Day: 121

Deep Snow Slowing Us down

Temperature: 30F

Location: Committee Bay

Latitude: 67deg 40’ 16’’ N

Longitude: 87deg 41’ 48 ” W

Distance Traveled: 14 Miles

Another ordeal on the sea ice of Committee Bay today. We traveled 14 miles, but just nine miles in a straight line. It was really rough going this morning, very deep snow, sometimes up to thigh deep. It was foggy, white-out conditions - the definition of white-out this morning. At times it looked like we weren’t going to go anywhere, very discouraging.

We are now just about 8 miles from the shore of Melville Peninsula. We are anticipating our day off tomorrow for the PolarHusky education site, and will be traveling again on Saturday.

We’ve just about completed a 75 mile traverse of Committee Bay, which is part of the Gulf of Boothia. North of here there is about 200-300 miles of open water, so it is almost like one of the Great Lakes. There is a prevailing north wind, that blows across the bay and down to where we are, so we were almost in a perpetual snow shower. Last night it snowed about four inches, and today another six inches. I’ve never been in such deep snow on pack ice before. I had a hunch it was a local phenomena.

Later today, as we got closer to the east shore and in the protection of a large island called Wales Island, sure enough the snow level dropped considerably, to just about four inches. And we are now on a pretty good hard pack.

We often saw clearer skies to the north and northeast, which I had a hunch was the clearing over the land that direction. We have another 225 miles to go until Iglulik, and I was really sweating thinking that we might have knee deep snow all that way.

Another thing today is that the temperatures got up to near freezing, which is actually very miserable for us. Everything got wet, the sleds were sticking. When we stopped they would basically freeze into the snow. Warm weather is not really an ally here. Everything is wet in the tent. Ideally, we like about 20 degrees below Fahrenheit. I’m hoping the warm weather might also be because of the open water to the north.

We hope to be in Iglulik in about two weeks, and have another 75 miles or so of unknown terrain ahead of us. We have a large scale map, which doesn’t give us a lot of details. So there is a little adventure ahead.