Firewood

There is a great simplicity in a trip to the Arctic tundra, the demands of everyday life back home drop away and are replaced by new routines. Prominent amongst these new tasks is collecting firewood for drying, cooking, heating  and melting snow to make water, in fact melting snow warrants a whole task category of it’s own!

Sometimes you can find plenty of wood, sometimes you can find scarcely any and you eek out a few twigs to make precious drinking water.

The wood comes from dwarf willows, they can grow in great thick stands along sheltered river valleys, drop away to a few spindly shrubs is less propitious places and even more often there are none at all.

It can be surprising how much good dead wood there is in a small clump, here’s a time lapse of the process:

 

& of course while you are doing all that hard work you are thinking of the tasty meal to come – in this case sausage, rice and exotic veg, well frozen veg.

The frozen veg, particularly the little baby sweetcorns and mangetout peas and the frozen papaya, mangoes and strawberries that followed, always get me thinking how strange but ingenious the supply and distribution of food is – grown and frozen in South America, shipped and consumed in the Arctic. I could wax lyrical about just how good strawberries taste when thawed and warmed over the fire with a little sugar at the end of a long day – food for thought and sustenance.

 

 

Camping at -50

People often ask what it’s like to camp in the Arctic winter; well it’s not bad if you’ve got the kit. Here’s a shot of one of Joe Henderson’s Thermalodge tents on an icy moon lit night.

& an “exploded diagram” photo, this is the moment just before putting the canvas over the top.

Once settled in and with a plentiful supply of firewood they can be amazingly hot! On one occasion whilst frying crispy bacon the temperature topped out around 100F (37C), now that’s toasty.

The tents have to not only be warm but strong. This is a 5 foot deep crater left behind from digging a tent out after a blizzard; at the height of the storm Joe tells me that only the chimney pipe peeked above the snow.

Expedition photos

Travelling the old fashioned way with a powerful team of 22 malamutes. By day forging a trail through virgin snow and over distant passes and camping in remote river valleys by night. This is what it’s all about.

Ice road trucks

You don’t have to fly to Deadhorse you can drive there too. The Dalton highway is an almost mythic road that runs for over 400 miles through Arctic wilderness. It connects Fairbanks with Deadhorse and is the main supply route for the oilfields. Recently it has come to fame as the road in the TV series Ice Road Truckers. American trucks are often impressive but somehow they are even more dramatic seen on this thin ribbon of a road, much of it made from no more than gravel and ice.

For all the high tech trucks and huge infrastructure of the oil companies everything in Deadhorse is contingent on the extremes of arctic weather, screaming blizzards and deep cold are common. Is this the truck that didn’t get away in time?

The “stay in bed” thermometer. It’s not particularly cold on this day at the airport but it does show new arrivals what to expect.

and just a few days later it really was cold. It was in fact even colder, but as I picked the thermometer up the warmth of my hand and the rays of the sun were enough to make the needle climb – cheated of a few degrees of bragging rights!

Travelling North to the Arctic

Getting to the start of an expedition on Alaska’s North Slope is an experience in itself. It’s hugely enjoyable.

Fairbanks to Deadhorse via Kaktovik with Frontier Flying. It’s a regular scheduled flight but the size of the aircraft definitely feels frontier.

It is the scenic route; you fly over hundreds of miles of wilderness. I spend the journey glued to the window, mesmerized by the emptiness and musing at just how difficult it would be to travel through those mountains. It easy to grasp just why there is nobody down there.

and then as you descend to the coastal plain the Inupiat settlement of Kaktovik comes into view, isolated on it’s small island on the edge of the Arctic Ocean. It’s a brief touch down before continuing to Deadhorse.

Deadhorse, remote as it is, is a relative metropolis – it is the gateway and logistics centre for the oilfields of Prudhoe Bay.

Hotel arctic style, Deadhorse Camp.

A great place to stay, with a very warm welcome, rooms, “consistent with the industrial heritage of the region” and great food. I am packed and ready for the expedition. www.deadhorsecamp.com

Winter shelters, igloos and quinzees

Wisdom and enthusiasm for all things northern was thick on the ground during my recent tobogganing trip to Maine, not only did we have of Garrett Conover and Alexandra Conover Bennett of North Woods Ways but also Ben McNutt and Willow Lohr of Woodsmoke Bushcraft.

Ben and Willow teaching Gary to ice the cake.

Meanwhile, inside, Gavin is completing a masterstroke

…fulfilling more than one long lived boyhood dream.

Pleased as punch the boys went on to spend a very comfortable night camped out in their igloo

…but not before I had laid my own proprietorial claim on the igloo with my best trapper pose.

And it didn’t stop with igloos – this is a another great shelter, a quinzee. It’s very simple, just a hollowed out pile of settled snow. The sticks you can see in the photo are the ingenuous bit, they are inserted all over the snow pile to a depth of 12 inches so that when you excavate the snow from the interior and you hit a stick, you can tell that the edges are near – simple.

Crawling inside the quinzee grotto, the light is ethereal

…and more importantly it’s very snug for a sheltered night’s kip. Brian on one of the two raised sleeping platforms, equipped with his euphemistic “liniment”, ushering on the drowsy mists of sleep.