Day: 4
Camp: 4
Location: N 53 02’ 13.7” W 98 25’ 16.9”
Distance: Approx 16km
WX: – 26 deg overnight -22 deg daytime high, winds North West 20km light snow, overcast
Travel Time: 5hrs 45mins
Up at 7:30am in the dark and cold, although only slightly chilly and sweat my ass off all night in my VBL, you still dread getting out of your frosty sleeping bag all damp, putting on your crunchy Gore-Tex and crawling out into the bone chilling wind. Marc was the first up to start the stoves, I got up last making sure I taped the pads of my feet good, cant risk having bad feet with maybe seventeen days left of the trip. 1 ½ hrs from wake up to walk out, not to bad considering three people and lots of stuff to do to get ready to role. We are still boot packing until we get through the miles of massive ice chunk fields. The shore line here is very shallow, when the lake was only partially frozen earlier in the season they must have had a thaw then some strong NW prevailing winds that piled thousands of tones of ice as big as dining room tables and refrigerators up to 20 ft tall stretching miles out from shore, then had a flash freeze locking the mess into place. You try your best to find the smoothest and most efficient way through the maze while keeping some sort of a rhythm. I led for the first part of the morning and was feeling good again today. All morning we had our eye on what we thought was the second last point from Long Point which is the end of our first leg of the expedition. We couldn’t get our minds off the idea of finding some cabin with a woodstove on the point that we could use for the night to fix up the sled and some other gear as well as reorganize before making the next big leg of the expedition which is a wide open crossing SE towards Berens Island. We tried hard not to get our hopes up as it was quite an unrealistic idea but you never know.
It doesn’t take long to warm up out on the lake with all the available layers, but you also cool down and chill to the bone really quick as well. Its critical to stay on top of layering, taking clothes off before you get moist and freeze but putting them back on as soon as you start to cool to much. It is also very important to portion and frequently consume your two litres of water throughout the course of the day. This will help you to stay hydrated also making sure your snacking every thirty minutes or so to keep you energy and heat output up.
Upon nearly reaching the awaited Long Point as I was stoked at my pace and thinking to my self how awesome I was, when all of a sudden my sled got 100% hung up and stuck in a place that it should have no problem? To my horror and utter disbelief my sled had split open lengthwise on both corners and on the front with not a lot of promise of potential to be repaired. No matter how long I looked and stared it was bad….then worse, especially when I could see miles of ice fields between me and Long point that threatened to literally rip the rest of my sled to pieces, I couldn’t believe it. We had field tested the sleds heavily before heading out on this trip on rough terrain, rocks, around trees and in very cold temperatures. Ideally I would liked to have had a proper fibreglass polar style sled but it just want in the budget for any of us and we were not anticipating quite as much ice fields that we have encountered.
I rearranged my sled and pulled it as gingerly as possible towards Long point in high hopes that we might find that illustrious cabin with a fire place that I could undergo some emergency surgery on my sled although unlikely. We finally approached the point and now all we needed was to find a path through the icepack to get to shore and do a quick scan for any cabins. To our astonishment there through the ice chunks, thick brush and not far off from the seasonal light beacon, with no mistake the outlines of three cabins seemed too good to be true but I thought “hey the sleds going to be ok!”……….NOT, after hiking up behind Neal and upon inspection, all three cabins were at least ten years abandoned, missing doors, roofs caved in and all dilapidated. Inside the cabins was a lot of garbage, old bed frames, dirty rusted pots, hundreds of pounds of mouse shit and misc broken plastic buckets. They looked like heavy duty recycling bins with holes drilled in them. These were the same style of bins that the fishermen had full of fish in the back of their sleds on day one.
Neal and I walked around the next bay to make sure we weren’t missing any good cabins, a little farther down. We decided to haul our gear up off the lake and close to the cabins to make camp in the trees and the warmer shelter of the deep snow and the land. Beautiful spot because were in the forest, but with evening setting in and the old abandoned shacks in background of the fire it is the perfect setting for a horror movie.
Tomorrow we will be heading out into the void with no sight of land for some time and maybe we will get smoother ice conditions that will reek less havoc on the sleds. I started to scour all the cabins for anything that I could use to fix the sled. In the end other then using duck tape to secure a cut out piece of an empty 4 litre fuel canister to the inside of the sled patching the hole that has turned the sled into a snow plough there was nothing else I could do unfortunately. I will just haul it until it falls apart and then we will just have to split the load between the two remaining sleds. The plan will then be one man will carry a pack possible use a kite and navigate for one hour then haul a 210lb sled for two hours, repeating the cycle amongst the three of us until sundown.
Neal got a really nice fire going with logs he found in the cabins. I made a warm bowl of soup for Frisky and gave him some beef jerky that I got from Robyns brother Sean Silver for Christmas, this will be a nice treat for us all every day for the rest of the trip.
Hopefully we can hit 20km tomorrow, keep fingers crossed. We will have to take a fairly precise bearing tomorrow and keep a close eye in it all day. We want no veering in order not to walk in circles, add any unwanted milage or miss the West shore of Berens Island about a 100km away. If you’re off only a few degrees over such a distance you can be way off and totally miss the point you’re shooting for, trust your compass.
Great dinner of chicken and rice 600 calories, not to bad but not enough calories so I made butter tea! One cup boiling water three tablespoons butter mmmmmmm. We are consuming approx 750 ml maximum fuel for a 24 hour period for three people.