NORTH POLE 5

5 50 Shades of White

Posted by Satellite Phone, April 12

The Inuit are supposed to have fifty words for snow. I need a similar sized vocabulary to accommodate the vastly different ice we encounter as we trek ever North.

Some of my least favourite ices so far include the ‘one person at a time’ ice, the ‘lower your pulk gently here’ ice and the ‘I do hope that through the tiny eyes of a hungry whale, my pulk doesn’t look too much like a seal from underneath here’ ice.

I had braced myself for a long, monotonous trudge and had expected the challenge to be a mental one, rather than a physical one. In reality the physical demands are immense and no two footsteps are the same. There is often thick snow, frequently thin ice with just the lightest dusting of hoar frost and then there’s everything imaginable in between. The surface ripples and undulates, there are obstacles to negotiate even in the flattest of areas. And then there are the pressure ridges. The ridges are unavoidable, the only thing to do is to clamber up and over them, heaving your pulk behind you and trying to avoid it from catching you as you climb down the other side. (Imagine rock climbing in ill-fitting skis, with frozen oven mitts on your hands and a dustbin full of bricks attached to you – that will get you close to the unfeasibly difficult truth.) The slabs of ice that form these barriers are vast monoliths. Like brittle toffee, recently smashed with a hammer, the triangles and parallelograms collide in a mess of angles and edges and are piled high in long winding paths. They stop us in our tracks over and over again, and each time, as you await your turn or await the group the far side, the cold seeps in again and you feel the tell tale signs of your fingers being nipped by the frost.
These obstacles force us to stray from our Northerly  path, too, and it seems a miracle that at each hourly stop when we recalibrate our direction of travel against our shadows, and check our progress with GPS, we are still on course.
The inverse of the pressure ridge is the open lead, a glimpse of the arctic ocean beneath you. Streams or rivers, depending on the recent movement of the ice, they must be crossed. As we stood at the side of one, the water bubbled with activity and within the space of a few moments it began to freeze, turning from black, to a dark sludgy green, to jade in front of our eyes.

The colour of the ice is a welcome surprise. I anticipated endless white but where the pressure has forced the ice up it reveals its underside, exposing the layers beneath that show the passage of time in its glacier mint greens, antifreeze blues and, where the ice is at its thickest, a dark sage that suggests the murky depths below us.

But on we trek, stopping only for timed 5 minute rests every hour. Five minutes goes too quickly when you’re negotiating with gloves and it’s usually a quick choice between water, a bite of food or charging the next set of hand-warmers. And then we’re off again.

As we walk, there are many moments that I am able to forget the ocean is just a few feet beneath us. Sometimes I am able to forget I’m dragging a 50kg pulk behind me.  There are times when I forget I don’t like being cold. There are moments, too, when I am able to forget that I can’t ski. But it’s the moments when I forget all four factors at once that are the magical ones and I’m able to look up, look around, wonder at the extraordinary beauty of the landscape we’re immersed in and remind myself that not only are we the most northerly humans on the earth, but we must be amongst the luckiest too.