Living on thin ice
People who take part in Arctic expeditions talk about the cold, about the hardship, and about polar bears. What they don’t tell you about is the waiting. To cover a significant distance in the Arctic, you almost always need to fly. And to fly safely, you need fair weather at the departure and destination points, as well as a surface that’s firm enough to land on. It transpires that these are an uncommon set of parameters in the polar regions, especially when your destination is a partially prepared landing area on sea ice of an unknown thickness.
After more than a week of waiting, we hurried to the Kenn Borek Air hangar at Canada’s aptly named Resolute airport early one February morning to assist in the loading of a red Basler BT-67 aircraft. Resolute, the second most northerly inhabited point in Canada, is about as extreme as it gets: the previous evening, the mercury had dipped to –37°C.
Having loaded tents, food, personal kit and a snowmobile, the Catlin Arctic Survey team assigned to construct the research station for the scientists scrambled aboard. I joined them. Flying in a Basler isn’t exactly business class. Actually, it isn’t even economy class. But what the Basler lacks in comfort, it makes up for in durability: the airframe is based on the venerable Douglas DC-3, which first flew in 1935.
As we approached our home for the next month, I kept my eyes glued on the bleached vista outside the window. I had expected a rollercoaster landing onto the ice, but our touchdown was surprisingly smooth; I’ve endured far bumpier landings at Heathrow. We shot past the fuel dump that had been cached the previous afternoon, taxied to a halt and hopped out, blinking in the white light. One of the first tasks was to drill through to the ocean to check the depth of the sea ice. It turned out our landing strip was a healthy 1.5 metres thick.
Setting up camp
Seventy minutes later, the Basler was gone and – with the nearest habitation about 500 kilometres away – we were truly alone. Conditions were perfect. A period of sunny, windless weather in the Arctic is a rare event, and one we were determined to take full advantage of. The first tent to go up was a Weatherhaven Polar Chief. With its circular design, the Polar Chief sheds wind from any direction, making it the ultimate survival shelter. But any tent’s strength is only as good as its anchors. Camping on sea ice requires a V-shaped Abalakov thread to be created for every anchor point.
The thread is drilled using a mountaineer’s titanium ice screw with diamond-sharp points. A length of nine-millimetre rope is then passed through the hole, to which a tent guy line is tied off. A sharp knife needs to be kept at hand while doing this work. We were each issued with a high-visibility Mora knife, supplied in an ingenious plastic sheath that gripped the blade securely without any need for a fiddly clasp.
Although this Polar Chief would eventually become the communications tent, on our first night it fulfilled the twin roles of mess tent and survival shelter in the event that an unexpected storm destroyed the rest of the camp. As soon as the Polar Chief was secured, we erected a number of small Mountain Hardwear and Hilleberg mountain tents, in which the base camp staff and scientists would sleep.
With my mountaineering background, I had assumed that the sleeping tents would be pitched reasonably close together. However, ice base manager Simon Garrod had other ideas. Simon has spent decades working in the polar regions with organisations such as the British Antarctic Survey. He patiently explained to me the importance of spacing the tents several metres apart, and ensuring that they were offset from each other (think Olympic rings) so that in the event of a snowstorm, the resulting drift lines of snow from the first rank of tents wouldn’t smother the other shelters.
Frankly, I thought Simon was being a little paranoid, but I went along with his plans. A fortnight later, the completed camp was enveloped in a day-long blizzard. When the storm blew itself out, we emerged into a world that looked very different from the one to which we had become accustomed. Metre-high drift lines the length of cricket pitches extended from the first row of tents. The compacted snow was as hard as concrete. Had the second rank of tents been pitched directly behind the first tier, they would have been entombed.
Home cooking
After the second Polar Chief (which would house the scientific research equipment) had been pitched, we turned our attention to erecting the large mess tent. The social hub for the team, it was big enough to seat about ten people. In one corner, a huge metal snow melter produced piping-hot water 24 hours a day, and generated sufficient heat to keep the tent at a comfortable temperature. Next to the melter was the cooking stove. Cooks Malin Høiseth and Fran Oreo produced an endless supply of superb dishes from the frozen goods that periodically came in on resupply flights. (Their meals were so tasty that for the first and only time on an expedition, I gained weight.) Keeping food frozen was never an issue.
Uneaten food was another matter, as it had the potential to attract unwelcome visitors – hungry, half-tonne visitors with large teeth. However, as it turned out, waste was kept to a minimum by virtue of the fact that we hoovered up pretty much everything that was placed in front of us; human vultures circled any partially cleared plates.
In addition to locating the waste food dump away from the sleeping and living areas, a physical polar bear shield consisting of a tripwire alarm was erected around the sleeping tents. Even so, emerging from the unprotected communications or science tent late at night was always a slightly nerve-racking experience. Peace of mind came in the form of a personal bear deterrent – a fountain-pen-shaped launcher that was capable of firing a non-lethal banger to a range of about 25 metres – that was issued to every expedition member.
Bedtime stories
Going to bed was always a hassle: stripping off a down jacket and pants at –30°C is no laughing matter. It was crucial to warm the quadruple-layer sleeping system with a couple of bottles filled with hot water an hour or so before retiring so that the sleeping bag didn’t suck all your body heat from you the moment you slipped inside it.
I swapped my daytime ensemble of merino wool and fleece clothing for a polyester base layer before retiring each night. I then slid into a waterproof and non-breathable vapour barrier (VB) liner made by Integral Designs. This liner prevented my sweat vapour from soaking the other parts of my sleeping system. With my sweat held in suspension, I slept soundly in a mildly humid and not unpleasant environment.
I used a lightweight Buffalo fibre-pile and Pertex sleeping bag on top of the VB liner. Primary insulation came in the form of an Ajungilak Denali sleeping bag. The generous cut easily accommodated both inner bags as well as my six-foot frame. The Denali’s superb hood design meant that once I was ensconced in the system, I was able to breathe out of the bag rather than into the filling. This is critical: while it’s tempting to snuggle right into a sleeping bag, breathing directly into the fabric is guaranteed to create an ice-encrusted patch of nylon and polyester fibre. Finally, I pulled a custom-made Brenig fibre-pile and windproof nylon overbag around the Denali.
One of the side effects of camping in cold weather is increased bladder activity. Some team members braved the cold and exited their sleeping bags to urinate in the otherwise unused rear entrance of their tents (urine was the only waste product not flown out from the ice base). I preferred to kneel up in the tent and lower a 1.5-litre Nalgene bottle into my sleeping bag. After emptying my bladder into the container, I would ever so carefully extract the usually full bottle, reach outside the inner tent and pour the hot liquid into a deep silo in the porch that polar guide Harald Kippines had thoughtfully carved out with an industrial ice drill.
Booting up
Baffin boots were worn by the majority of the base camp staff. If you were active at –30°C, they were reasonably warm, but when you stopped moving, your feet inevitably became chilled. It was essential to keep toes wriggling, especially when sitting at a desk for hours on end hammering out emails and sending data through the expedition’s Iridium OpenPort satellite transceiver.
The communications tent was usually heated to a temperature of between 4°C and –9°C. On the odd occasion when the thermometer dropped below this threshold, I downed tools, as remaining motionless while using a computer is no fun at –10°C and below. At this point, I would shut down the electronic equipment, secure it inside protective foam-lined Peli cases, and retire to the mess tent for a hot chocolate and a round of the team’s favourite game, Perudo.
Fuelling an expedition
Polar life revolves around fuel for snowmobiles, stoves, heaters, lanterns and generators. Without fuel, nothing happens: no-one eats, no-one drinks and nothing works.
On the Catlin Arctic Survey, three types of fuel were used. Coleman fuel (an ultra-clean fuel) was used in the stove and the pressure lanterns; jet fuel was used for the heater stoves in the communications and science tents; and petrol was used in the generators, the ice drill and the snowmobile. The Coleman fuel was stored in one-gallon containers. Coleman fuel doesn’t vaporise in the cold, so the next canister to be used was kept warm in the mess tent. Jet fuel and petrol were supplied in 45-gallon drums. These were stored in a rubberised berm that looked like a giant children’s paddling pool and was designed to contain any fuel leaks.
All refuelling was done inside this slippery berm. Each day, the ice base manager engaged in the potentially messy business of transferring jet fuel and petrol into five-gallon plastic containers using a gravity-fed tap and hose (conventional wobble pumps work poorly in low temperatures). No wonder staff at polar camps perpetually reek of ‘eau de jet’.
Ten of the best
The Catlin team members spent an extended time living and working on the Arctic ice. So, in addition to wearing items that protected them against the elements while hard at work outdoors, they needed to use kit that kept them warm during the long periods of inactivity. Here is some of the equipment that Paul and his colleagues put to use in the High Arctic
Don’t forget…
…to triple-check that the lids on your water bottles are 100 per cent secure after filling them with hot water to warm your sleeping bag. Tighten, wait, invert, then tighten again. And again
November 2010
After more than a week of waiting, we hurried to the Kenn Borek Air hangar at Canada’s aptly named Resolute airport early one February morning to assist in the loading of a red Basler BT-67 aircraft. Resolute, the second most northerly inhabited point in Canada, is about as extreme as it gets: the previous evening, the mercury had dipped to –37°C.
Having loaded tents, food, personal kit and a snowmobile, the Catlin Arctic Survey team assigned to construct the research station for the scientists scrambled aboard. I joined them. Flying in a Basler isn’t exactly business class. Actually, it isn’t even economy class. But what the Basler lacks in comfort, it makes up for in durability: the airframe is based on the venerable Douglas DC-3, which first flew in 1935.
As we approached our home for the next month, I kept my eyes glued on the bleached vista outside the window. I had expected a rollercoaster landing onto the ice, but our touchdown was surprisingly smooth; I’ve endured far bumpier landings at Heathrow. We shot past the fuel dump that had been cached the previous afternoon, taxied to a halt and hopped out, blinking in the white light. One of the first tasks was to drill through to the ocean to check the depth of the sea ice. It turned out our landing strip was a healthy 1.5 metres thick.
Setting up camp
Seventy minutes later, the Basler was gone and – with the nearest habitation about 500 kilometres away – we were truly alone. Conditions were perfect. A period of sunny, windless weather in the Arctic is a rare event, and one we were determined to take full advantage of. The first tent to go up was a Weatherhaven Polar Chief. With its circular design, the Polar Chief sheds wind from any direction, making it the ultimate survival shelter. But any tent’s strength is only as good as its anchors. Camping on sea ice requires a V-shaped Abalakov thread to be created for every anchor point.
The thread is drilled using a mountaineer’s titanium ice screw with diamond-sharp points. A length of nine-millimetre rope is then passed through the hole, to which a tent guy line is tied off. A sharp knife needs to be kept at hand while doing this work. We were each issued with a high-visibility Mora knife, supplied in an ingenious plastic sheath that gripped the blade securely without any need for a fiddly clasp.
Although this Polar Chief would eventually become the communications tent, on our first night it fulfilled the twin roles of mess tent and survival shelter in the event that an unexpected storm destroyed the rest of the camp. As soon as the Polar Chief was secured, we erected a number of small Mountain Hardwear and Hilleberg mountain tents, in which the base camp staff and scientists would sleep.
With my mountaineering background, I had assumed that the sleeping tents would be pitched reasonably close together. However, ice base manager Simon Garrod had other ideas. Simon has spent decades working in the polar regions with organisations such as the British Antarctic Survey. He patiently explained to me the importance of spacing the tents several metres apart, and ensuring that they were offset from each other (think Olympic rings) so that in the event of a snowstorm, the resulting drift lines of snow from the first rank of tents wouldn’t smother the other shelters.
Frankly, I thought Simon was being a little paranoid, but I went along with his plans. A fortnight later, the completed camp was enveloped in a day-long blizzard. When the storm blew itself out, we emerged into a world that looked very different from the one to which we had become accustomed. Metre-high drift lines the length of cricket pitches extended from the first row of tents. The compacted snow was as hard as concrete. Had the second rank of tents been pitched directly behind the first tier, they would have been entombed.
Home cooking
After the second Polar Chief (which would house the scientific research equipment) had been pitched, we turned our attention to erecting the large mess tent. The social hub for the team, it was big enough to seat about ten people. In one corner, a huge metal snow melter produced piping-hot water 24 hours a day, and generated sufficient heat to keep the tent at a comfortable temperature. Next to the melter was the cooking stove. Cooks Malin Høiseth and Fran Oreo produced an endless supply of superb dishes from the frozen goods that periodically came in on resupply flights. (Their meals were so tasty that for the first and only time on an expedition, I gained weight.) Keeping food frozen was never an issue.
Uneaten food was another matter, as it had the potential to attract unwelcome visitors – hungry, half-tonne visitors with large teeth. However, as it turned out, waste was kept to a minimum by virtue of the fact that we hoovered up pretty much everything that was placed in front of us; human vultures circled any partially cleared plates.
In addition to locating the waste food dump away from the sleeping and living areas, a physical polar bear shield consisting of a tripwire alarm was erected around the sleeping tents. Even so, emerging from the unprotected communications or science tent late at night was always a slightly nerve-racking experience. Peace of mind came in the form of a personal bear deterrent – a fountain-pen-shaped launcher that was capable of firing a non-lethal banger to a range of about 25 metres – that was issued to every expedition member.
Bedtime stories
Going to bed was always a hassle: stripping off a down jacket and pants at –30°C is no laughing matter. It was crucial to warm the quadruple-layer sleeping system with a couple of bottles filled with hot water an hour or so before retiring so that the sleeping bag didn’t suck all your body heat from you the moment you slipped inside it.
I swapped my daytime ensemble of merino wool and fleece clothing for a polyester base layer before retiring each night. I then slid into a waterproof and non-breathable vapour barrier (VB) liner made by Integral Designs. This liner prevented my sweat vapour from soaking the other parts of my sleeping system. With my sweat held in suspension, I slept soundly in a mildly humid and not unpleasant environment.
I used a lightweight Buffalo fibre-pile and Pertex sleeping bag on top of the VB liner. Primary insulation came in the form of an Ajungilak Denali sleeping bag. The generous cut easily accommodated both inner bags as well as my six-foot frame. The Denali’s superb hood design meant that once I was ensconced in the system, I was able to breathe out of the bag rather than into the filling. This is critical: while it’s tempting to snuggle right into a sleeping bag, breathing directly into the fabric is guaranteed to create an ice-encrusted patch of nylon and polyester fibre. Finally, I pulled a custom-made Brenig fibre-pile and windproof nylon overbag around the Denali.
One of the side effects of camping in cold weather is increased bladder activity. Some team members braved the cold and exited their sleeping bags to urinate in the otherwise unused rear entrance of their tents (urine was the only waste product not flown out from the ice base). I preferred to kneel up in the tent and lower a 1.5-litre Nalgene bottle into my sleeping bag. After emptying my bladder into the container, I would ever so carefully extract the usually full bottle, reach outside the inner tent and pour the hot liquid into a deep silo in the porch that polar guide Harald Kippines had thoughtfully carved out with an industrial ice drill.
Booting up
Baffin boots were worn by the majority of the base camp staff. If you were active at –30°C, they were reasonably warm, but when you stopped moving, your feet inevitably became chilled. It was essential to keep toes wriggling, especially when sitting at a desk for hours on end hammering out emails and sending data through the expedition’s Iridium OpenPort satellite transceiver.
The communications tent was usually heated to a temperature of between 4°C and –9°C. On the odd occasion when the thermometer dropped below this threshold, I downed tools, as remaining motionless while using a computer is no fun at –10°C and below. At this point, I would shut down the electronic equipment, secure it inside protective foam-lined Peli cases, and retire to the mess tent for a hot chocolate and a round of the team’s favourite game, Perudo.
Fuelling an expedition
Polar life revolves around fuel for snowmobiles, stoves, heaters, lanterns and generators. Without fuel, nothing happens: no-one eats, no-one drinks and nothing works.
On the Catlin Arctic Survey, three types of fuel were used. Coleman fuel (an ultra-clean fuel) was used in the stove and the pressure lanterns; jet fuel was used for the heater stoves in the communications and science tents; and petrol was used in the generators, the ice drill and the snowmobile. The Coleman fuel was stored in one-gallon containers. Coleman fuel doesn’t vaporise in the cold, so the next canister to be used was kept warm in the mess tent. Jet fuel and petrol were supplied in 45-gallon drums. These were stored in a rubberised berm that looked like a giant children’s paddling pool and was designed to contain any fuel leaks.
All refuelling was done inside this slippery berm. Each day, the ice base manager engaged in the potentially messy business of transferring jet fuel and petrol into five-gallon plastic containers using a gravity-fed tap and hose (conventional wobble pumps work poorly in low temperatures). No wonder staff at polar camps perpetually reek of ‘eau de jet’.
Ten of the best
The Catlin team members spent an extended time living and working on the Arctic ice. So, in addition to wearing items that protected them against the elements while hard at work outdoors, they needed to use kit that kept them warm during the long periods of inactivity. Here is some of the equipment that Paul and his colleagues put to use in the High Arctic
Start the slideshow (10 pictures)
Don’t forget…
…to triple-check that the lids on your water bottles are 100 per cent secure after filling them with hot water to warm your sleeping bag. Tighten, wait, invert, then tighten again. And again
November 2010
 |
