After a few more long days working away we managed to get camp looking fantastic. The shower was… I want to say brilliant because out in the middle of the Arctic the concept of a shower is a little on the ludicrous side. The truth of the matter is that it brings back floods of memories of being in Africa when you have to contort yourself into unusual positions just to get your whole body wet. Once that is achieved, under the incredibly slow (and short lived) trickle, you have to try and get all the soap of before the water ‘tank’ runs dry. Regardless of all that we can wash ourselves and we have grown quite fond of our little shower.

The kitchen sink has performed fantastically and we can wash up all the dishes after every meal now. It has all become so efficient that we even empty out our meal bags out onto plates and sit around the table to eat them. I have no idea why but they seam to taste much better of a plate rather than in a bag. Speaking of efficiency we have established a routine with the heater now and are able to keep the temperature in our home at a perfect level. We do have a hose to connect the heater directly to a 45 Gallon drum and run the heater continuously but despite the additional hassle we found that we can monitor the fuel far more efficiently if we run the heater from the 5 gallon jerry can on the back. When the Jerry can is full we can run the heater on its lowest setting for between 9.5 and 10 hours. The lowest setting is ample to keep our home warm and when the fuel runs out we can leave it about 2 hours before having to relight it. We have had long debates about the toilet and have agreed and settled that it will stay outdoors in the ice. Cold as it may be dealing with the pluming of an indoor one is just not going to be realistic at this stage.

We have taken to a regular fitness regime and every day we walk, ski, run or hike up at least one of the hills. I was so excited when we reached the top of one of the big ones to see that there was a clear run of snow down one side. Although the bindings and boots are not exactly designed for skiing and I didn’t execute it in the most graceful of manners I couldn’t resist telemarking down.

Excuse the change in tense here but the story was written in staggered instalments.

After all the work we put into getting our home up and running we then got a devastating call from the London head office… we are coming off the ice!!! For a whole host of reasons it has been deemed that our job is done and we are on our way home. Our extraction was synchronised with the main resupply for PAM and we then had to completely disassemble our home. We all felt a little shocked and sat in silence for a while, I suppose each of us was thinking the same thing one way or another and then starting to get on with job. The flight was delayed by a day giving us enough time to return the whole place as we had found it ( Well not exactly as we found it, we didn’t fill the cabins back up with snow. We actually took great care to board up the doors and windows to protect them) and then Charlie hopped on the plane as it came through on its outbound leg to go on up to see Pen, Ann Daniels (mother of 4) and Martin (sweat cheeks) while Katie and I made final preparations for departure. Once everything was packed and out by the runway Katie managed to get her very first glimpse of an animal, a wolf. The wolf was actually rummaging around the bag with the cameras in so we couldn’t get a picture but Katie was very excited to see her first wild polar animal none the less. The plane was late on its return leg and Katie and I had taken to trying to guess the song that we were singing songs through our emergency whistles to try and stay warm. The flight home was quiet and sombre and we all sat staring out of the windows watching the polar ice below (and Katie wants me to mention the enormous pink moon).

The great news of the day is that Pen, Ann and Martin managed to get their resupply and they all seem in very high spirits as they continue along their journey Northwards. The not so good news is that our flight out onto the ice has been delayed again due to bad weather and the aircraft is not available over the weekend… so we are now all crossing our fingers for a Monday drop off. In a bid to try and overcome the irritation of having to patiently sit and wait for our flight back onto the ice we have started training for our next trip. Oh yes… of course it was never going to be long before we decided on our next trip and true to form here we go. Unfortunately I cant tell you what the project is just yet but I can tell you that it requires us to be exceptionally fit and strong and of course it is a world first!!! What possible better training ground could we ask for than the Arctic for such an endeavour?

We have been devising a training schedule that will fit in with our surroundings and daily work whilst out on the ice. Staying fit out here is considerably harder than it sounds because you have to be careful about sweating and the intense cold. We’ve spent most of the afternoon pulling our pulks over huge blocks of snow and ice and I caught this photo of Katie wrestling her 110kg sledge up and over the boulders.

Well there is only 1 twin otter in service currently at Resolute and so we are in a queue behind the re-supply for the ice team and the Polar Continental Ice Shelf. Due to bad weather the ice teams re-supply has been put back two days already which mean we are not going to get on the ice until Wednesday or possibly Thursday at the earliest! let me out, let me out!!!

FSB’s Red Nose Day Celebrations

Our new heater has now arrived, hooray! So all being well we will be back out on the ice on Sunday, and not a moment to soon, as poor old Tark’s is suffering pretty badly with his allergy still, and various sources have put it down to the chemicals in the water here at Resolute. We will be testing the heater thoroughly and rigorously tonight to make sure it does exactly what it says on the tin, but thanks to all Ron’s advice from International Thermal Research Ltd I am feeling incredibly positive that we have a fantastic piece of kit from Pioneer Space Heaters. We are all scratching at the doors to get back up on the ice as we didn’t even have time to take in our surroundings last week. It is after all the cold Stark beauty of the Arctic Ocean that we signed up for, so on ‘take 2′ we hope to endure it with a smile.  When we do return on Sunday we hope that the pile of kit that we left out there is still in tacked, our tracking beacon is still beeping away with the kit’s location however,  we  won’t know until we get out there whether the kit is buried under a pressure ridge or floating in an open lead!

Some pic’s from week 1:

Frosted Tark’s

The pressure ridge behind camp

Charlie in the ‘Coal mine’ (at midday)

Charlie trying to fix heater

The second reason was medically more concerning. Unlike PAM we are not man hauling large sledges during the day and so keeping warm became a real issue. Unfortunately in order to stop ourselves getting cold weather injuries and keep the fundamental communication lines open we had to light our cookers. These in turn gave off relatively large amounts of fumes and so we were forced to keep them on for very short periods punctuated by walks around camp to get fresh air and stay warm. We had a very serious discussion to try and ascertain whether we could hold out safely until the first resupply was due in about a week. Unfortunately despite our original evaluation it quickly became apparent that in order to prevent the situation deteriorating into an emergency and not only causing further risk to ourselves but also to PAM it was decided that we should get off the ice.

7 days after we had  waved good buy to the guys in the twin otter they were back again to pick us up. They even had a doctor on board to check us over on the way back to Resolute. Truth be told it was such a relaxing sensation to be back in the warmth of the plane that we pretty much fell straight to sleep and slept all the way back. Once we landed we were all rushed to the medical clinic and checked over thoroughly. Preliminary tests suggest we are all well and we have to go back in a few days once they have the blood sample back to get the all clear. So we are going to spend the next few days collecting ourselves, cleaning all the soot off our equipment and getting a new heating system and tent before hopefully heading back out later on in the week. Apart from the kerosene heaters making life a misery I actually feel a little sad that we had to leave this camp as it was becoming quite homely.

As for the Ice Team, we know very little on their progress, other than the small bar of ‘Hotel Chocolate’ I bought Pen for his birthday, thinking I was being very thoughtful and organised to plan for such things back in England, has today caused him to chip his tooth…opps!!

I’ve lost track of time up here and all the days seem to blend into one. Yesterday though I got excited for the first time as Chip (the expeditions operations manager) and I flew from Resolute Bay up to Isachsen to drop a fuel cache. The small plane (Twin Otter) that will drop us out on the ice later on the week can’t carry enough fuel on board to go from Resolute Bay to our drop off point on the ice and back again. Consequently we have had to put a makeshift refuelling station about half way. I say about half way because its very difficult to know exactly were we will be put down. Obviously the sea ice is slightly temperamental and so it will be a case of finding a landing strip suitable to put the plane down on in amongst the chaos. Apart from the convenience of being about half way, Isachsen was chosen because between the 1940’s and the 1970’s there was a research facility up there and they built a runway to get all the kit in or out. It was a very surreal experience, with no pun intended the entire station was quite literally frozen in time. After some fast and furious digging we managed to unearth the door to one of the facilities and when we got inside everything was exactly as it was the last time people were there. All the food was still neatly stacked on the shelves, the beds were made, the pens and pads were on the desks and there was even a leg of lamb in the fridge!

In any case the flight was a welcome break from the never ending mountains of kit we are preparing and testing. Why, so

close to departure, are the team still testing equipment you might be asking! Well the answers are simple. The first reason in neither exciting or surprising, it’s money!!! To cut a long story short expeditions don’t run on thin air and for some reason (still unbeknown to me) sponsors always seem to wait until the 11th hour before joining or committing to expeditions. As a consequence buying equipment is left until the 12th hour and with heavy time constraints you often can’t get the exact piece of kit you want and have to modify a similar item to make do. The second reason IS exciting, well it is to me at least, and that is science. Originally expeditions were all bout science and discovery. As technology and knowledge have evolved at an exponential rate over the past century, discovery and scientific endeavours have made way for personal expeditions. Not that their is anything wrong with these trips but a significant void has opened up between expeditionists and scientists. Many believing that our advancements in technology such as satellites have made the relationship superfluous. The truth of the matter being that there is and always will be a close symbiotic relationship between the two. The only problem being that we are no longer simply charting and mapping new areas (or rarely in any case), in order to produce a significant and worthwhile set of data we have to go the extra mile. As such a considerable amount of the equipment that is being used on this trip is firmly in the prototype stages and has been specifically designed for this trip.

Well I think that’s probably enough about my opinions on expeditions and science. Tomorrow we are collecting the final pieces of our kit and all things being equal and pending good weather we are currently looking at a Saturday drop off.

Oh I almost forgot, for some reason the newsletter is not working so I apologies to those who have subscribed and I will try and fix that as soon as possible. The good news is that our widget was accepted by Yahoo and you can now download it on the right. Just click on it and it will do the rest for you. At the moment it acts a bit like an RSS feed and will update automatically every time we update the website. Hopefully I will get it to run all the videos at images soon as well. Any feed back about it is much appreciated!

Charlie Paton and I arrived last night to a pleasant -47, whilst the Ice Team, Pen Hadow, Martin Hartley and Ann Daniels have stayed on in Ottowa, along with Ian Wesley (kit boy) and Tarka. They are staying down a few extra days for some scheduled press conferences and have collared Tarks as their french speaking translator.

We will spend the next week here in Resolute sorting and preparing kit,  going through weather reading and prediction, working with the pilots to understand exactly what they require from the runways we must build and maintain and finally repeat training exercises such as falling through the sea ice and polar bear safety.

The Inuit town of Resolute is little more than the size of a hamlet back home in the UK, maybe a small village at a push, with a population of approximately 230 people, the facilities of a school, small supermarket, hotel and its lifeline - the airport!

We are still waiting for the freight to arrive, so for now I am furiously working away at eating all Randy (the cook) can throw at me…his chocolate brownies are amazing!!

We have had a flat out start to 2009, working every hour we could find. With the only exception being 4 days off around Christmas, in which I became Tarka’s ‘feeder’, trying to replenish the 2.5 stone in weight he lost whilst cycling across Africa!

Well, our exciting news is that in 2 weeks time we are off to the Arctic Ocean for approximately 12 weeks! We are extremely fortunate to have been invited into the team of the Catlin Arctic Survey. The Catlin Arctic Survey is an international collaboration between polar explorers and some of the world’s foremost scientific bodies. It seeks to resolve one of the most important environmental questions of our time: How long will the Arctic Ocean’s sea ice cover remain a permanent feature of our planet? The expedition is being led by highly experienced polar explorer Pen Hadow. Accompanying him will be Ann Daniels, one of the world’s foremost female polar explorers and Martin Hartley, leading expedition photographer. Team (PAM) will be traveling on foot, hauling sledges from 80°N 140°W, across 1200km of disintegrating and shifting sea ice, for around 100 days, in temperatures as low as -50°C.

Tarka and I are 2 of the 3 members that constitute the Ice Base Team. The range of a Twin Otter (fully loaded) is about 1,125km. The distance from Resolute to the Team PAM (who will be travelling along 140° Longitude) is 1,100km. There is therefore the need for a re-fuelling point, at some point along the plane’s return journey, hence the need for two Ice Bases (see below). Our job is to inform pilots of weather conditions, on the ground, and to mark out and maintain a suitable runway. We will need to keep an eye on the state of the ice runway, which needs to be 305m in length and at least 60cm thick in order for the Twin Otters to land. Fog also starts to become an issue in the later stages of the expedition, as the slightly warmer temperatures meet the cold open water exposed by the ice break-up. Flying in such conditions is particularly dangerous, making re-supply runs that much more difficult to complete and our role as Ice Base staff that much more critical. In addition we must take care of the fuel cache used for re-supply and provide a little psychological support for them knowing there are others out on the ice.

For those who know little about the Arctic Ocean, in short Tark’s and I are going to live in a tent induring ridiculously cold temperatures for a little under 3 months (2 days ago we were given current weather reports of -80°C excluding wind chill)! Our tent will be on a thinning layer of ice that is constantly on the move, we may wake each morning kilometers away from where we went to sleep! Our main role is to aid the landing of the plane onto the ice to re-fuel, however for this to happen we have to make sure the fuel drums have not floated away on a fresh stretch of open water or sunk to the bottom of the ocean! On a daily basis we will be drilling holes and taking ice samples whilst watching our backs for the large white furry friends that will be our neighbours for the duration of the expedition.

To learn more about the Catlin Arctic Survey please click on the video link.