The Arctic-Arc: After the Pole, the unknown
Dixie on chaotic ice
© International Polar Foundation
Alain Hubert and Dixie Dansercoer begin the second half of their adventure: The traverse of the Arctic Ocean liying between the North Pole and Greenland - A very rarely travelled route. Even if conditions are not looking easy, our two explorers are keeping unwaveringly high spirits !
Few expeditions ever venture on "the other side of the North Pole", between the Pole and Greenland. It is indeed into almost "unknown" territory that Alain and Dixie are now progressing. Already, conditions have changed and are becoming more difficult. Just four days after leaving the pole, they encountered a chaos of ice that was nearly impossible to cross:
"It was horrible", explained Dixie on the phone yesterday. "Naturally, it should be remembered that we are about 70 kilos heavier since the re-supply of our goods. But also, several passages of fallen ice were really hard to cross. The sea ice was often so broken apart and shattered that both Alain and myself had to climb huge ice blocks to see which way was best to follow. We often also had to work together in order to get the sledges across. And, when a couple of squared decimetres of flat surface finally came up, we would sink into the snow up to our knees."
"The fact that we have encountered such broken up ice so close to the Pole is incomprehensible," clarifies Alain. "On the other side of the Pole, on our way up, it was the same story. Normally, this close to the Pole, the sea ice should be less scattered and less cracked. So why do we have such a terrain then? Probably due to a succession of heavy storms having taken place here several weeks or months ago. I do not see any other explanation..." Alain is all the more surprised that, normaly, there are no big storms in the Arctic at this time of year.
During the following days, Alain and Dixie were forced to abandon their skis and haul their sledges on foot : "There is more than a knee-deep layer of snow on the ice," explained Alain, "which forces us to remove our skis and to proceed on foot, as the surface of this snow is frozen into a hard crust and so irregular that it is impossible to use skis. [...] We are walking rather than skiing, and the sledges are continuously having to be drawn over obstacles and through deep snow, there is no moment of respite as before (before reaching the North Pole [ndlr]) the terrain was often flatter, and at times the sledges would advance under their own momentum as we pulled them. Now the effort is continuous during the whole day. We are pulling endlessly like beasts of burden, straining all our waking hours."
Even though they are progressing slowly in these harsh conditions (8 or 13 kilometres only in a little more than 8 hours of daily effort), Alain and Dixie have good moral and even take the necessary time to make measurements for a scientific study of the European Space Agency.
