September 11, 2009 by Lei.

Thank you for visiting my page. I’m hoping to become the first Chinese woman, as well as the first Asian American woman, to climb the highest mountain on every continent and to ski to both the North and South Poles (the “7+2”). I am only one mountain away from this goal: Mt. Everest! “The roof of the world” will be the most challenging—and most expensive—climb I have ever attempted, and I need your help to make this dream a reality. Every little bit helps! Your sponsorship will help inspire regular people to challenge themselves to do the impossible!

Please email me at info@LeisVentures.com if you would like to discuss sponsorship or have any questions.

If you would like to make a financial contribution, please mail a check to the following address or contact me for other payment methods:

Lei Wang
PO Box 45614
Somerville , MA 02145

Please help spread the message by forwarding the letter Everest 2010.PDF (or Chinese version Everest 2010 Chinese .PDF) to your friends who might be interested in helping.

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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 15, 2008 by Lei.

It’s a snowy day in Longyearbyen today, but fairly warm. We sorted through food and gears, and sent packed sleds to airport. We are packing 12 days’ worth of food, about 30 pounds per person. We are departing tomorrow morning to Borneo, the Russian ice station between 88 and 89 degree where most expeditions launches from. From there, we will fly in helicopter to near 89 degrees to start the ski trip.

Tonight, we had our last group dinner. Everything here is very very expensive, but there’re some interesting games that are unique to this place. For the past couple days, we have tasted whale steak, seal meat stew, and venison heart soup.

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April 14, 2008 by Lei.

Tomorrow we will sort out group food and gears, and pack our sleds to be sent to the airport. We are hoping to fly out early morning on the 16th to start our last degree ski trip.

For the previous few expeditions, almost every team suffered severe backward drift. The night before we headed out for the training trip, I ran into a familiar face at the bar — Steve Jones, the ALE manager at Patriot Hill when I visited Antarctica a couple months ago. He just came back from leading a last-degree expedition. They started at 89.30 degree, and got picked up at 89.28 degree six days later. But since then, the news was that ice drift has slowed down. There was even a positive drift (towards north) last night.

Pray for the good weather, and prey for the positive ice drift.

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April 14, 2008 by Lei.

Just got back in town from our shakedown training trip. For the past three days, we skied around valleys on the island while pulling our sleds. The picture looks familiar? But notice my new expedition anorak!

The first day was a total white out. We couldn’t see any scenery. The place we were dropped off was by the house for doggies. It was a weird feeling when the three seals (food for dogs) hanging in the whiteout was the only thing we saw that day.

We practiced pulling sleds up and down rough pressure ridges, which are very common on north pole trip, and broke two ski poles within the first 10 minutes. At camp, we took turns cooking and doing chores for the group. Testing out gears and learning to handle the unique dampness of North Pole trip are a big part of the training. The camp site looks familiar, but look carefully the thin lines surrounding the camp site:

Aha, the thin line is to protect the campsite from polar bears. At each corner, there is a little bell attached to the pole. If the bear crosses the line, a little bullet inside the bell would explode and scare the bear away.

I was curious enough to pull the line myself, however triggered nothing. It turned out that we had the wrong type of bullet inside it! Luckily, no bear came, though I’m really curious to meet one.

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April 11, 2008 by Lei.

Longyearbyen, or Svalbard, or Spitsbergen, all refer to the same northernmost island of Norway, located at 78 degree (Arctic circle starts at 66 degree). More accurately, Svalbard is the archipelago, Spitsbergen is the largest island of the archipelago, and Longyearbyen, named after American John Longyear, is the governing center and the only “town” on Spitsbergen and Savalbard.

When the plane was on its landing approach, the magnificent glacier island came into view, impressed me with its beauty and serenity. A few little houses perched here and there on the glacier slope, reminded me that we are arriving into Arctic Circle. Until then, I realized that I under dressed for the destination. It’s -15C outside and windy.When we flew into Antarctica on Ilyushin 76, we were told to dress “properly” with full winter gear; but here, the idea of flying into a “city” on a commercial flight fooled me, plus everyone else around me were all dressed just like normal passengers on any other commercial flights (of course, everyone magically produced a big coat once the plane landed)

Arriving at Longyearbyen near mid night

Luckily, I left Boston with my warm jacket, which was too warm for Boston already, but would save my life tonight and for the next one or two days, since one of my luggage that had my beautiful new expedition anorak was missing (because of flight delay, I missed my connection in Newark, and was routed to Oslo with a different airline. One piece of luggage missing upon arrival in Oslo). I also smartly threw in my carry-on pack a long cotton shirt, my city hat, and gloves at last minute. Those little things definitely came as essential at this moment, though wind chill still took no time to blow right through my city pants during those few steps between the plane and the building.

Though it was almost mid night, the sky was still fairly bright. I’m very happy to be back to my 24-hour daylight life again, and it’s brighter than I expected. To make it even better, we also have moon here! I still remember the first night after I came out of Antarctica, when I was surprised to realize that there is a moon in the world!

Despite the long travel and midnight arrival, we, two guides Keith and Dirk, and three team members for the shakedown training trip, still went out for a drink in town. Surprisingly, there is a “town” here! There are about a handful hotels, about 3-4 bars and some restaurants in “downtown”, and many open late like in any other cities. There are one university and a small permanent resident (school, tourism, coal mining) here all year long, even during dark winter.

Longyearbyen , a town in the valley

For the next few days, we will do a so-called shakedown training, simulating our ski trip in a more friendly condition on this island. Then we will fly out to the ice on Apr 16^th. We will be the last group out on the ice, and hope we will have better luck with nature. We heard some horror stories of some expeditions just came back. In one extreme case, one team was dropped off at 89.25 degree, and six days later, after working hard for 12 miles every day, they got picked up at 89.35 degree. Because the ice was drifting so fast, they actually only moved 10 miles towards pole in 6 days! So here, hard work does not guarantee success. We have to have nature on our side.

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April 8, 2008 by Lei.

I’m leaving Boston on April 9th for my North Pole trip. It would be a long flight through Copenhagen, Oslo, then the last stop in civilization — Longyearbyen of Norway. There, our team of 8 strangers from around the world will go through a 3-4 days’ training before we fly on to ice around April 16th to officially start our ski trip. We expect to arrive at the North Pole around April 26th. The distance between 89 degrees and the North Pole is about 60 nautical miles (1 nautical mile = 1.8 kilometer). But because of ice drift (hey, we are on an ocean!), the actual mileage we ski through will be much longer.

Posted in North Pole | 3 Comments »

April 8, 2008 by Lei.

I enjoyed quite a different life style during the past couple months:) Instead of being my normal mountain girl, I was hanging out on beach every other day:

The two tires weigh about 80 pounds together, and came as a special gift from John Huston, a polar adventurer and guide, who helped me to kick start this training last fall.

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April 7, 2008 by Lei.

Many friends have made me aware that I haven’t updated my blog since I came back. Sorry, too late for excuses now.

After coming back from Aconcagua, I actually recovered faster than I expected physical wise. Within one week, I felt energetic enough to hike and climb again. But the mental recovery only started after my body was healed. I spent the next week assessing my situation. During those two months of the long stretch of expeditions back to back, my energy level was wearing down obviously. I knew I could have performed better on Aconcagua had I not arrived at the mountain with half tank. I only survived the climb thank to my guides Estaban and Damian, and a lot of mental power. But it would be dangerous if I can’t guarantee a full tank to start off Everest.

After a painful and almost depressing debate, I finally decided to postpone Everest to next year. It was not a high moment to make such a decision, but safety is the utmost important priority. Given the fact that both North Pole and Everest are the hardest of the 7+2 project, I think it’s wise though not ideal to focus on just one of the hardest tasks during one trip.

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