DAY 47 - A TOUGH, TOUGH DAY

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Today was a TOUGH day!

by John Huston

Whoa! What A DAY we had today! We will never forget this day. And it will probably go down as the most difficult, intense day of the expedition. This is an expedition of managing a lot of variables and when things go well, everything can seem smooth and relatively easy and comfortable. When things go wrong, it can be the exact opposite.

Today, this morning around 10:00, I fell through the ice with my skis on when I was attempting to cross a newly-frozen lead. I was in the water for about a minute. At first, it felt not that cold and then extraordinarily cold. Tyler was right behind me. I was able to swim out with the help of my pulk and ski poles. The wind was blowing around 7 to 10 knots out of the west and it was sunny. And we stripped me down, changed my clothes, which is a frigid, frigid experience right there on the side of the ice, and stuffed me into a sleeping bag, and gave me a little food. And I was warm enough and Tyler went and set up the tent and for the next hour and a half, we dried out some of my layers and prepared to go traveling again. Skiing is the warmest activity out here. We don't have a lot of fuel left, so we can't waste fuel drying all my wet clothes, so to have some damp clothes on and ski, is the easiest way to dry things.

So, that was a traumatic experience, and dramatic. We handled it very well. And we are mad at ourselves that we did not test that lead better because going through the ice and making everything wet makes everything harder for the next few days because it takes more time to manage the wet clothing in the tent. So, we were feeling good after that and then we received the beating of the wind out of the west for all afternoon. The sun went away for the most part and we had a 15 to 20 knot wind for most of the evening and afternoon of our skiing. We skied almost 13 hours total from camp to camp, including the incident, and suffice it to say, my soft Bergans of Norway sleeping bag never felt better.

I was extraordinarily impressed with Tyler throughout the whole day. I had a rough day skiing mentally, but I recovered and we ended on a high note and felt like we had persevered. We felt like that we are still on track to be successful. We're on schedule and it's going to be an interesting finish. We're running right to the margin of food and fuel as expected. And we feel that we have everything in place to reach the pole on the 24th or 25th of April.

Today we skied for CaringBridge user Dora Wild.  She is a 60 year old from Waterloo, IL and she has been fighting cancer for 1 1/2 years.  So Dora, as we had our tough day, we thought of you and sent you positive thoughts and we thought of all the other CaringBridge community following us and supporting people in need.  CaringBridge provides personalized websites for patients and families experiencing health crises, treatment, or recovery.  It connects their personal community to their experience in a very easy to use way and we are trying to raise $100,000 for CaringBridge so go to our website www.northpole09.com or CaringBridge.org for more information on how to support our efforts.

All right, keep on watching. We'll try to stay dry. Thanks for listening.

Daily Expedition Data
Date: April 17, 2009
Location: N88° 22.131' W064 57.022'
Time Traveled: 13.0 hours

CaringBridge Family: Dora Wild
John and Tyler are commited to raising
funds and awareness for CaringBridge.

DAY 46 - HOW HARD IS THIS EXPEDITION?

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How hard is the day to day in this expedition?

by John Huston

We've been skiing for 46 days straight and we didn't plan it that way. We didn't plan to save our rest days or day for bad weather or a storm and we haven't had a storm that's made us think we should stay in the tent and we really had no storm at all. So 46 days of skiing, how hard is it? And this trip, an unsupported ski expedition to the North Pole, has been called the hardest trip on the planet.

Well, answering that question can be done in many ways. First of all, Tyler and I will not likely know how hard of a trip it's been until it's over with. Just like we didn't know how hard it was to live at minus 60° for the first 8 days or so until it was over. And then we started having warmer temperatures and little things became easier and easier as far as managing things in the tent or staying warm and that sort of thing. So once we reach the North Pole and we get out of the groove of skiing every day and the mental focus, our bodies will relax, our minds will relax, and we'll likely be hit by a wall of some sort of exhaustion and we just don't know what we'll feel like, but we will have more perspective on how hard it is.

So, in a lot of ways, it's not going to be defined until it's over. Physically, it's a very hard trip. We work tirelessly to keep our bodies healthy; drinking, eating right, taking care of our feet, sleeping well, and we work very hard to travel at an even steady pace which Tyler and I are matched perfectly for. And that steady pace is easier on our bodies and minds than trying to push too much, and that's all we can do is ski at our steady pace and churn out the miles. So that makes the challenge not easier, but much more manageable mentally as well. Just get in our steady skiing groove and go north. It's kind of a comfort zone there. In a lot of sense the day-to-day life is as hard as we make it. Every day we're presented with different challenges; wind, navigation, skiing conditions, and how we feel, and how we react mentally through those different conditions defines our experience.

So, these days the skiing is very good, the temperatures are warmer, and we still have hard periods during the day, though. If, me in particular, gets dehydrated, or a little too hungry or something like that, or I just go in a mental place that is not as comfortable as I would like it to be. It's not easy to entertain ourselves for 13 hours a day all the time. So if we keep ourselves "care up" and our minds clicking along, then it feels very, very good and we enjoy the skiing. If we get out of that groove, it can seem like we're having a very hard day. So that kind of decides of how hard it is and that aspect of it.

But, all in all, when we're done at the North Pole, we'll have a lot of energy for a bit, most likely ‘cause we'll be so excited, and we don't want to define what we're going to feel, but our bodies are a lot thinner. We probably each lost probably 20 to 30 pounds and we're not gonna know how hard of a trip it's been until it's over. But suffice it to say that this definitely is one of the all-encompassing, most difficult challenges that we've ever undertaken, personally, mentally, and physically. And we feel good about how we're going about it and that makes it a lot less hard feeling. That‘s exactly what we wanted to do.

We skied for CaringBridge user Kirsten Hildebrandt, who is 3 years old. And February 15th, 2009 she was hospitalized for two months and she's now home. So Kirsten, we are thinking of you and sending you our positive thoughts just as your CaringBridge page allows your friends, family and support network to do so while you are recovering.

Daily Expedition Data
Date: April 16, 2009
Location: N88° 15.531' W066 53.278'
Time Traveled: 13 hours
Distance Traveled: 12.3 nautical miles
AM Temperature: -8°F
PM Temperature: -10°F
W/SW wind, 4-10 knots
Calm this PM, <4 knots

CaringBridge Family: Kirsten Hildebrandt
John and Tyler are committed to raising
funds and awareness for CaringBridge.

DAY 45 - SECRET SKILLS

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Did you know that we can sew?

by Tyler Fish

Hello, this Tyler calling with a blog for Day 45. Well, many of you have been following us for a while now on this North Pole expedition and you've probably gathered that there are some skills that we have. whether it's skiing or maybe camp cooking or just staying warm. We also have some secret skills that are a little less obvious. They're sort of smaller skills, but they can lead to some big comfort and ultimately success. This expedition is an unsupported expedition. Unsupported expeditions are expeditions where you get no help from the outside world and they require some special abilities.

We have the best equipment we could use, but at some point any of it could break or need repairing. The equipment should be durable and it should be functional, but it should also be repairable. Every prepared expedition has a repair kit and every expedition member becomes a repair person. One of the best secret skills that we have on our team is the ability to sew. It's a very simple skill. It can help you prevent something from getting worse, help you patch something that is ripped, help you modify something that, although good because it is the best gear out there, but you're living in it 24/7 or that you're using it everyday, you want it to be just a little different than it is.

Well, in order to sew you need a needle or a couple different types of needles, some thread or maybe some thinner and thicker, maybe even dental floss, which is a great thread, and you need a scissors and potentially a pliers. Our Victorinox Swiss Tool has both of these. And you need some material potentially to work with. The sewing has taken our time now and again and it's helped us feel like we have some control over things; it empowers us from day to day. So that's one of our secret skills. I encourage everybody to learn how to sew. A few different stitches and you're ready to change your world.

Well, hopefully we're done with all that now because we don't have any time. Today we crossed the 88° latitude. We're very happy about this for this means we're in the final push; we boosted up our hours to 13-hour days. We're ready to get to the North Pole, and if everything goes well, we'll be there in about 9 days. We are fighting some easterly drift. The winds are blowing pretty good, moving the ice, and the terrain has been wind-blown and some of the hardest packed snow that we have seen. We hope this helps us move quicker. It seems to be; we've made 14 ½ nautical miles today; that's the most that we've done. So, we're optimistic. We plan on reaching the pole, and because of some of our secret skills, we'll reach it in style, also looking good.

Now today we wanted to mention that we skied for Jim "Piker" Hill, recently diagnosed with AML and he is a CaringBridge patient. CaringBridge provides free, personalized websites for patients and families in health crisis, treatment, or recovery. And we're supporting CaringBridge as part of our expedition helping raise awareness and to raise money for CaringBridge. If you'd like to give money to this wonderful charity, please go to our website www.northpole09.com.

Daily Expedition Data
Date: April 15, 2009
Location: N88° 03.593' W068 27.494'
Time Traveled: 13 hours
Distance Traveled: 14.5 nautical miles
AM Temperature: -10°F
PM Temperature: -8°F
constant W/SW wind, 10-14 knots
More overcast in PM
117 nautical miles to North Pole

CaringBridge Family: Jim 'Piker' Hill
John and Tyler are committed to raising
funds and awareness for CaringBridge.

DAY 44 - AN EVENTFUL DAY

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John maneuvers the sleds after bridging a small lead.

by John Huston

We had a big day today. We are happy with it. We are very happy with our distance and we had a few events. So, here's a quick rundown. Last night, Tyler and I camped on the shores of a lead that was open, hoping that it would freeze overnight and it did not. It got bigger, and was more open when we woke up. So, we skied northwest along it, hoping to find a place to swim across, ski across, or a narrows. And luckily we found a narrows. It wasn't totally frozen, so we put on our dry suits, which cover everything completely, boots and Bergans outerwear, and they're quite warm. And we swam through some kind of slurpy, slush-like ice with some chunks in it and pulled our sleds, which float nicely like tops and corks right on top of the slush so nothing inside gets wet, right across. And that was great to have a first successful swim and to get in the water and feel the warmth of the water compared to the air. So, that's two events right there: our first successful swim and also crossing a lead which was stalling our progress.

At that junction, where the lead narrowed where we swam across, we encountered two people, if you can believe it. A guided expedition that had put in at 85-degrees north and was skiing a very similar route to the North Pole. And we shook their hands, Keith and Sebastian, and wished them good luck, and talked for a few minutes. It was good fun and it was really nice to share in someone else's experience and to know that they are having similar successes and struggles as we are out on the ice. So, we are ahead of them now and we will most likely stay ahead of them due to different travel schedules. So, good luck, Keith and Sebastian. It was great to run into you.

Another event, which are ongoing events, it has been windy out of the west for the past 3 or 4 days. And we like the wind at these kind of warmer temperatures, right now it is -10 Fahrenheit with a lot of sun, because it makes it easy for us not to sweat and maintain a nice even temperature all day. And more importantly that wind is packing our snow surface just beautifully. And we've experienced the very best skiing conditions of the expedition yesterday afternoon and almost all day today. And the terrain, thankfully, is nice and flat with some rubble inclusions and little ridges here and there, but nothing compared to the beginning and this is the stuff that we dreamed of.  So, we love that hard-packed snow.

However, that wind is also pushing us east-southeast at a very, I guess, pretty quick drift and we don't like either one of those directions, south or east. Historically the more east the expedition is the more southerly drift it has to deal with. And south of course is the opposite direction of the North Pole.  In our case, we are drifting today .3 nautical miles per hour east-southeast. Last night, we drifted almost 1 mile south. So, in 24 hours or so, we lose 2 miles of northern travel. And that definitely impacts us negatively. And we are now over at the 70-degree longitude which can be the danger zone as far as too much southerly drift. We're not experiencing that yet, but it makes us a little nervous about what we might have in the future and these winds are supposed to keep up for the next few days.

So, it should be very interesting. The finish of the race is on. We are upping our travel hours to 13 tomorrow cutting our sleep a little bit, but we feel excellent. Our legs feel good, our pulks are getting lighter, and the skiing conditions are fantastic, and we feel very good about being on schedule. So, hopefully, we will get to the North Pole in 10 days or so. So, stay tuned. The race is starting. Pedal to the metal. Thanks for listening.

Daily Expedition Data
Date: April 14, 2009
Location: N87° 50.579'  W070 42.310'
Time Traveled: 11.5 hours
Distance Traveled: 11.0 nautical miles
Drifted 2-3 nautical miles E/SE
AM Temperature: -16°F
PM Temperature: -10°F
W wind, W/SW wind, 10-15 knots
Clear, high thin clouds, excellent skiing
130 nautical miles to North Pole

John and Tyler are committed to raising
funds and awareness for CaringBridge.

DAY 43 - TRAVELING CONVERSATIONS

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Skiing is all about going forward with everything we have. We feel the same about life.

by Tyler Fish

This day was skied for Donna Hornik. Donna is a 3-year-old brain cancer patient from Indiana. Donna and her family use CaringBridge to keep family, relatives, and friends all updated on how Donna is doing. CaringBridge offers free services; free websites for anybody who would like to use them. John and I are encouraging people to use CaringBridge. We are trying to raise awareness for them and also trying to raise money for CaringBridge. If you're interested in donating to CaringBridge, you can go to our website, www.northpole09.com and there's a link that you can click on to go and donate to CaringBridge. So, Donna, we skied for you today.

Today was a great day for travel along what John and I feel is mostly older ice, the wind-packed crusts, the smaller pressure ridges, the kind you can see over when you finally get to them. It was smooth consistent skiing and we were able to stay close to each other and not have to wait for each other or catch up to the other person after rubble. Because it was easier to stay close, we've begun to have conversations, which I don't know what to call them, but they're either the longest or the shortest conversations on record.

Perhaps the longest because the conversations span miles before they're done or the shortest because it's just a sentence and an answer or maybe a couple sentences and then the conversation breaks for 10 minutes, 15 minutes, and then it continues. You see as one person checks the compass and checks the bearings to see where we are going, the back person can ask a question and then the front person can answer. The front person may then ask a question back, but then it's time to go.

The questions can be either about future plans for the expedition, the upcoming week and a half or two weeks, or they can be random personal trivia questions.  And again, the answer may not come right then. We have to keep skiing. The person might interrupt and say, "Oop, got to go," or "Oh, I've got my point. I'm leaving." So it keeps our lives interesting, these conversations, and John and I think we'll continue them because we've enjoyed the company while we're skiing.

So it's been a fun way to go through the day. And right now we are camped on the south side of a lead that we came to at the end of the day and that lead happens to be open, or mostly open, and we decided that it was better to camp now and potentially have it freeze overnight and we'll be able to cross it rather than try something riskier at the end of the day. We did see one seal swimming in the water and we do wish that that seal could tell us what will happen. So stay tuned tomorrow to find out what we did.

Daily Expedition Data
Date: April 13, 2009
Location: N87° 41.772' W073 33.662'
Time Traveled: 10.5 hours
Distance Traveled: 8.4 nautical miles
AM Temperature: -18°F
PM Temperature: -16°F
W wind in AM, SW wind in PM, 10-14 knots
Clear, but some haze
138 nautical miles to North Pole

CaringBridge Family: Donna Hornik
John and Tyler are commited to raising
funds and awareness for CaringBridge.

DAY 42 - FAT BOY BURGER

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John says, "I want a Fat Boy Burger!"

by John Huston

Out on the sea ice, skiing 11 hours a day, our minds wander all over the place. Tyler can hum and sing songs. I'm not so good at that. We both think about our lives in the future, activities and spending time with the people that we love and our friends back at home.  And we also daydream. Daydreaming is a very effective way to pass the time and it could be quite satisfying if we are patient with our thoughts.

However, certain thoughts pop in my mind, I am sure Tyler's too but I am talking about me here, more often than others.  And in particular, I can think about food and almost taste food that I don't have here at great length, sometimes hours, like today, I probably had 10 or 12 different meals around ethnic restaurants in Chicago.

Tyler and I are eating roughly 7,600 calories per day. We just finished our dinner, a wonderful pemmican stew with some curry, salt and black pepper added in. Also, with freeze dried cheddar cheese, milk, and ramen noodles, along with the lamb, chicken, and vegetable pemmican. We really like it every night and every morning. It's just fantastic food.

So, one daydream I've been having is about the Fat Boy Burger. In November, Tyler and I had the pleasure of visiting Bergans of Norway headquarters in Hokksund, Norway, outside of Oslo. And we went out to lunch with Ragnar, Rune, Jon and Terja to a little bar/pub nearby. And everyone at the table ordered something called the Fat Boy Burger and I have been salivating over this burger at length.

The Fat Boy Burger is half pound hamburger, Norwegian cheese, bacon, fried egg, mayonnaise, catsup, tomato, lettuce and I'm not sure if there's avocado on there but I'm going to put avocado on there too, and then a whole plate of French fries on the side. And I have thought a lot about that Fat Boy Burger. And I want one. So, when I get off the North Pole, I'll probably have lost 20 to 30 pounds, and I'm going to be coming for that Fat Boy Burger.  So, look out.

So, there's a little window into the simple minds of the long distance skier and how we often think about our loved ones and people back home or CaringBridge and people who that wonderful organization is helping out and our sponsors and people who support us.  It all means a lot but also we could caught in wonderful day dreams, that are sometimes tantalizing painful day dreams, about food and the Fat Boy Burger.

So thanks for listening.  We're on our way to the pole. It's a windy day but we are happy with our progress.  We're drifting east quite a bit so that should be interesting to see how that plays out and tomorrow we'll put some more miles.  Good night.

Daily Expedition Data
Date: April 12, 2009
Location: N87° 34.015' W074 52.656'
Time Traveled: 11 hours
Distance Traveled: 10.5 nautical miles
Drifted 1.0 nautical miles S/SE
AM Temperature: -18°F
PM Temperature: -18°F
all day drifted E (1-1.5nm)
NW wind in AM, W/SW wind in PM, 10-12 knots with gusts
overcast with sun shining through high clouds

WEEK IN REVIEW, 4/5 - 4/11

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Tyler fills a water bottle. We love our 7L tea pot.

by Tyler Fish

Hello. This is Tyler Fish calling in with the Week in Review. Calling in on Day 41, April 11th. It is a Saturday. The title of this blog is "Science, Health, and Variety". The Week in Review will come in 3 categories; science, health and a variety of things.

In Science, to start off, John and I noticed that the full moon came and went without any huge consequences for us. Typically, the full moon brings the greatest tides, which break up the Arctic ice that is over the ocean. We did not notice too much going on here so we are pleased with that.

We have continued to make more ice observations for the National Snow and Ice Data Center - noting the amount of ice floating on either side of new leads, anywhere from almost nothing to up to 30 or 40 centimeters of ice. So, that's been pretty interesting to do that project.

And in energy, John and I have been concerned about a fuel shortage. We thought that we did not have enough fuel in milliliters per person per day to finish the expedition in the comfort that we wanted to have. We need fuel to power our MSR WhisperLite Internationals. Those stoves we use for food, hot water, heat and any drying.  They're sort of the "one stop shop"-that's what we've got. Well, we can't get any more fuel so we decided we needed to change our habits. So we conserve. We become more efficient. We have water that is less hot. We wear our fleeces more often inside the tent and we're also now luckily able to take advantage of the natural light and heat of the sun.  It has an affect on the tent on good days.  So, we are very proud of ourselves. We've actually reversed our trend in fuel and we are increasing our milliliters per person per day that we had left. So, that is exciting.

In health, John and I are working very hard at protecting our faces from both the sun and the wind. They take a beating every day. In particular, my nose feels like a little bit of a stump.  John has decided that his hands, the cracks in his hands, just won't heal until after the expedition. My cough, contracted in Baffin Island before the expedition, is now finally gone.  And both of us are working hard to heal our chilblains, which is a surface freezing of the fatty tissues, often on the thighs, outer thighs, which is exactly where the both of us have it. What is a chilblain?  What does it look like? Well, right now, just imagine a bruise with some scabs on the outside and then they break open a little bit, so we bandage those. The most exciting news though, in health, would be the boost. John and I have increased our calories to over 7000 calories per day that we are trying to eat as much as possible.  Being good Midwesterners, most of this boost came from dairy products: chocolate, milk, and definitely some cheese.

In variety - last week saw us reach 86° and this week has seen us reach 87°.  And now we're actually a third of the way on to 88° so we are moving consistently and we are very happy with that.  The final two weeks are upon us so please expect a lot to happen.

This last week also saw John and me attempt to wear lighter long underwear due to a little bit of warmer weather. Well we have since changed back to thicker long underwear because we realized we are tired, our bodies are tired, we are thinner and it's become a bit breezier.

John and I have, in conversations, begun talking about what we want to do differently with our lives post-expedition; which I think is a herald of the different part of the expedition is upon us.  It's towards the end. 
And the last thing in variety - our DeLorme PN40 GPS comes out every break to double-check our bearings and position so that we know that we do not stray too far from our northerly course.  Victorinox watches keeps on ticking and their tools keep our gear clicking. They're really quite helpful. And Bergans of Norway keeps us protected all day.

Please stay tuned for the next two weeks of this expedition.  It's bound to get very interesting as every day becomes more and more important and vital in our forward progress towards the North Pole.

Daily Expedition Data
Date: April 11, 2009
Location: N87° 24.221' W075 26.748'
Time Traveled: 11 hours
Distance Traveled: 11.6 nautical miles
Drifted 0.4 nautical miles S/SE
AM Temperature: -20°F
PM Temperature: -20°F
NE wind in AM, NW wind in PM, 4-6 knots
156 nautical miles to the North Pole