Our ever-changing icescape.
by John Huston
This is John. Today was a typical day for us as far as travel goes. We had a mix of rubble. We kind of have little soccer ball sized ice called popcorn rubble; you can kind of ski over it and the sleds slide over it quite easily. And in other places we have more significant, difficult blocks of older ice that require two people on a sled and lots of grunting and groaning depending on the exertion.
We never know what we are going to get. Out of camp this morning, for example, it looks like great skiing and it was for about 45 minutes and then it turned into rubble for the next 3 hours. We climbed upon the tallest piece of rubble around to scout and sometime it looks great to the north and sometimes it looks like a huge field of rubble. It is just a very inconsistent terrain that we travel on. So we always just try to accept what it is and keep moving north.
That's it for today. We are healthy. We are well fed and we are ready for a nice sleep. Our routines are working very well. We are not over tired and we feel like we are moving along quite well as far as that goes. Tomorrow we will do the Week in Review and something fun to wrap up the first 2 weeks as well. And we’ll try to send a few more photos. All right. Thank you. Bye.
Daily Expedition Data
Date: March 14, 2009
Location: N83° 42.946' W074 16.704'
Time Traveled: 8 hours 30 minutes
Distance Traveled: 3.7 nautical miles
AM Temperature: -42°F
PM Temperature: -34°F
AM overcast, light breeze out of N
PM clearing, light breeze out of SW
Distance to North Pole: 378 nautical miles