Day: 5

Becoming a Well-Oiled Machine

Temperature: -18F

Location: Great Slave Lake, NWT

Latitude: 61deg, 59min, 9sec North

Longitude: 113deg, 21min, 42sec West

It warmed up today to minus 18 today. The wind was blowing quite hard during the night, but it did die down during the day as we traveled. The six of us are getting much more efficient at breaking camp, and we broke camp today in a little over an hour, which is the fastest I’ve ever had a team break camp by Day 5. It often takes a couple of hours, but we are very organized. At lot of this has to do with Paul and Mille, who have a tremendous amount of experience. They’ve been traveling the last nine winters, and three years ago they traveled 2,500 miles from Churchill, Manitoba to Grise Fiord on Ellesmere Island. They have their systems down quite well, and we are using a majority of their dogs, 26, and their dogs are seasoned veterans. They’ve traveled each winter, and it wouldn’t be possible to do what we’re doing with dogs that were “off the shelf” - i.e. just being trained in. It takes a couple of years before you get a good expedition dog like the ones Paul and Mille have. We’re very thankful for their team and their organization in getting going.

Because of the short days, we have only four and a half hours of real mushing, which works out quite well, because the dogs have some time to rest. They are still getting in shape, and four and a half hours is about as long as they can go right now. We’ll be pushing a few more minutes each day. We basically get out of the tents at 8:30 and get moving around 9:45. We finish around 3:30 at sunset. The sun is setting a few minutes later each day, so we’ll just follow the sun and add those extra few minutes each day.

We had some whiteout conditions today - that is, you cannot see the land’s dimensions - but it eventually cleared out and we could see land on either side. We’re now in the Hearn Channel, a very long channel, probably about 45-50 miles long, on the northeast side of Great Slave Lake. We made camp at the usual time, 3:30, but Hugh and I had some stove problems, and it took us about an hour and a half to work that out. But we were lucky to have some good weather. It was minus 10 degrees outside when we stopped, which is actually quite mild, so we were able to work outside on the stove, working with our bare hands on metal without much trouble at all.

We’re sitting in our tent here, it’s around 8:30, and Hugh is finishing his dinner. We’ll do dishes in a little bit, have a cup of tea and retire.