Midnight Sun

April 8, 2009 8:38pm

86.8552N, 076.6805W

Imagine
walking up a steep hill with a harness rigged to your back with a bunch
of bungie cords. Now imagine someone yanking as hard as they can every
other step you take while you are trying to go up that hill. Practice
that in the deep freeze, strap on a pair of skis and you’ll begin to
get a sense of what it feels like to pull a heavy sledge across the
ice! I figured today that we take approximately 25,000 steps a day out
here. This would then mean that the sledge yanks on our backs about
12,000 times today. It can get extraordinarily frustrating! This of
course does not factor the up and down of the terrain.
We traveled
through relatively flat pans today, and ended riding right into the
midnight sun. (Our rotations have us now ride into the “night”, which
of course makes little difference now as the sun no longer sets up
here). We covered 13.25 nautical miles in about 11 hours. We crossed two
newly frozen leads.; one of them was in motion while we crossed it–a
large frozen section was being pushed onto another one. This is one of
the more incredible displays of the power of the tides, wind and
current: to move hundreds of billions of tons of ice and crumple blocks
of ice the size of trucks, piling one on top of another. Such is the
power of nature. Our focus must be on harnessing that so sustainable
energy.
We are now tucked in our sleeping bags.
Our current position is N86°51.093 and W76°41.010.
Good night.

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