Day: 94

Spirits are high, time to travel.

Temperature: Not reported

Location: Quoich River

Latitude: 66deg 24' 43" N

Longitude: 93deg 6' 40" W

Distance Traveled: 13 miles

Last night, the storm blew really hard. We had winds of probably 60-70 mph. The storm of the past two days is probably the worst storm I have seen in the Arctic. But the wind was blowing and hitting our tent at the correct angle, so there wasn’t any problem with that. I also commemorated the weather last night with one of my famous meals, call the Heart Attack Special. This is a dinner consisting of fried bacon and a quarter pound of butter. That is smothered in cheese, and then everything is dumped onto pasta, which also has butter on it. It is probably about 3,000 calories for each of us. But in this kind of cold weather we need that.

This morning we broke camp in some very strong winds, almost zero visibility. In fact, at times we couldn’t even see the other tents as we were taking them down. It took us about an hour to shovel everything out. The sleds were totally buried, and the tents were drifted in. It was a lot of work, but by about 10:30 we were rolling again.

We had about 100 yards of visibility most of the day. It was a ground blizzard, where there is lots of blowing snow and strong winds, but clear up above. We made about 13 miles today, which is pretty good considering the conditions. It was a cold, miserable day. During the lunch break, on the leeward side of the sleds, we were just covered with snow. As we sat there it drifted in. The dogs were also drifted in over that half hour period.

We ended up making camp around 5 o’clock, and the winds died down a little bit. I think tomorrow is going to be a good day. It seems like a high pressure system is moving in, and we may get some good weather on the back side of this storm. Basically, we have had a three day storm here. We traveled in today’s storm, because we didn’t really feel like sitting around any longer. And we were able to pull through and make some mileage.

We are hoping for some good weather tomorrow. The spirits are high in the group, and we are happy to be moving again after being stormbound for two days.