Day: 1

Arctic Transect 2004 Expedition Launches Today!

Temperature: -25F

Location: Great Slave Lake, NWT

Latitude: 62deg, 21min, 38sec North

Longitude: 114deg, 19min, 15sec West

This is Day 1. We’re camped on Great Slave Lake tonight. It was a real hectic morning in Yellowknife, the capital of the Northwest Territories. We’ve been camped here for the last three or four days, staying in various houses in town. We got up at 5:30 this morning and went through gear, packed our sleds, and hooked up dogs. By 12:20 we finally launched the expedition, traveling through several systems of lakes and got onto Yellowknife Bay, which is a large bay attached to Great Slave Lake.

Great Slave Lake is the eighth or ninth largest freshwater lake in the world. It’s about 230-240 miles east to west, and is really a huge body of water - you can’t see the other side of the lake, only open horizon. Leaving Yellowknife Bay, seeing the three dog teams was like watching three boats leave harbor into the open ocean. We had sunrise this morning at about 10:10 and sunset at around 2:30, so we’ve got about four and a half hours of sunlight. It was zero degrees Fahrenheit this morning when we left and partly cloudy but then cleared up to be a beautiful day. It was about 10 degrees below zero when we stopped at 3:30, with no wind at all.

There were these beautiful sun dogs on either side of the sun and the dog teams were traveling toward the sun dogs. The dog teams were giving off a vapor trail, which is sort of like exhaust from their breath and the heat of their bodies. The vapor trail is a sign of very clear, cold and calm weather, and it was really neat seeing the dogs steam off into the distance with a really low sun, with sun dogs on either side and the sun casting real low shadows. The shadows were hundreds of feet long, typical of December here in the Northwest Territories. We’re at 62 degrees north latitude, which is about 250 miles south of the arctic circle. We’re camped on the lake tonight, and it is becoming very cloudy, which will probably keep the temperature around minus 20 degrees. This is fairly mild weather for us, and what is really mild is the absence of wind and the absolute calm.

We’re having a very quiet New Year’s here, we’re too tired to party. We’re in three separate tents, and I’m tenting with Hugh. We’ve got three candles going here and we’re sitting next to the Coleman stove after a nice supper and we’re planning on going to bed around nine o’clock.