Conquering the Impossible (25 page)

On the next day, May 2, I left without looking back—like a cowboy in an old Western. Despite the weight of my sled, loaded to the gunwales, and the nearly flat terrain that allowed a strong northwesterly wind to blow straight into my face unimpeded, I made nineteen miles that first day. That evening I had the happy surprise of seeing Ron and Sari pull up; they had decided to follow my tracks by snowmobile to come and wish me good luck and urge me to keep up my courage. To be welcomed by friends and family after a long trip in the wilderness is a wonderful thing. But friends who come to wish you luck on your journey is a great comfort, as well.

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Over the past five months I had made almost no westward progress. Starting now, I absolutely had to make up for lost time. After Cambridge Bay, which was about 250 miles away as the crow flies, I had set myself a little challenge: to cover nonstop the eight hundred miles between Cambridge Bay and Paulatuk, on Amundsen Gulf.

The season that was beginning was ideal for travel. As the Arctic spring was beginning, the cold was dry, and temperatures rarely dropped under twenty degrees below zero, except during rare plunges to forty degrees below zero caused by strong frontal systems. In comparison with what I had suffered, it was practically balmy. It was ideal for traveling. I would sweat less while marching along, and I would have a few more minutes of grace time in which to pitch my tent. After the long winter night that had undermined my strength and deprived me of vitamin D, the more prevalent sunlight gave me a new surge of energy. And with it came optimism. I felt certain that now I would enjoy the good weather that I never experienced between Arctic Bay and Gjoa Haven.

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According to the Inuit elders, the best route to Cambridge Bay was to hug the south coast of King William Island, then climb back onto the island to avoid an area prone to open water before crossing back down to the mainland and heading south and west along the edge of the Queen Maud Gulf and the Barren Lands. Then I would head back north to Victoria Island and Cambridge Bay. I had no time to waste. The route that I was planning to follow was 125 miles shorter and meant going to the west point of King William Island, then—since the shortest distance between two points is a straight line—crossing directly over to Victoria Island through the Royal Geographical Society Islands. The currents around these islands are so rough that the pack ice piles up into insurmountable barriers. This was where Sir John Franklin's boat was crushed in the ice and where his entire crew died trying to reach dry land.

*   *   *

I followed the coast to Glad Man's Point, a promontory on the westernmost point of the island. Like so many other locations in the area the place was named by Franklin, Amundsen, and their men after episodes (often tragic) that had taken place there.

In this icy wasteland there were no signposts, so I made use of Inuit “signage.” According to Makabi, the route to Gjoa Haven had passed over “the mountain that looks like the two breasts of a woman,” past the peak “shaped like a bear's teeth,” and, one day's march further on, the hill “that looks like the back of a humpback whale.” Such descriptors made it that much more necessary to know how to observe subtle shapes, something which I had been slowly learning to do. And so I recognized the “woman's breasts,” the “bear's teeth,” and the “back of the humpback whale.” This time, on the westernmost edge of King William Island, I was looking for a cove shaped like the egg of a snow goose, longer than the average egg. When I came upon it, the resemblance was striking. I was on the right path.

At Glad Man's Point, a radar station on the Distant Early Warning (DEW) Line, a solitary outpost, continues to stand guard against the nuclear threat. In contrast with what you might think, this spot isn't actually very far from Russia. You need only travel to the far side of the Pole.

The interior of the station looked like an abandoned hut on a construction site. I decided to pitch my tent in the second room, next to the generator that continued to provide power for the automated radar. There I would be sheltered from the wind and close to a heat source that would keep me a few degrees warmer.

As soon as the metal door closed behind me, I realized I was under surveillance by the lenses of a number of security cameras. I was shocked to hear a voice out of nowhere: “You are in a high-security military building. Please pick up the receiver, call the following number, and identify yourself.” I realized that a soldier on duty in an office somewhere, perhaps in the Pentagon or on some American military base located thousands of miles away, was watching me.

It was certainly in my interest to comply with the order. After all, the station also had remote-controlled weapons. I called the guard and explained to him briefly who I was and what I was doing. I told him he could check out my Web site if he didn't believe me.

I assured him that I was just passing through and that I wanted nothing more than a shelter for the night.

“Okay,” answered the voice. “You can stay the night. But we're keeping an eye on you.” In the morning, as soon as I woke up, I broke camp and packed my bags in haste. I had no desire to spend any more time under the watchful eye of Big Brother.

*   *   *

Sir John Franklin and his men passed through Glad Man's Point in June 1847, just prior to the last leg of their fateful journey. My imagination was attuned to this fact and, here and there, led me to glimpse a pile of stones, identify a cross carved into a rock, or hear what sounded like cries for help.

*   *   *

At this point along the route, I was supposed to listen to the voice of reason and head south across Queen Maud Gulf to the Barren Lands and follow the coast west from there. But I was more determined than ever to keep heading west, traveling via the Royal Geographical Society Islands, and then Jenny Lind Island, which would be my last landfall until Cambridge Bay, which I would reach by crossing Icebreaker Channel and hugging the southern coast of Victoria Island. This alternate route of mine was theoretically impossible because of the enormous blocks of pack ice that rendered the way impassable. They had told me the same thing about Committee Bay.

As was my way, I didn't resist the temptation to go take a look for myself. If I couldn't get through, I would just make a detour to the South. It wouldn't be the first detour of my trip.

At first, the frozen ocean was like a speedway underneath my skis, and I was setting distance records every day: fifteen, sixteen, seventeen miles. At this time of year, each day was between eight and twelve minutes longer than the day before.

I was in the middle of the area where Franklin and his men wandered at length, searching for Glad Man's Point and King William Island, which they hoped would be their way back to civilization. Armed with rifles and animal traps, they tried to hunt bear and caribou for sustenance. I hadn't seen any bear tracks for a while, but otherwise, game seemed abundant. Why would they have starved to death? As I moved through these haunting, magnificent landscapes that once enveloped Franklin and his men, I pondered the other factors that might have contributed to their deaths. I could think of only two good reasons: the inadequacy of their equipment, intended for navigation rather than traveling over ice fields; and the rigid chain of command of the time, when a captain was all-powerful and his orders could never be questioned, even if those orders threatened to condemn the entire crew to death. These same two reasons were likely the cause of nearly all the maritime tragedies in the Arctic during the nineteenth century.

When no messages were forthcoming from her husband, Lady Franklin financed numerous rescue missions. The missions went on for years and managed to produce only one piece of information: the “Eskimos” had named a small island in the area Floating Boat Island. This suggested that Franklin's ship, once freed by melting ice, had not sunk immediately but had drifted until it reached the island in question and then finally settled to the bottom nearby. In the year I ventured into the region, new sonar surveys were being done in an attempt to locate the wreck.

Franklin's body was never found. We know that his men wouldn't have performed a burial at sea because naval regulations of the period required that the body of a dead captain should be carried home with his ship except in case of shipwreck. The crew would certainly have warehoused his body in a shallow trench carved in the ice, or in the earth's surface just above the permafrost, with a pile of rocks heaped above it to mark the spot. The sailors probably expected to be able to come back to recover the body after they themselves had been rescued. But that was not how events unfolded.

In the years and decades that followed, explorers continued to search for that “temporary” grave—now more than 150 years old—and for the body that the cold would have preserved virtually intact.

The story of Sir John Franklin and his men has been handed down from generation to generation among the Inuit of the region, becoming one of the countless legends of the Arctic. I imagined the phantom ship and the mysterious corpse lying undiscovered below my ski tracks as I traveled over the frozen straits and barren terrain of that unforgiving region.

*   *   *

I pitched my tent just before the Royal Geographical Society Islands and their daunting pack ice. I was in a hurry to start climbing these huge, supposedly insurmountable piles of ice. To my eyes, they were more of an exciting challenge than a daunting obstacle. The challenge was primarily physical—it takes more time to haul a sled up while climbing than it does to pull it behind you while skiing on flat terrain. Then came the strategic challenges of picking a route. Should I try to go to the right around this or that block of ice, or to the left? Should I try to climb this giant block, which looked like it led to an easier passage beyond, or this other smaller block, in which case I might have to unload my sled in order to get over the wall that stood behind it? The days were filled with decisions of this sort, each of which influenced the chain of decisions that followed. The strategic component was like a chess match, while the stakes were like a high-rollers' game of poker. The wins and losses were collected on the spot—payable in blood and sweat. There was no cheating. There were no loopholes. It was a language that I understood.

I wasn't disappointed by the challenge posed by these ice blocks. The battle was as tough as I had expected, and my average distance dropped drastically. But the smooth sailing had been getting a little dull anyway. I was calculating, evaluating, negotiating, and the fight was stimulating and exciting. With a single-minded focus on my task, and watching foxes and birds out of the corner of my eye, I felt a kind of happiness in giving it my all.

During the night, both guarded and surrounded by those thousands of colossal sentinels of ice, I thought to myself that this would be an ideal spot to leave a letter to my daughters. This idea, which had been buzzing in my head since Arctic Bay, sprang from my desire to have Annika and Jessica see everything that I had seen. But to get them to come up here, it wouldn't be enough to tell them that the landscape is worth seeing. I would need to give them a specific goal. To find a letter that had been left for them would be a sort of treasure hunt that might motivate them many years from now, if and when I was no longer around.

This area was so difficult to reach that the mere achievement of getting there would help them understand my line of work. Although, who knows, ten or twenty years from now, global warming might have melted all the ice, and people might travel this coastline in cruise ships!

In the middle of the night I wrote a letter to my daughters that began with a few statistics—position, daytime temperatures, and so on—and then went on in an attempt to explain the emotions that I experienced while I was there. I tried to re-create some of the more exceptional moments that I had experienced during this adventure, and finally, I tried to justify, in my own words, both my dreams and my long absences. In short, I told my daughters everything that I had long wanted to be able to say to them but that they were still too young to be able to understand.

I slipped the letter into a plastic bag, which I planned to hide under the rocks on the next island I encountered along my route.

The island I found the next day was about the size of a pickup truck. My letter in one hand, my camera in the other, I searched for the ideal place to hide my message. Noticing a small jutting ridge, I decided that it would make the perfect hiding place, and I began to excavate the frozen earth beneath it with great difficulty. Suddenly, as I was moving some rocks, I uncovered a wolf trap! The trap was still attached to its rock with a chain. The powerful jaws, still pried open, would never snap shut on anything because the spring, like the rest of the trap, was badly corroded. The rust had literally fused the whole mechanism into the stone, but not so completely that I couldn't break it away with a little effort. Scientists and historians would have some fun with this item, which must be at least a century old—roughly from the period of the Franklin expedition. I could see them, him and his starving men, setting that trap with feverish hopes.

I am one of those people who believe in a “Leave No Trace” ethic, meaning that even when chance brings us face-to-face with this sort of treasure, the only alteration we dare make to the scene is leaving footprints in the snow.

I put the plastic bag containing the letters for my daughters on top of the trap, and then I placed the stones on top of them. I noted the exact GPS location of the spot, which I then photographed for my records. Then I continued on my way.

*   *   *

After fourteen hours of struggling through the pack ice, I pitched camp on Jenny Lind Island. Before slipping into my sleeping bag, I repaired a tear that I had made in my tent with the tip of one of my skis. Because temperatures had fallen again to forty degrees below zero, I couldn't leave a hole in the tent. I stitched it up and “welded” the stitching with a special heated silicone gel.