View of Svalbard from Nybyen
Saturday 23rd Jan - Day 12
WOO HOO. Our skis have arrived.(Finally, after what feels like weeks of delays and days of trying to track them from Oslo to Tromso to ???.) The boys turned the breakfast room into a workshop and spent the morning drilling holes, gluing holes, screwing bindings, getting the skis good to go. Simon was the demon on the drill, Marcus the glue-sniffer and Lee screwed them all up (sorry, the boys humour is catching). Jack, Mark and I sorted out the cookers, re-attaching them to their wooden boards with metal ties and on aluminium paper (to stop them burning, as they were before - not ideal, seeing as they keep us alive out here!), whilst the rest of the girls did a full kit inventory to get things ready, mended and allocated for our expedition next week.
At 5pm Bjorn (Erlingson), the IW sea-ice scientist who is with us this week, sprung a surprise. Earlier in the morning, I'd found him hovering, almost hopping outside our door (he's in the room opposite Ness & I). After enquiring if he was OK, I found out he was more than alright, his third granddaughter was born this morning... Congratulations Bjorn! To celebrate, he organised a shindig with an old friend and sea-ice professor at the University of Svalbard, who kindly invited us into to his wonderfully cosy house for drinks (will upload some pix when we get a chance) and told us stories about his life exploring the ice in weird, wonderful and remote places, which continued until pretty late. It was a very special, and memorable evening. Quality "team bonding".
Thursday 21 - Day 10
7am
After a low-spirit evening last night (sea ice reports from the Arctic aren't good right now, so our expedition "proper" is looking dicey), we've woken to find it a Good Morning here today. This is more like it. Everyone's biting at the bit to get their harnesses on and get out there. Wooaah.
Temperatures have plummetted back to -17 (after rising to -6 yesterday), all open water leads have frozen and there's a foot of snow everywhere & we're happeeee. Light, fluffy snow everywhere. It's a great feeling pulk-pulling with that crunch under foot with blue skies overhead. (Ha ha, got ya - Oh, for blue sky days!). Okay, with dark skies overhead, but it's still really invigorating, even with the dark.
Definitely makes a change from last week when it was warm (+2) & running torrents down the road - incredibly depressing freak conditions, which the locals say that they have never before seen in Svalbard at this time of year. Needless to say, there's been endless debates over whether or not this is down to climate change or quite normal, freak weather patterns, if you get me.
These conditions will sure beat navigating the lethal ice terrain covered with running water that has been so regularly wiping us out this past week. Has sometimes felt more like playing hopping stones across an Alpine river bed pulling an errant kayak than pulk-pulling in the High Arctic! After a few rainy days (when I sunk through the snow up to my mid thigh, and lost my boot. Ugh.) the water froze and it became so icy everywhere that cars where sliding off the road and being abandoned all over the place... Some of our guys resorted to night "dwarf tossing" on the way back from dinner. (Which basically involved persuading a reluctant "Mini" - Claire - to lie on her back while the boys took her feet and pushed her along the ice on her back, to see how far she'd slide... 20 feet. Not bad!)
What else have we been up to? Lots of super useful training, learning about snow laters, avalanche training, rope-skills, firing up the stoves in high wind (it takes 2 people around 4-hours nightly to melt enough water for dinner and to fill our hot-water bottles (Platypus sacks) and 4 one-litre flasks for the next day, stove-learning, rope-skills etc
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