Day: 148

Snow Cover Is Diminishing

Temperature: 0F

Location: Baffin Island

Latitude: 70deg 58’ 44’’ N

Longitude: 80deg 09’ 33” W

Distance Traveled: 30 Miles

We left the DeBeers exploration camp yesterday, and did a full day of travel. Of course, we are traveling night hours. It is cloudy, with a little bit of light fog on occasion, kind of like traveling in a haze.

We have adjusted pretty well now to the night rhythm. We are about 80 percent alert, the day went pretty quickly. We made it the usual, about 30 miles. We are about half way Baffin, and it is absolutely perfect travel again. We got into some hills and little mountains to the west, and in this area the snow is melted down quite a bit. The snow is totally different that what we had east of the camp, where the snow was very deep, and it looked like winter was still there. But here probably 60 percent of the surrounding land is melted off, which is normal. And the rocks and the highlands are barren. The other 40 percent, the troughs and the valleys will come out later. We still have a long travel season, but the land is quickly opening up.

And once you get rock and land surface exposed, it sort of creates a mini furnace, which accelerates the meltdown even faster. But there will be no problem here getting over the mountains and to the other side to Eclipse Sound, that leads us to Pond Inlet.

We are sleeping pretty good. It is 9:30 in the evening, and we are getting ready to leave in another half an hour. We have been sleeping about seven hours at night (i.e. days), so we are still a little confused as to the time of day. Especially now in the 24 hours sun, all hours of the day are identical, there is no difference at all. So it could be 12 midnight or 12 noon, you couldn’t really tell by the lighting.