Day: 40

Warm Temps, Good Travel

Temperature: 2F

Location: Canadian Barrens

Latitude: 63 deg 2’ 45’’ N

Longitude: 103deg 41’ 33’' W

Distance Traveled: Not reported...

We had a very warm day. When we got out of the tents this morning it was two degrees below zero, Fahrenheit. That may seem cold to most people, but it is very warm for this area. It is the kind of weather they usually have in May. At the beginning of the day it was cloudy, with a little bit of snow. We had this very fine snow, about two inches of powder on the ground, which is another unusual thing for the Barrens. This is an extremely windy place, and I’ve never seen powder snow like this that would actually stick on the ground.

As we traveled, the sun actually came out about noon, and we had a wonderful day. At first, we had some whiteout conditions, where we had to travel strictly by GPS, we had really no idea where we were. We’ve been traveling in a fairly flat area. We used to have undulating, sort of moonscape terrain, but now it is sort of like the plains of North Dakota. We are very lucky, because we have a lot more weight on the sleds after the resupply. I thought that this was going to be a very difficult section, but it looks like we might have good traveling conditions for the next couple of days. We were expecting the worse, but we got another good break in the terrain.

Around four o’clock here it was clear, and we could see of into the distance, though there wasn’t much to see. It is just a very gently rolling landscape. Over a three or four mile area it might drop 20 feet.

We have a very good campsite here. We are not on a lake, but just on the main ground of the Barrens. We usually look for a lake, where we can use ice screws to stake out the dog line, but in this case there are no lakes in the area.

We had a very good day. The team is really coming together, and the last of the resupply was really monumental for us. It usually does take about 40 days to get a team together, also considering we didn’t do a training before this. Usually you work out your rhythm and all the kind in a training trip, so the training for us has been the last 40 days.

I want to give a special thanks to Eric’s mother, for her generous contribution of cookies and brownies that came in on the resupply. Eric, in particular, has enjoyed these, and he has also shared them with us on several occasions. We really appreciate that, it meant a lot to the team.