Six-knot currents rush into one end of Lancaster Sound and rush out the other end with the same power. I was trying to make the best of things, so I sailed along a heavy snow that transformed my boat into a Popsicle. The wind shifted. If it suddenly began to blow hard, it could freeze the halyards and make it impossible to work the sails. And so I was obliged to change the setting of the sails constantly, in order to keep the cables from freezing solid in the pulleys.

  But actually things were looking pretty good. According to the Coast Guard officers aboard a Canadian icebreaker named the Terry Fox, Bellot Strait was open. If I hurried, even though it was late in the season at the beginning of October, I would be able to make it through. Incredible! I could already visualize myself, sails bellying, making good time all the way to Cambridge Bay.

  Two days later, I had a cold shower in terms of morale. Just as I was rounding the Brodeur Peninsula, the Terry Fox warned me that five miles of ice blocked the Bellot Strait between Somerset Island and the Boothia Peninsula.

  “You could have made it through just two days ago,” the Coast Guard officers told me, “but not now.”

  A matter of two days—forty-eight hours—had just foiled my plans.

  It seemed that the storm that I weathered in Viscount Melville Sound had pushed the ice into Lancaster Sound all the way up to Bellot Strait, where enormous chunks of pack ice now blocked the passage. There wasn’t even the narrowest channel of navigable water. The Terry Fox questioned me about the specifications of my boat—size, engine power, thickness of the hull, and so forth—and confirmed the bad news. There was no way I could get through.

  And to think that after Bellot Strait there was clear sailing all the way to Cambridge Bay. I was out of my mind with frustration.

  And that wasn’t all. My friends in the Coast Guard informed me that the temperature had just gone into free fall and that the ocean was beginning to freeze over.

  “If you keep on going,” they told me, “the ice will close up behind you. You will leave your boat there, and we won’t even be able to come look for you. Turn back. Come back and meet us at Nanisivik!”

  Nanisivik? I’d never heard of the place, but the pessimistic predictions of the Coast Guard men proved to be accurate. I decided to follow their advice and turn back. The ice did indeed solidify behind me as I entered the narrow Admiralty Inlet. This was the beginning of a mysterious journey as I plunged into the unknown expanses of this region for which I had no maps, since I had not expected to venture in this direction. Blindly following the instructions of the Terry Fox, in a strange half light that was neither day nor night, I sailed along in silence beneath the walls of a menacing gorge with a mixture of anguish and excitement that the first mapmakers certainly must have felt, sketching what greeted their eyes as they moved forward on a path of discovery.

  When I reached what should have been Nanisivik, I couldn’t see a thing. There were no lights except those of the Terry Fox, the Canadian Coast Guard icebreaker, toward which I was sailing at a cautious six knots.

  I was absolutely exhausted. Ever since Upernavik the incessant work and the bad weather had conspired to deprive me of both sleep and food. The constant cold and clamminess—there was no heater in the cockpit—had brought my frostbite back to life, and my hands were terribly painful. After the hellish journey across Baffin Bay with sixty-knot winds and the brutal currents against me, after turning back, being gradually encircled by ice, and the battle to save my boat, I felt as if I were coming home.

  The crew of the Terry Fox, who had noticed my arrival on their radar screen, tossed down lines and we moored the two boats together. They gave me hot soup, cold beer, and some sharp questions, which amounted to, “And just what do you think you’re up to out here all alone?” As you can imagine, the answer was a long one.

  The Terry Fox was heading back tomorrow to its home port on the Saint Lawrence Seaway. The icebreaker—even though it was a class four vessel—was in danger of being trapped by the cold and there wasn’t a day to waste. I asked, just for the sake of trying, whether the captain might be kind enough before heading back to Quebec to break the ice blocking the Bellot Strait so that I could make it through the passage.

  “Sorry, Mike,” he answered. “That ice is too thick. Even for me.”

  At least I had tried everything. The ice was closing in behind me, preventing me from turning back. That decided it for me. My cruise was ending here.

  Nanisivik was neither a port nor a village. It was a zinc mine, and the miners were the inhabitants. They lived in prefabricated huts around an ore crusher whose dull rumbling was a constant and unsettling presence. Men only stayed for fifteen-day shifts—any longer and they would go mad.

  Arktos was the first sailing vessel ever to drop anchor at Nanisivik—a minor landmark event, quickly overshadowed by another, much larger development. The day I arrived was the last day of Nanisivik’s existence. The mine was shutting down for good after twenty to twenty-five years of continuous operation.

  By an odd and almost frightening coincidence,
the minute I set foot there, the town vanished. Everywhere there was a hustle and bustle of trucks and pickup trucks being loaded. Helicopters and planes were taking off, carrying off light equipment and materials. Miners and engineers were leaving for other jobs.

  I had the weird impression that I had somehow triggered this hurry-scurry exodus. I felt like yelling, “Hey, guys, hold on! It’s only me!”

  Canadian environmental laws require any company operating a mining concession to return the site to its original state once the deposit has been fully exploited and operations have ceased. And so crews were out bulldozing all the houses without exception, filling in the swimming pool, demolishing the gymnasium, the restaurant, the post office, and all the other facilities that had been used for the past two decades by the almost exclusively male population. In quarries and mine shafts they parked 4×4 Toyota Land Cruisers, earthmovers, steamshovels, Caterpillars, bulldozers, and other vehicles—all of which looked brand-new. And then they buried them all under thousands of tons of rock, blasted loose with dynamite! Huts filled with enough spare parts, drilling equipment, and other mechanical equipment to dig shafts and rebuild any engine imaginable ten times over—met the same fate.

  I was fascinated (and horrified) by the sight of millions of dollars of equipment buried like a pile of junk. I knew perfectly well that, since planes are the only means of transportation up here, moving this material out would have cost far more than its market value. Moreover, the mining company, having established this site with the idea of operating it for ten years, had more than doubled its expected revenues and had enjoyed an excellent return on its investment. All the same, I couldn’t help thinking that it was all a gigantic waste.

  But at least I was able to observe this incredible, once-in-a-lifetime spectacle!

  The setting was melancholy, even tragic. Nanisivik had never been a real town, but it still represented twenty years—in some cases, longer—in the lives of these men who were now beginning to worry about their futures.

  As with any other dramatic conclusion, there was a farewell party, and I was invited. Alcohol, normally forbidden in order not to “contaminate” the Inuit, reappeared and flowing freely. One man named Bill, the chief engineer at the mine, told me that a cargo icebreaker, the Arctic, would embark with the last load of zinc from the mine in a few days. After that they would demolish the ore crusher and the mine would shut down for good.

  Since Bill seemed to be fascinated by my adventures, I gave him a brief summary of my situation and explained to him that, unless I could sail all the way to Cambridge Bay, as I had planned, I was going to have to trek the whole distance on foot. To make things worse, I would have to follow a much longer route since ahead of me, between Baffin Island and the Barren Lands, extended the Gulf of Boothia, which never freezes over. If my boat was stuck here, I would have to walk all around the Gulf of Boothia until I could find a way across.

  As for the idea of waiting for the thaw so that I could take my boat and continue, as planned, by water … that would take eight months! And without wishing to offend a resident of the place, I didn’t want to spend eight months in this hole, which was going to disappear in a matter of hours anyway.

  I was disappointed even though I was certain that I had made the right choice to take shelter here. I couldn’t wait until springtime, and I couldn’t leave right away. It was the end of October, and the snow was not thick enough or compact enough for me to set out across the vast rocky expanses of Baffin Island. The snow takes a while to accumulate in this frozen desert where precipitation is infrequent and gales are almost continuous. It’s a no-man’s-land less reminiscent of an ice field than the surface of the moon.

  Some Inuit whom I happened to meet confirmed this. It would be at least three or four weeks before the snow would be safe to travel across. So I might as well make the best of it and settle in as comfortably as I could. Bill gave me his house, one of the last ones standing. A crane that had miraculously survived the general destruction delicately hoisted my boat, which had been anchored in the shelter of a natural deepwater cove after the Terry Fox left, and set it down on the ice. Considering that the ice would not fully melt before next August, I wasn’t worried. There was no danger of Arktos drifting away or sinking while I was gone.

  Since I had some time on my hands, I called Cathy and asked her to join me with Annika and Jessica. I hadn’t seen my daughters since my departure from North Cape and, once I left Nanisivik to set out into the Arctic winter, it would be at least six months before I could hold them in my arms again.

  A few friends traveled along with my family, and the little group arrived without encountering any problems. Though Nanisivik was nothing more than a barracks community, its airport—given the importance of the air freight generated by the mine—could accommodate passenger airliners.

  On the rear section of my skis, Annika and Jessica, who had already richly decorated the front of the skis, drew a number of inukchuks. That is the Inuit name for the mysterious piles of huge flat rocks that you can see here and there atop hills, almost everywhere in the immense territory of Nunavut. Their origins shrouded in the mists of time, inukchuks are used to point the way to the next village. To a traveler seeking the right road, they call out, “I’ve been there. This is the way to go.” The inukchuks on the back of my skis and the house on the front of those skis would now call out together, “I’ve been there. Now I’m going back home.”

  * * *

  After camping out for a few days in the four or five remaining houses, my visitors left me to a solitude more intense than before. In all of Nanisivik, besides me, there were only five men in charge of the cleanup. They were cutting off the water supply and the electrical generators. There would be nothing but a minimal infrastructure operating at a low level throughout the winter so that people would be able to come back next summer to finish the renaturalization of the site.

  The mine had finally shut down, the Arctic was loading the last shipment of zinc, and they shut up the last house—mine.

  Now I was homeless, with no roof to protect me from an increasingly biting cold. Luckily, I knew that I could rely upon Claude, who generously offered to let me stay in the tiny cabin where he stores his sealskins and his tools at his home in Arctic Bay.

  * * *

  Corey, one of my new miner buddies, first introduced me to Claude Lavallée. The thirty-two-year-old native of Quebec had come to live in the Arctic when he was thirteen, accompanying his father who was installing phone lines for the mining companies of the Far North on behalf of Bell Canada. As a very young man, Claude began to work with him. But when he was fifteen he met Lily, a young Inuit woman. When Lily became pregnant Claude went to live with her in Arctic Bay, an Inuit village located twenty-two miles south of Nanisivik. They were married, and to earn a living Claude took the bus from Arctic Bay to the mine every day together with his new Inuit “brothers.” It was one of the longest bus routes in the entire Arctic. Lily’s father, Johannessy, taught Claude the arts of hunting, fishing, and survival in the Far North, but shortly after the birth of her baby, Lily’s parents broke up. Her mother moved not far from Arctic Bay, and her father went much farther south to Igloolik. Thus Claude, at the age of sixteen, found himself the head of a large family, and he supported and raised all of Lily’s brothers and sisters by himself by working at the mine.

  * * *

  While the last traces of life were being eradicated for all time in Nanisivik, I set out for Arctic Bay. The village is located well to the north of the Arctic circle but still within the geographical limits I had established for myself when I began the trip. Claude’s toolshed had only a tiny wood stove, and it was freezing cold inside. I felt like I was sleeping in my tent out on the ice field. But accommodations were free of charge, I was still completely in contact with nature, and I didn’t have to deal with anybody if I didn’t want to.

  Once the mine was shut down, Claude relied upon the centuries-old strategies of his adopted anc
estors for the care and feeding of his little tribe. He fished, hunted on foot or with his sled dogs, and became a skilled mechanic, fixing snowmobiles and various other machinery. He was a master of jury-rigging and improvisation, a MacGyver of the ice field, capable of making anything you can name out of the materials he had on hand. Supplementing his income was the generous monthly subsidy that the Canadian government provides to every Inuit family. However, up there that stipend only went so far, considering the scarcity of supplies and the difficulty of shipping anything.

  I shared their family meals, fed the dogs, helped out in the shop, and did whatever I could to make myself useful. While I was a member of the household, Lily made me a pair of sealskin gloves and boots.

  * * *

  At the beginning of November, when my route showed promising signs of becoming passable, Claude helped me reinforce the runners on my sled and bolster the sled’s framework. If everything had gone according to plan, I would have traveled only over ice, and my sled, in its current condition, would have been perfectly adequate. But modifications were going to be necessary for travel over the soil, rocks, and mountains, which awaited me on the route from the northern tip of Baffin Island.

  Claude gave me GPS positions for fishing holes and liquid obstacles located along my route. He told me everything he knew about the ways and habits of polar bears, their migratory routes, and their gathering spots, which he suggested that I avoid assiduously. He also initiated me in the mysteries of seal hunting. In short, he helped me with the unstinting generosity of a simple, honest man.