Zig-zagging in the cold

Saturday night. Good evening all. Richard here, checking in for the team.

“We’re now settled in our tent for the night. Broke down our camp further along Committee Bay this morning. Came up against a few technical issues with the ‘bear fence’ in the process, but we did manage to make a few modifications and cobble it back together again tonight. 

We worked our way steadily northward, negotiating very confused sea-ice, and hard-frozen debris, that we had to meander through, finding various paths and dead-ends and things like that. Achieved about 18k today, but a lot of that has been zig-zagging to find a decent route up North.

We started off the day on skis until we came upon an area of ‘bluish-looking’ ice that called for a switch to micro-spikes to get more purchase to pull our sleds over these very challenging obstacles. It became a skis to micro-spikes, back to skis, then back to micro-spikes, and so on, kind of day.

There’s been a very steady and strong head-wind today —very cold in the face. It’s been a very cold day (definitely!) so we spent much of it with our heads down interrupted only by spurts of ’pause, halt’ for an occasional glance around to see if there were any polar bears sneaking up behind us. All in all, it’s been a good, solid, consistent day and we’re quite happy with the distance we’ve done.  

Cheers, Richard (for David and Frank too) “

• Sunday’s weather for the region is forecast as starting out cold, with an early morning windchill close to -40.  Warming throughout the day with the possibility of flurries.

[Editorial Note: The Arctic Return team is in great spirits, having fun, and looking ahead in anticipation of what tomorrow brings.]