Victory on the final stretch!

During the night, the ice drift carried us one kilometre south and two kilometres west. When we woke up, our camp was slightly more than 24 km from our goal. Also today we took our turns in the lead – that is, everyone except me. I brought up the rear, relaxed and enjoyed my “holiday”. Everyone on this team is so well versed that I didn’t have a single worry.

The weather has been excellent, mostly sunny, just a thin veil of clouds that never did manage to hinder the sun. And the snow has been silky smooth! We have, of course, encountered pack ice and frozen leads, just like on the other days. Optimistic as we were, we expected to reach the North Pole after a “normal day” – nine hours of effort out on the ice.

Then suddenly – just as we were 2 km from the Pole – we saw another group slightly east of us. It was Matvey Shparo’s team, and both teams wanted to reach the goal first. Suddenly it was a race for the North Pole!

We expended the very last of our energy on that final stretch. Poor bloke who wanted to test the weigh of my pulk! He had to pull 180 in that last spring. Lars took the lead and gave us our victory, reaching the North Pole 20 metres before the first Russian. Not only that, but we had our entire group across the finish line before the Matvey managed to gather his.

It was quite a dramatic and exciting finale!

I can’t resist mentioning that we “gave” the Russians a whole day’s head start. In other words, we only used five and a half days on “the last degree”. This is definitely the faster group that I have brought to the North Pole. Granted, conditions have been excellent this year; but the decisive factor was having an incredibly strong group. They worked really well as a team and gave this everything they had.

Now we’re just savouring the moment here on the North Pole, relaxing and eating cake. We’re pleased with life and everything is perfect.

We may well be home a few days early. Right now we’re booked on the aeroplane that departs on Wednesday, 23 April. In all likelihood we shall also reach Longyearbyen on Spitsbergen that same day.

We’re all well – and we are very satisfied. This was a great way to reach our goal – a slim margin but a great victory, right before the noses of the Russian team. There ain’t nothin’ like a bit of friendly competition!

This entry was posted on April 20th, 2008 at 9:20 PM and is filed under North Pole 2008: Three Expeditions. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.