Day: 61

One Day from Baker Lake

Temperature: -37F

Location: 22 Mi. West of Baker

Latitude: 64deg 05’ 33’’ N

Longitude: 96deg 36’ 20’’ W

Distance Traveled: 20 Miles

It was cold this morning, minus 30 degrees Fahrenheit, and windy. The temperature has dropped 37 degrees in the last 24 hours, although it wasn’t that bad. But it was windy during the day, with windchills probably about 50-60 below. But it was crystal clear, so there was a little bit of heat from the sun. Toward evening the wind died down a little bit, and we had a beautiful sunset, around 5:30.

Travel was fast. We covered 20 miles. We found the remnants of an old snowmobile trail. It appears that the trail was made some time ago, probably around January, depending on the snow drift pattern. But a snowmobile had passed through here when there weren’t any large drifts. This is the first trail and sign of any human being we had had in the last 500 miles. The distance between Yellowknife and Baker Lake is probably the longest distance between communities in Canada. And probably the longest on any continent, I can’t even think of communities in Siberia being 500-700 miles apart.

But this was our first sign of an actual trail. It wasn’t distinct enough to follow, we were still using lead dogs and skiers up ahead. We are 22 miles from Baker Lake, and expect to be there tomorrow night around 6 o’clock. The troops are really happy. There is kind of a “barn door” fever now, everyone wants to get in really fast, to get into a shower. For myself, I am looking forward to just drying out my sleeping bag a little bit. I am content out here, but it is going to be nice to get out of these cramped quarters in the tent.

I had a little incident last week, during the day off two days ago. One of my jobs is taking care of the food, and we had a slab of bacon that we wanted to cut up. There was no way of slicing it, so I just took an ax to it outside, and chopped it into pieces. And I then filled it into a stuff sack. There was one little piece about the size of a postage stamp still on the ground, so I picked it up and put it in my mouth. It froze instantly to my tongue and my lip. The two froze together. It was actually quite painful. I had to wait for the thing to thaw out. I thought it would thaw out right away, but I had to breathe really hard on it. After about two to two and a half minutes, I finally got the thing off my tongue, and my tongue is healing up.