Day: 32

Barrens Blizzard Brewing

Temperature: -45F and Windy

Location: Canadian Barrens

Latitude: 63deg 08’ 00’’

Longitude: 107deg 14’ 10’’

Distance Traveled: 0 Miles - Day Off

We have our first Barrenlands’ blizzard brewing up. Yesterday we had our normal 45 below day, then around three o’clock we saw some clouds come in, and the wind shifted to the east, which is a telltale sign of change. These storms come up very fast, usually within 12 hours, and we had all this signs of the wind and the kind of clouds that form.

It whited-out during the night, and today it has been quite windy. It is not a full scale storm yet, but the wind is howling, tugging on the guylines of the tent, and the dogs are covered up with snow. They are comfortable under their bed of snow.

We had a team meeting today at 8 o’clock. And what I do with these team meetings is stake out skis and ski poles between one tent to another about every ten feet. So that way you can go from one pole to the next very easily. Otherwise, in the evening you can leave to go back to your tent and very easily become disoriented in the wind and blowing snow. So this is always standard procedure if there is any questionable weather. Especially if we are traveling from tent to tent, and it is very easy to set up the ski poles and skis. One going from one pole to another, the key is to always keep the last pole in sight before you get to the next one. Otherwise you can get separated from the two poles. We had an incident like that on the Trans-Antarctica trip on our last night, when a big storm came in and we lost one of our team members in the storm. It was very touch and go, and we were able to retrieve him the next day, and he survived OK. But that was a warm weather storm. The storms out here are quite cold.

But with the typical precautions like this we’re OK. Also, when going from tent to tent we make sure our headlamps have fresh batteries in them. Because if you do get separated, even with two people, both lights could go out, and then you could be in big trouble.