Ellesmere Island Journal days 1-3

5/10/08
Yesterday I finally Joined the team, they’ve been pushing through the rough Ice now for 40 days and only just reached smooth traveling where the plane landed. On the the flight in I manned the controls for a couple of hours and flew the Twin Otter over sections of the Arctic Ocean. I brought plenty of gifts with me to try to get on everyones good side, but it seems I didn’t particularly have to worry about it as they were just happy to see a new face. It’s extremely warm right now, and with the sun shining as it does 24 hours a day, everything feels extremely comfortable. We celebrated a bit last night and drug the sled to the top of a nearby peak and 6 of us rode straight down the hill in a mad dash, I have to say, it was one of the most fun days I’ve had to date.

5/11/08
This may be my only chance to be alone. I’m sitting on top of a small mountain overlooking our camp, and the broken arctic ocean. From here I can see the shadows of clouds as they move across confused jumbles of Ice far out to sea. The shadows shimmer as they move. This place has not been conquered by man, we simply can make quick dashes in and out of it. As I sit here and take in a full 360 degree view the only elusion to man that I can see are my own tracks, and our tents. Not even a man made sound penetrates the stillness, such powerful stillness. Yet, it holds such violence. Only a mountain away the Cache of Otto Sverdrup sits, a treasure lost that has been found by Toby after many years.

5/12/08
It was our first day moving since I arrived. We packed up early and set about moving camp. The sleds are heavy because of the amount of food that we now cary, and as hard as I trained, it was not near enough. As we finally pulled into camp, my motivation collapsed and merely setting up the tent was an act not performed so much as automated. I stand now ready to collapse. We covered about 23 Kilometers and I sat down only once all day. The General Outline of our day is as follows. Wake at 6:00, eat breakfast by 7:00 pack gear by 7:30 load the sleds by 8:00. From here Will usually treks ahead to find a route and we travel at a jogging pace for 2 hours at a time taking 15 minute breaks in between. We continue like this for 8 hours or so until we set up camp again. This is a very loose schedule, on easy days, the breaks extend to almost 45 minutes, and some days we quit a few minutes early or late.

Mika

“Unusual things are not meant to last.” Said Mika, a deceptively humble and sedate Inuit woman. She had said some form of the same statement many times over the last few weeks. This time she was referring to a team of dogs that she said could pull her Dogsled at a sustained speed of 17 kilometers per hour. Sadly most of those dogs had perished from the disease parvo, the year before. She sat across the room from me sowing a pair of beaver skin mitts speaking in a quiet monotone voice, occasionally punctuating words by raising her eyebrows. Inuit people are not all as quiet as Mika, but those who were raised mostly on the land understand the value of quiet. “We are taught to be quiet so as not to disturb the animals.” Mika said. I’m sure I had a quizzical look on my face. Who cares I thought. The more I learned from Mika about their traditions, the more I realized just how valuable their laws are. She remembers a time years ago when the Canadian Government tried to teach the Inuit to be herders, so they could make a living herding Caribou. The Inuit tried the techniques, but in the end the Caribou were just to hard to manage, so they went back to their old ways. What the Canadian Government didn’t understand, was that the Inuit had been managing the Caribou already for thousands of years. By our standards, the Inuit were a nomadic people, moving from place to place depending on the seasons. Nomads are roamers though, and they knew exactly where they were going, and it was the same as the year before. They didn’t move only to follow herds of Caribou, or to stay within hunting distance of the Flow Edge. They moved to allow their homes to air out, and to let the scent of man leave for a time, thus allowing nature to follow it’s course uninterrupted by man.

Many of the Inuit ways are confusing to us. They fight for rights to lands rich in mineral deposits, and yet do not mine them. They are a people backed by oral tradition, with knowledge passed down from the Elders. Those who lived solely off of the land are older now, mostly in their 80s, and it’s they who understand the reasons behind the laws. As with many oral traditions, they are passed on only when they are of use to those who keep them, and they are intimately connected with the language they were created in, changing the language changes the meaning of the story. Mika is fighting now to preserve not only her people, but their ancient ways. It isn’t easy, she is bending the rules by recording what has been an oral tradition for so long, and it’s considered rude to tell the Elders what to talk about. On the cusp that binds the generations, Mika is fighting to hold together her culture.

30 K Across the Bay

Stepping off of the airplane in Iqaluit reminded me of running head long into a brick wall. The cold wind was penetrating, and impenetrable. In the short walk from the plane to the building, the wind had pushed the cold through every layer I had on, and I felt like I was standing naked on some fictional icy planet. Iqaluit is not actually above the arctic circle, but sits just south of it on the map. The map lies. If you follow the tree line, the northern limit of where even large plant life can live, you will find that there is a sudden dip just around Iqaluit. Arctic storms that can be heard coming, howl across the ice, bringing temperatures that make your bones brittle. It’s a white dessert, with no open water, no trees, and scarce life to be found.

After meeting up with the team, I went back to the house where I’ll be staying for the next month, and was given my clothing that will be my only protection from the elements for the upcoming expedition to the even colder Ellesmere Island. The words of a good friend came to mind as I pulled on my bibs, and bent down to my knees to zip up my jacket. “Function over fashion,” Craig had said. I have no problem with that, as long as it keeps me warm!

Soon after, I was introduced to the dogs. They need no artificial warmth, or layers to keep them warm. Even the puppies can spend nights out, curled up on the ice. These dogs however are closer in relation to arctic wolves than they are to the handbag stuffing chihuahuas and the overbred lapdogs we find comfort in. It shows too. The elongated stride, the tooth scarred muzzles, and the cold, calculating, but intelligent stare of the dogs remind me of the feeling of looking into the eyes of a lion on the Serengetti.

The dogs you see in movies are malamutes, and siberian huskies, kitty-cats compared to the canadian eskimo dogs that are pulling us. Three of the dogs on our 9 dog team have drug their previous owners and 800 pounds of gear to the north pole twice. They are easy to make friends with though, and just like people, each dog has it’s own personality. The new dogs on the team are skittish, and afraid of people, just like a captured wolf would be. The veterans have the system so figured out that they could practically put their own harness on and will snap at other dogs for stepping out of line.
After a hard day of pulling you around, the dogs are tied up individually and fed, then after all the other work is done for the night, they look forward to a good petting that is the highlight of their day. Sarah, my teammate impressed the value of “saying goodnight” to your dogs early. A dog that is your friend is going to listen a lot better, and is going to enjoy pulling you around a lot more than one that resents you.

On my second day in Iqaluit, we load the sleds and harness the dogs for a 30 kilometer run out to a cabin that Sarah and Eric own across the bay. Sarah and Eric are the children of the famous arctic explorer Matty Mcnair-Landry. Matty is like one of the sled dogs, she pulls people up to the arctic. People with dreams of the North Pole invariably will come to Matty to lead them there. Sarah and I team up on a sled, and are yanked by the yelping dogs through a kilometer of broken up sea-ice before reaching the smooth ice beyond. I can’t say it was the easiest place to learn to ski. Dodging chunks of ice, wind hardened drifts of snow, and the sliding sled the whole time. Some of the new dogs didn’t always know how to pick their way through the ice while tied into the sled, and would try to go around the ice on the wrong side. As the sled went forward, the momentum and the 8 other dogs would suddenly yank the misguided dog backwards and the dog would get drug around the ice chunks and catapulted back toward the sled. Sarah has been doing this since she was two. She can remember being tied down to the sled and bundled up as her mom mushed the dogs across the ice. A life in the arctic running dogs makes for a strong person. I got to see Sarah lift an 80 pound dog (one of the small ones) as it got caught between two ice flows, and throw the dog over the ice, and over the sled, clearing some of the other dogs, probably saving it from being smashed to death between the flows by the frenzied other dogs.

Preperation

A new generation of explorers has been invited to sit around the same table that has been Will Steger’s base of operations for over twenty years. The biggest difference between the planning of our expedition and those before us is the road that allowed our easy access to Wills cabin, far removed from the town of Ely Minnesota which itself is far removed from the city life that has become all to present in my life. It used to be that to get to wills cabin, skiing, dogsledding, or canoeing across the lakes was the only way in, and this is exactly how Will brought in the supplies to build his cabin.
Few buildings sidetrack my gaze as I scan the shoreline along Wills lake. Steam rises from the lake and a stairway descends almost directly into the water from Wills sauna. After letting the sauna wring the sweat from us, the cold water is as inviting as a tropical beach and for hours we trade off between hot and cold..
We are here because Will has chosen each of us to join his latest expedition. We are from around the world, and we all have different takes on life, but we come together for a single task. Through the Circumnavigation of Ellesmere Island in the high arctic, we will be bringing back first hand accounts detailing the effects of global warming. My job is to capture the many critical moments on camera and to bring home the imagery that will inspire people to take action.