We have made it out of South Camp Inn, yippeeeee, and we are once again surrounded by breathtaking beauty and not another human being for hundreds of miles, perfect.
With all expeditions or adventures, things are for ever changing and plans are never set in stone. The operations team in London decided due to a change in circumstances for the next month our ‘Floating Support Base’ will in fact be far more useful at Isachsen. As we have mentioned before Isachsen is on the northerly coast of Canada, and although I can see the sea ice from our camp we are in fact on land and therefore not ‘floating’. In 3 to 4 weeks we will be moving out onto the ice at about 85º north, but for now we are taking in a different landscape equally as beautiful and just waiting to be explored. The exciting part of being based at Isachsen is our new home. We have temporally discarded the tent and have spent the past 3 days, working right around the clock creating an a truly palatial arctic dwelling in some of the old porter cabins left over from the research station based up here in the 60’s and 70’s. 
Many of the cabins have been heavily snow damaged, filled to their roofs from spin drift. However, after digging for 2 hours to clear a route to the medical hut we were overjoyed to find that the door and windows had remained tightly shut all these years and it was almost as good as new. The space is perfect for our living quarters but the boys wanted to have an additional cabin to store our food and barrels in. So feeling thoroughly over ambitious we set about digging out the porter cabin opposite to the medical hut, which unfortunately had not had its door closed for all these years and had a hefty amount of snow and ice inside for us to remove. Due to it being open to the elements it was very cold and damp inside, so to get the heat from our heater in to dry it all out, Tark’s and Charlie set about making a sealed tunnel/walk way between the 2 porter cabins with a door for entry!! All made out of bits and pieces, and using tools, we could find and dig out of the snow up here at the top of the world! Well the boy’s have excelled themselves, amazingly it doesn’t look half bad (from afar) and will do the job just nicely. It will take a day or so for some of the heat to filter into the second porter cabin and evaporate all the ice and damp, but when it does we will be in the height of arctic luxury. Talking of luxury, we have even dug out a porter loo to save our bums from the elements, although there was something special about our original ig-‘loo’ (…will have to make another when we move out onto the ice in a few weeks.)
In addition to our fab new home we have been graced for the past 3 days with absolutely stunning weather, you couldn’t have it better, perfect blue skies, not a breath of wind, 14 hours of sunshine and a mild -24ºC. One more day of DIY and we will be able to explore the mountains. We will post a video of our DIY in a couple of days.
Oh and the heater…what a beast!
Clearing out the last bit of snow – it was up to the top of the door!
