Into the Cold: A Journey of the Soul Page #6

...must be on harnessing

that into renewable energy.

-l got the rope.

-Good, excellent. Well done!

That's how you cross a lead

on the Arctic Ocean.

Yeah, that's a little boat creation.

Not Cancn, but

it does work as a raft.

Today was a grind.

There were no gimmies.

No freebies. No mulligans.

No "this one"s on the house",

or "first ball in".

Nothing but hard-earned

slow miles.

We had, essentially, a blizzard.

The stress of the cold

was challenging.

l had the good fortune of fogging

both of my goggles that day.

We had temperatures

minus 46 Fahrenheit.

So l was forced to relinquish

my position in the lead.

You never know what to expect.

Once we got resupplied, there was

a sort of break of our rhythm.

And our second ration of

fifteen days was a little short,..

...which gave us food shortages.

lt's tough being out there

when you're both food stressed.

-We were hungry, a lot!

-lt's what you focus on so much!

Keith was just beat up

at the end of that day.

lt really pushed me mentally.

What are you doing here, Heger?

l'm just getting ready to send

a dispatch with our PDA unit...

...and our iridium

satellite phone.

This uplinks with the satellites

and we're able to send images,..

...text messages and our position;

so that folks back at home...

...can virtually join

our adventure.

This is truly remarkable.

We are witnessing

one of nature's...

...most extraordinary

display of power here.

This lead that's been blocking

our way is actually closing.

So the two plates are coming

together and it's in fact...

...what's creating these

pressure ridges around here.

But, it looks like, if we're lucky,

this whole lead is going to...

...close up and we're going

to be able to cross it over.

The arctic terrain can be

unrelenting and unflinching.

Yard by yard we negotiated

the broken ice boulders.

The mix of cruddy, powdery snow

swallowed up the sledges" rails...

...as if dragging them through

syrup. Each section led to...

...another chaotic and random

display of Nature"s forces.

ln this grand theater, it is hard

not to feel insignificant.

And the purpose of our mission,..

...in its simplicity,

felt all the more absurd.

Nice job.

Try and imagine

a giant crumble cake.

Throw it into the deep freeze.

And now reduce your size to

about an inch,..

...strap on some skis

and decide to cross it!

Sometimes the best thing to do

is to just put one foot...

...in front of the other, and

move forward without thinking.

This is us after

fourteen hours of travel.

We're pretty exhausted.

We're going into the negative drift

at this point. So, it feels like...

...walking on a conveyor belt.

Every mile that we do we lose...

...about a tenth of that mile

to the drift pulling us backwards.

We're travelling

on the Arctic Ocean,..

...so we spend 35 days

without touching land.

First, there is no point

on the sea ice where...

...there is an actual

geographical North Pole.

That night we realized that we had

started drifting south.

That point is at the bottom

of the ocean and...

...everything above

it is essentially floating.

So the miles we were making,

they were being taken away...

...from the, sort of,

Arctic treadmill.

So, we're pretty exhausted.

The wind has been whipping us...

...like whip boys, all day. lt's

blowing about 25 knots right now.

And although the temperature is

not that cold, the wind is...

...dropping them by 20-30% so it's

about 25 degrees minus right now,..

...but it feels about 35 minus.

Although we're happy to be here,..

...we're pretty beat up right now.

Right Keith?

Agree with that!

The drift was so strong that day

that we woke up the next morning...

...behind the spot that we had

woken up the morning prior.

From morning until evening,

hardly a word is exchanged.

The terrain was friendly and

relatively flat and the scenery epic.

As each day rolls into the next,

there are no signs of life...

...to break the quiet sanctitude

of our journey.

Not a bird; not a bug; no plane

high above in the sky.

The feeling of solitude in this

white stillness could, for some,..

...scream louder than despair.

But mostly l immerse myself in

complete communion with the ice,..

...and feel at one with it--

one in thirty million species...

...inhabiting the earth;

no more, no less.

And l get lost in the unique

privelege of finding myself here.

Nourishing my soul with the pure

and raw power of Nature.

We came upon an enormous system

of melt ways, frozen over,..

...remaining most likely

from the summer.

Huge waterways looking like rivers

stretching for miles east and west.

lt spells the ominous demise

of the Arctic summer ice.

lndeed while it"s predicted to break

entirely in the summer period...

...by as early as 2013, privately

scientists feared it might have...

...happened last summer,

and could anytime hereafter.

Broken ice in the summer means

the end of multi year ice...

...and a rapid breakdown of the

structural integrity of the sea ice--

Regardless of seasons. But for us,

today, it was eerily beautiful.

All cold environments are

challenging to shoot in.

But out here, each opportunity to

shoot has to be measured against...

...one, the time to stop, open

the sledge and set the gear up,..

...and two, the cold that

sets in from stopping.

Consequently, shooting

is extremely challenging,..

...and made all the more

frustrating for the fact that...

...there are quite literally

100s of shots daily...

...that cannot be captured

but to memory.

Eerie and ominous,

with the profound beauty...

...of the simplicity of void.

This lead spells out the future of

the Arctic Ocean as it breaks up;..

...its ice thickness

further threatened by...

...the exponential factors of

warm air and warmer water.

This lead was enormous:

two miles across and...

...its length unclear as

it stretched East and West,..

...well beyond what

the eye could see.

The ice is rapidly changing, and

l wonder if generations to come...

...will have the chance

to do what we"re doing.

My one great privilege which

will undoubtedly live to be...

...a great frustration is that whilst

witnessing such unique sights,..

...l also know that

it is impossible...

...to capture its scale

and breadth on film.

When the sky is overcast out here,

all manners of depth,..

...perspective and height disappear.

The pale shade that normally...

...gives the icy terrain

its detail is completely gone.

What remains is the seemingly

posterized ice blue color...

...of most pressure ridges--

and pure white.

The morale was low, as

yet another reality sunk in:

At the rate we have been going,

we will not make the pole in time...

...to exit through Barneo.

So the additional challenge is set;

the race against the clock is on.

We need to average

12 nautical miles a day,..

...which we have not done so far,

and not for lack of trying.

Besides we are drifting south--

Rate this script:0.0 / 0 votes