The northern lights were beautiful the other night when we were packing food.
Location: Iqualuit, Nunavat, Canada
Audio blog: packing gear, northern lights, frying bacon
Audio transcript:
Hello, this is Tyler Fish calling on the 19th of February. I am in Iqaluit, Baffin Island, at Matty McNair's house. The days have been busy for the last couple and I guess I need to recount them here; it's a little bit of a struggle to try to tell to tell you everything that has happened. Basically the biggest thing is that we that learned that all of our heavy and large items needed to go to cargo to be flown north if we wanted it to reach Ward Hunt Island when we start the expedition. So the next stop for all of our gear and for us is Resolute, which in on Cornwallis Island. It's in-between Baffin Island and Ellesmere Island, if you want to find it on a map.
We needed to pack up our food, get it all ready and that was a struggle for us, but we decided it was to our advantage. It would push us; we'd have to make decisions and it would get done. Indeed it is done. In the meantime what we were doing was there was a lot of packing of nuts and weighing things. John was weighing huge bags of freeze-dried cheese and I was counting all of the nuts and the truffle bars. A truffle bar, for those of you who do not know, basically is a chocolate fudge-like substance put into a bar form so you can eat it pretty easily, put it in your pocket, and take it out. And those are really good.
While we were doing that, I went outside to get something out of the deep-freeze and I remembered to look up at the sky, something you can forget when you are really busy. I looked up and there were the northern lights, a wonderful green and purplish ribbon that was just dancing down the sky. It was awesome! It's a good reminder that we are here for a reason because we love the north. This is just the beginning of the north because we continue to go north from here, so we are excited about that.
We have also been working on fattening up some more. I am still trying to get to 200 lbs. and I think I am a little bit ahead of John. We have been doing that in a couple of different ways. One of the things John had to do, wanted to do, was looking forward to doing, was to deep-fry the bacon to seal in the fat. He set up shop on the back of a motorboat that was sitting nearby, sitting out in the snow and he fired up our Whisper Light stove and fried up all the bacon, about 18 kilograms (about 40 lbs.) of bacon.
So that's about it, I think. We did get everything to cargo to help us relax a bit, so now we can focus on a little bit more of our gear. And we will get to go out camping and it will be great and work on some of our routines. John and I are doing well and we are excited to hear from people when we do. We hope all of you are well and are looking forward to hearing from us next. Thanks."