TR: Greenland page 4

Day 5

Another windy night.  Woke at 6am and had breakfast at 7am.  My borrowed thermarest won't stay inflated, but I am comfortable.  The lack of ground insulation caused my body heat to melt a progressively deeper trench where I lay each night.

Climbed a peak we nicknamed Weeman.  It was fun and at times a little exposed for a very short stretch.  I felt uncertain with only 4 short crampon points below the arch of my foot.  Thanks British Airways.  I don’t think I slowed down our progress too much, although I did benefit greatly from Al and Neil making good kick steps for me, which used more of their energy. 

It was a good day so a lot of photos were taken, but unfortunately no one took a good picture of the peak from a medium distance.  It is a nice pointy rock sided peak with a steepening snow face running up one aspect to about 50 degrees.

Our route up the top snow field of Weeman. 

Alan and myself.

Ben T and Ben M.

Dave

Johnny sets off

Johnny further up

Neil leads

Neil again

From the top of the snow field we traversed a narrow corniced ridge.  The snow was quite faceted here and loose underfoot. No crampons made me step carefully. It was a big enough drop on both sides that you did not want to fall.

Me riding Weeman

After the descent of Weeman the group carried on riding across a nice gentle glacier that had smooth relatively soft snow.  We continued for over a kilometer almost to the water's edge and then skinned about 1 hour back to basecamp.  After that I went off on my own for a return visit to the powder bowl of the previous day to take advantage of the good snow under better light conditions.  It was pretty good.

The evening was still, cold and clear bringing with it our first really good view of the Aurora Borealis.   The Aurora Borealis is almost surreal, supernatural.  Like a giant raging but gentle green ghost or vertically hanging sheet that wraps around itself at amazing speed.  It was simply incredible to see it, despite the very cold night air.   You have to see it to understand it.  I went to bed at 7pm but got up again to enjoy the show.

It was difficult to photograph.

Neil captured the best images after many attempts.  For the time being I only have this  lower resolution shot. We were all very stoked by the Northern Lights, but Neil liked it the most.

Longest unsupported polar expedition

Departing Reykjavik for Greenland we noticed two young guys wearing identical snow-going gear, right down to the same orange watches worn on the outside of their base layer sleeves.  We chatted to them on the flight and it turned out that they were on a sponsored two man return trip diagonally across Greenland.  It was going to take them 110 days and they would be dragging their gear on pulks much like some other arctic expeditions have done.  The purpose of the trip was I guess to build experience and because this is what they like to do.  The return nature of the journey contrives to make it the longest unsupported polar trip in history.  Somewhat pointless but no doubt an incredibly satisfying physical and mental achievement if they pull it off.

Both were young, fit and evidently well educated British men of a good class and most likely pretty popular with the ladies back at home.  Yet in occasionally predictable British fashion they utterly failed to introduce themselves.  I knew one was called George as it was embroided onto his Eaton school bag.  It seemed their sponsors forgot to supply them with an everyday travel bag.  Despite these light-hearted gags, everyone on our trip agreed that that these guys were up for a massive battle and all the best to them. I can't imagine how mentally difficult it would be to pull that sled every day for 55 days, to eventually see the coast line and civilization, only to turn around 200 meters from a beer and walk all the way back.  Of course, this is what Britain and her colonies was built on. Almost gone are those days.

I wasted most of my visionless youth in bars and lacked the imagination and role models to even conceive of setting out on a proper adventure.  It’s pretty good to see these guys doing it. Save equipment failure, I think they will make it quite simply because they want to. I'd like to try something hard one day.  You can follow their progress here.

I'll post the rest of the Greenland trip report in a few days.  For now I am heading out on a two night tour behind Hakuba.

Edit: Use the below links to continue reading the Trip Report.