June 2, 2008 by Lei.

It takes a while to settle back into “normal” life again after having been on expedition mode for six months. A lot of friends have been anxiously waiting to see the pictures and video I took during the past half year, wanting to know what was it like to live or travel in those places. Thanks to my dear friend Jing Mu, who spent all her precious free time to work on this project, here they come …

http://www.youtube.com/user/moon9607

The first posts include Ice Marathon 2007 and our flight to Antarctica. We are planning to post a new video clip about every other week.

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May 6, 2008 by Lei.

It might not come to many people’s mind that Arctic is an ocean, not a land. So when we talk about traveling “on land” in the Arctic, we mean traveling on a piece of ice. The piece of ice can be big, can be small. Ice can break and can melt. Since the ice is on the ocean, it does not stay still. It drifts with current and wind. You can never (easily) stand on the “same” point on ice.

To start the trip, we first flew from Longyearbyen to Ice Camp Barneo on a Russian jet Antonov AN-74. It is not as big as the Ilyushin 76 that we used in Antarctica, and does not require solid blue ice runway, which is not possible to build in the Arctic.

Ice Camp Barneo is just a campsite with a few tents on a big piece of ice. There we caught a flight on a helicopter to fly to the start of our ski trip. It was built in late March on 89 degrees, but has drifted to 88 degrees when we flew in mid April. Because of global warming, there were not a reliable multi-year ice to build the camp on, so it was built on a piece of young one year old ice. When we finished the trip in late April, a big crack showed up near the runway, as you could see in the following picture. It takes a lot of guts for a pilot to land a plane on a piece of broken ice!

Though we say this is a ski trip, it is not the kind of skiing most people have in mind. First of all, when you pull a sled of 100 pounds behind you, the maximum speed you could ski is just about a normal walking pace even if the surface is perfectly smooth. Besides that, you often have to travel on a far-less-than-perfect surface. Because the apparent “peaceful” ice we were traveling on was actually floating on the giant ocean. The powerful force of the ocean current often pushes ice in all directions. When two pieces of ice were pushed against each other, the ice crashed into small mountains of ice rubbles, thus forming what we call “pressure ridges”. To get over pressure ridges, it takes a lot of team work where we help each other by passing on or pushing over the sleds.

Besides pressure ridges, we also crossed leads of various sizes from time to time. A lead is a piece of open water that breaks the ice. If the lead is small, we could just leap over. When it is big, we would have to take hours to detour or search for routes to hop over the ice “islands”. This year, we ran into a series of giant lakes that clearly is a product of global warming:

These lakes cost us a couple days of no progress, and it was where our teammate Brian Jones fell in to above waist line. In his honor, we named this lake “Lake Jones”.

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April 25, 2008 by admin.

April 24:
Current position is 90° North!!! The team had a long, hard day but achieved their goal. They awoke at 7 AM and reached the North Pole at 7 PM. They covered 10 nautical miles in 9 hours of travel. The ice conditions were quite solid. They ran into a few cracks but again, nothing compared with the conditions they had previously encountered. All were quite excited to reach the Pole and had a well deserved celebration with champagne, photos, and satellite phone calls back to family and friends. They are now comfortably settled into their tents enjoying the fruits of their labors. Major congratulations to all on a hard fought victory! Spending days making no progress and eventually moving backwards is quite discouraging to say the least. But they kept up their spirits, kept plugging away and deserve to feel very proud of themselves!

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April 24, 2008 by admin.

April 23:
Current position is 89° 53’028” North; 039° 01’ 651” West
The team got a helicopter lift today around 11:30 AM and were dropped off around 1:30 PM at 89° 47’ 25” North.  Conditions were remarkably improved from where they had been- ice much more solid, much less open water- a great relief to everyone!  They covered 6 nautical miles in 5.5 hours which felt like huge progress compared with their recent days of travel.
John Thompson returned safely to Longyearbyen and was seen at the medical clinic.  No specific treatment is needed other than keeping his hands warm which he plans to do.  His spirits are overall very good and he’s talking about trying again next year.

If the day goes well and there isn’t too much drift overnight, it is possible for the team to make it to the North Pole tomorrow!

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April 23, 2008 by admin.

April 22:
Current position is 89° 19’ 840’ North, 004° 58’ 102 West.  The team took a layover day today to rest up from their intense efforts at “going nowhere fast”!  The Arctic treadmill is working against them combined with massive amounts of open water.  They are finding more open water than they have seen in the 15 years they have been leading North Pole expeditions.  Each night, they drift further south and spend the day trying to recapture lost ground, ending up basically right back where they started.  One team member, John Thompson, is having some significant frostnip issues on his hands and for his own health and health of the team overall, he will be transferred back to Longyearbyen tomorrow.  The team will be getting a shuttle by helicopter over this huge area of open water to a position with firmer ice conditions closer to the North Pole.  They will then continue their trek to the north.  Meanwhile their spirits are high as they enjoyed their day flying kites, resting, reading, soaking in the beauty of the Arctic (and drifting south 7 nautical miles!).

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April 22, 2008 by admin.

April 21:
Current position is 89° 19’ 840” N, 004° 58’ 102” W.  The team woke up to discover they had drifted south 3 nautical miles overnight.  They skied for 8 hours and had good ice conditions for the first 3 hours in the morning.  They then encountered fractured open water with lead after lead, basically stopping any forward progress.  These conditions are very challenging physically, mentally and emotionally for the team.   But they’re persevering, doing their best to stay positive and recognizing that what they’re experiencing is in the footsteps of the great Arctic explorers throughout history.

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April 21, 2008 by admin.

April 20:
Current position is 89° 20’183” North, 0° longitude (they are exactly at the Prime Meridian also known as the Greenwich Meridian).  They had an overall amazing travel day with unlimited blue skies and slight north winds.  They are currently drifting to the southwest.
They encountered several patches of open water and rubble zones in their first 4 hours of travel.  Then in the last 6 hours of their 10 hour travel day, they covered 8 nautical miles, finding beautiful pans of ice.  They thank everyone for all of the support from friends and family.

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April 21, 2008 by admin.

April 19:
Current position is 89° 13’ 664” North.  Another rather challenging day of travel as the team again encountered quite a few open leads and many “team building experiences”.  They were able to navigate around the leads but they definitely impacted the team’s progress to the north.  They had flat light- cloudy conditions with minimal sunshine, making it difficult to see the contrasts in the snow and ice.  They progressed 5 nautical miles as the crow flies, over 7 nautical miles including negotiating around the leads.  All are in good spirits- tired but satisfied with their day of travel.

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April 21, 2008 by admin.

April 18:
Current position is 89° 08′ 719″ North, 004° 21′ 676″ East. The team had excellent traveling conditions today- sunny skies, unlimited visibility, no wind.  The ice conditions were initially excellent- incredibly flat terrain for the first two thirds of the day, then they ran into a number of pressure ridges.  They did encounter several sizeable leads that led them on some significant detours to find spots to cross.  They traveled 7.8 nautical miles including their sideways motion.  Their progress “as the crow flies” was 5.8 nautical miles.  Everyone did very well- healthy, warm and now comfortably settled in camp.

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April 18, 2008 by admin.

April 17:
Current position is 89° 04′ 116″ North, 005° 25′ East. The team had an excellent first day of travel on the ice. As they had a late night last night, they slept in a bit and were on the trail by noon. They covered approximately 6 nautical miles in 6 hours which is a very strong showing for the first day. The ice conditions were overall very good- they encountered a number of pressure ridges, some challenging enough that they had to take off their skis and climb through. The weather was very pleasant- quite sunny, temperature around -20° C (-4° F), light and variable winds.

Here is an audio clip of Lei’s report:

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