Day: 4

The Winds Pick Up, -70 Wind Chill

Temperature: -35F

Location: Great Slave Lake, NWT

Latitude: 60deg, 2min, 51sec North

Longitude: 113deg, 48min, 46sec West

It was a very cold morning. At six o’clock, the wind must have been 30-35 mph, and about 30 degrees below zero. It almost looked like we would be stormed in, but the clouds lifted and by 8:30 we were outside the tent. The wind chill is probably 70 below, and our faces freeze up in a matter of minutes, and about 15 seconds if we are facing the wind. We’re traveling to the southeast, so having this northwest wind at our back is a real salvation.

It did clear off as we traveled. There was a lot of blowing snow, with a low sun, and it was quite beautiful. It’s almost like being on the high plateau of Antarctica. All around us is nothing but 360 degrees of white, flat ice, which blended right into the blue sky and the long shadows (as usual, with the low sunshine).

We had a lunch break at 12:30 and then moved on a little more cautiously with the leads in the lake. I talked earlier [see Day 3] about the cracking of the ice, which is nothing major, but it can happen on the large lakes like Great Slave Lake, Lake Winnipeg, Great Bear Lake. It’s usually only three, four, five feet, nothing like the really dangerous, like the Arctic Ocean. The cracks are usually quite rare, you see them once in a while, as with pressure ridges, but we were a little more cautious traveling today.

We’ve got a good formation, with Mille, Hugh and Paul as dog drivers, so from now on they will be working with their individual teams. The main thing is to make sure that if we get into any sticky situations that the dog driver is able to control the team, which means the drivers should be working their own sleds. So we’re going to be doing that from now on, and whenever their is a question or navigational issues, I’m going to travel with Paul in the lead sled, to help him out. But we traveled real cautiously. It’s good to travel with a degree of caution. Yesterday was no big deal and no real danger, but a wet sled is a bad thing when it is this cold.

We traveled on until sunset, the sun dropped off the horizon at 7:26, and we made a hasty camp. It takes about an hour to get everything set up. Hugh and I work together with Hugh’s team, and with the tent, and food, etc. we’re totally self-contained. We put up the tent together each night in the wind, and then he tends to the dogs and I get things set up in the tent and get water. Hugh’s last chore is shoveling snow around the tent, which is real important with these tents. We also screw them down into the ice, with the kind of ice screws that climbers use, but it is important to shovel snow onto the snow flap. The snow flap is a piece of nylon about 18 inches wide all around the bottom of the tent, and you cover the flap with snow and it keeps the tent anchored down in the wind. And it also keeps the flapping of the tent down. So we’re totally secure here every evening.

Typically the winds come up around 9 or 10 o’clock, right about now. Around 4, 5 or 6 o’clock it really peaked out. Around 10 o’clock in the morning the wind starts slowing down, and noon is the calmest time of the day, maybe about 15 mph winds. Our coldest temperatures are in the evening. We had 28 below when we set up camp. But we are comfortable on our forth night in our cave of a tent here, and we’re slowing adjusting to tent life, usually going to be pretty early, around 8:30-9:00. I’m working on cameras tonight and reading the manuals. I’m one of the photographers in charge of videos, which is a real test of patience during the day when everything is freezing.

But things are going real well so far. It is cold, but we’re going to keep traveling until we reach the next village, which is probably about another seven or eight days away.