Mike and I are now camped at N86?28’59”, E94?,20’30”. We feared the worst after the wind really started howling last night, but the day turned out much better than we expected. Perhaps partly because we played it safe and put on a double set of winter clothing this morning, on our legs as well as torsos. I cut up a pair of my socks and used them between my boots and galoshes – so today my feet stayed nice and warm.
The temperature wasn’t actually so bad. It had climbed to –30?C, and fortunately the winder gradually turned from a more southerly direction and died down considerably toward the end of the day. It’s always more comfortable to have the wind at our backs. All in all we had a good day, putting 26 km behind, two of which were last nights ice drift. From our position you can see that we’re already halfway to 87 degrees latitude – and we’re satisfied with that progress.
We have followed many frozen leads today; they’re mostly running north–south. We move more quickly and easily on this nice, even ice. But now it seems we’ve put the leads behind us, and probably the polar bears as well. We haven’t seen any tracks or signs of them at all today.
As far as the bears go, I want to point out that they suffer no damage even though we several times have had to shoot them with our flare guns. The brightly burning flare is designed to frighten, and it cannot penetrate their thick fur. The polar bears, however, don’t experience it as fun, so they keep a safer distance. We are not out to injure these magnificent animals. As I pointed out in a previous post, we are the intruders here.
We’re starting to feel fatigue after these long days. When we walk 10 hours, there is hardly time for anything at the end of the day, other than to set up camp, brush the snow and frost from our clothing and equipment, cook up water, eat dinner and go to bed. That fills up the entire day.
Even though we have no sun, we have no trouble keeping our direction as we walk. Mike is a real master when it comes to navigating after snowdrifts that may be one or two weeks old. Perhaps his “jungle knowledge” is useful up here in the Arctic, too, because he is fantastic when it comes to reading the terrain.
