Latest Update from Wales, AK: Sunday Feb 26th 2006. Goliath Expedition www.earthtrekuk.net Hello BNH, hashers, family and friends, Karl and I got in Wales Alaska on Tuesday Feb 21st after 5 eventful days walking from Brevig Mission to Cape Prince of Wales (AKA Wales). I am sorry if I did not communicate any sooner but the network was done in Wales for the last 48 hrs. More details on this below but let me share at first a few other things for those amongst you that would like to know: 1. There is a new web article on the Goliath Expedition that some of you might want to see. It’s on http://www.mounteverest.net/news.php?id=1581 If you wish, take a few minutes as well while on the site to check other expeditions currently going on Everest, in the poles and across Oceans… Some great stuff ! 2. The new website for the expedition (going forward) is going to be: http://goliath.mail2web.com/ (attention: No www !) However, for the time being, the old website www.earthtrekuk.net is still currently the most up to date. 3. In early April, Karl Bushby’s first book called “Giant Steps” will be released by Time Warner: http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/0316729582/002-0430736-9085637 This first book covers his odyssey from Punta Arenas in Chile to Wales in Alaska. 4. Recap of my involvment in the Goliath Expedition over the last month: Thursday Jan 26th 2006 Flight Seattle-Anchorage-Nome Friday Jan Jan 27th- Monday Jan 30th Planning/ Sorting and collecting gear in Nome, AK Tuesday Jan 31st – Friday Feb 3rd 60 miles walk along the coast (Nome- Sinuk- Cape Woolley – Cape Douglas) Friday Feb 3rd 8pm – Sunday Feb 5th 8am 36 hrs pinned down in the storm at Cape Douglas and got pushed off shore on an ice pan, 28 miles off the coast, SW of King Island Sunday Feb 5th Evacuation from the ice pan by helicopter. Karl Bushby dropped back on the coast at Cape Douglas to continue by foot to Teller with all food/fuel supplies remaining. Dimitri brought back to Nome to get treated for frost bites on fingers (level 2 & 3) Thursday Feb 9th Dimitri able to get on a flight back to Teller to rejoin Karl (without his sled, considered too big to be shipped in a Navajo plane) Friday Feb 10th – Sunday Feb 12th Spent time in Teller waiting for sled shipment Goliath Expedition school presentation Met musher Joe Garnie Monday Feb 13th Moving from Teller to Brevig Mission: 2 hrs walk across the frozen bay (6 miles) Tuesday Feb 14th – Wednesday Feb 15th Spent time in Brevig Mission waiting for sled shipment Goliath Expedition school presentation Met village elders Rita and Henry Olanna, got seal skin hats made ! Thursday Feb 16th Dimitri’s sled flown on Cargo plane from Nome to Brevig Mission Friday Feb 17th – Tuesday Feb 21st 5 days walk/ski Brevig Mission – Wales On the coast and through York Mountain range (approx 55 miles) Wednesday Feb 22d – Friday Feb 24th Organizing Bering Strait Crossing gear in Wales, Goliath Expedition school presentation Saturday Feb 25th – March 15th Planning Cross Bering Walk during this time frame, Need to fly RT to Fairbanks to get additional gear, train/test with new dry suits, repair gear (e-g: Karl’ sled) 5. BNH, I am going to send you some additional pictures that describe pretty well what we had to deal with in the last 5 days. Btw, thank you very much for having already posted pictures on the net. [corrections to previous batch dates] 6. Hash related news: I have exchanged email with “Fucking Nuts” (aka Joe Oakes), a long time hasher from the Bay area in California and I want to share with other hashers that apparently I am not the first hasher to be swimming/walking in the Bering Strait. In 1995, FN Joe Oakes swam between the two Diomede Islands, (located in the middle of the Bering Strait) covering a distance of 2.5 miles, crossing the international dateline since Big Diomede island is Russian and Little Diomede island is US territory. Now, the difference this time is that we are planning to go for the 56 miles crossing (56 in a straight line…) between the US and Russian coast, and hopefully planning to be able to walk 50% of the time on ice pans and swim 50% of the time between them. We may or may not “drop by” the Diomedes, depending on the currents and the ice movements. I assume that Joe Oakes did his feat in the summer, and therefore swam the entire 2.5 miles, not dunking on and off ice pans. OK, now on with the report for the following section of the journey: Friday Feb 17th – Tuesday Feb 21st 5 days walk/ski From Brevig Mission to Wales on the coast and through York Mountain range (approx 55 miles) --------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------- Friday Feb 17th: Good weather (around 35F, fairly good visibility and tailwind). Total: approx 17 miles After having finally received my sled on Feb 15th in Brevig Mission, shipped from Nome on a cargo plane, Karl and I were able to take off the next morning Friday Feb 16th at 11:30am after having set up all of our gear. We proceed northwest along the coast, following the sandy/gravel ice covered spit that separates Brevig Lagoon from the Ocean. At around 4pm, we were met by the only 2 humans we will see in 5 days: OC and his wife (2 school teachers from Brevig Mission) who came to greet us by snowmobile, turned around and went back home, knowing that the snowmobiles could no go much further because of potential open water leads along the coast. In any event, we moved pretty well and accomplished 17 miles over the next 7 hrs in our bunny boots while pulling 150 lbs of weight each (our usual gear + 5 days of food supplies). We finally camped about 1 mile East of the old Lost River mining camp, securing our tent with the last pieces of drift wood that I have seen. On a side note, I do find it quite interesting that for centuries Inuits have been able to collect drift logs landed on their shore after having traveled probably thousands of miles on the Pacific Ocean from distant jubilant forests when they themselves do not have any trees in their region, partly because of the permafrost. In other words, they have used wood for centuries but were not able to see any tree alive in their own backyard! --------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------- Saturday Feb 18th: Fairly good weather (Temp 30-35F, snowy & stormy weather, tail wind) Total approx 5 miles! We continued our Northwest bound journey along the coast. After about 1.5 hr, we stopped inside an old very dilapidated cabin to gobble a Larabar and drink some water. Snow was falling quite hard, we had poor visibility, and while continuing along the coast, we were trekking along the side of ice pans/ice surges that had been crushed on the beach by the recent storm. Remember the storm that took Karl and I, 28 miles offshore on a floating ice pan on Feb 5th, 25 miles straight south at Cape Douglas? Well, this storm had a reverse effect in this Northern section of the coast, piling the ice pans on the beach, crushing them on top of each other. I have a strange vision of this section of the trail partly because I was listening on my IPOD along the way a travel report from a journalist who spent time in the early 90s on a 42 feet boat with 25 refugees, fleeing from Haiti to the Bahamas under the sweltering heat… This could not have been visually further away from the crushed ice pans I was looking at, except for the comparison the author was making between abandoned ships on the Haitian coast and whale carcasses… Obviously this story impacted me a bit since on the following night, it lead me to a dream where I found myself in the middle of a weird cruise ship when in stead I woke up in our tent, partially buried under the snow… Well, at least this type of “travel” is not going to happen for a while since my IPOD has stopped cooperating and now badly needs repair, which is not an easy task to achieve in the village of Wales (150 souls). Continuing along the coast, we quickly got concerned with the topography on our map. The gravel sandy beach was quickly being replaced by about 25 miles of steep cliffs, similar to what you can visualize either on Chuckanut Drive in Washington state or in Northern California on Highway 101. Once again, because of the recent storm, this would mean that the ice surges/pans were going to pile up along the cliffs all along the coast and not leaving us any place to go through smoothly. So, very quickly, we were faced with something that looked like a major freeway crash where ice blocks the size of cars would have been piled up on top of each other for the next 25 miles. In between the crushed ice pans forming some type of revolutionary barricade, one could see from time to time very tempting flat section made of new ice… However because of the temperature being abnormally high (35F), the new ice was more of a slush that was very easy to pierce/fall through. So, as we were trying to progress, we would choose to either pull our 150lbs sled in and over one barricade at a time or once in a while get a break and walk through the flat new ice, which felt more like walking through a mine field, ready to “detonate” and take you under. Considering the fact that Karl had fallen through the ice a few weeks before between Shaktoolik and Koyuk, he was cautiously opting for climbing the barricades, despite the slow progress this represented. Neither one of us wanted to get wet with the trekking clothes we had, and our dry suits were waiting for us in Wales. Having said that and not having experienced the cold and alarming wetness of falling through the ice in the past, I was apparently more willing to take risks and progressively went for more and more unstable ice pans made of newer ice. Until, BINGO, it was my turn to hit the jackpot: I felt through the ice all the way up to my chest. Karl unhooked his harness, ran towards me and helped me pull myself out. I could have pulled myself single handedly but could definitely benefit from his help if I wanted to keep my hands and gloves dry, avoiding any additional frost bites. Karl suggested then that we set up the tent so that I could put on some dry clothes and dry myself near the stove. Considering the facts that it was already 3pm, we were making slow progress and only had 3.5 more hours of movement in the daylight, I turned down his generous offer, a bit embarrassed of the situation and suggested that we should press along. As long as I was pulling up and down this sled, I would be able to keep warm, partially thankfully to my wool IBEX base layers. About 1 hr later, as I was in the lead, scouting through another sketchy area, I realized that the new ice ahead was not going to be able to support our weight. At that point, while turning around to inform Karl to find an alternate route, the ice pan below me suddenly opened up, and I found myself in the icy water, up to my chest, feeling once again as if I was in the middle of quick sand. Karl came again to help me out, but this time with a smirk on his face… almost debating whether he should film this or help me out… One more time, I suggested that we press on until it was time to camp for the night. The problem with finding a place to camp is that we were obligated to sleep on an ice pan unless we were willing to climb a cliff that was about 600 feet high. Which was out of question with our sleds in tow. Even though we were told in Brevig Mission that “generally speaking” in this section of the coast, the ice pans traditionally do not move of-shore but have more the tendency to pile on top of each other at the bottom of the cliffs, I was concerned throughout the night that we might either be stranded off-shore again or piled up under ice pans at the bottom of a cliff… At one point in the evening, we checked our location on the GPS to make sure that our tent had not moved and we thankfully observed that this was not happening! In any event, I spent part of the evening trying to dry my clothes the best I could around our little two stoves. On a side note, I discovered after arriving in Wales a few days later that even the crème de la crème in artic exploration is also not immune to falling through the ice as Mike Horn related in his log this week: http://www.mikehornnorthpole.com/ “Day 33: Mike Horn’s report on their North Pole Winter Trek “We were forced to stop because I fell in the water - not once, but twice!!! (…)” This somewhat made me feel less embarrassed about my own experience… --------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------- Sunday Feb 19th: OK weather (Temp 30-35F, fresh overnight powdery snow, morning fogs, and progressively partly sunny in the afternoon, minor tail wind first part of the day which became much stronger and stormier in the evening) Total approx 6 miles ! Coming out of the tent in the morning, I was pleased to see that we had not moved, still nested on our ice platform along the coast. Our sleds and tent tough had been covered with a substantial amount of snow that we had to dig out. I looked at the side of the tent and saw a fox about 20 yards away sitting on the cliff staring at me. I also noticed then his foot prints around our tent. I started wondering if it was the same fox that we had seen the previous two days hiding at first amongst ice surges and at a later time while he was climbing rapidly the side of a cliff. While taking a few pictures and a small film of our furry visitor, I joked with Karl that I was starting to behave like the mad character in the movie “Grizzly Man” wanting to pet foxes and bears… Well, this definitely will not happen anytime soon since I found out once we got in Wales, that there currently is indeed in Wales a major rabies outbreak brought on by foxes where one human and six dogs have already tested positive… The dogs were put down and the patient was flown out for treatment. So, going forward, I will refrain myself from even petting dogs in the village since I really have no desire to either catch the “Dumb” or “Furious” type of the disease (although some of you might argue that I probably already have one or both of them ….) So, after having dig out our sleds from underneath the snow, and put away our gear, we started to move forward through our “Ice barricades”. The mounts of new fresh snow that had fallen during the night and piled up on top of the ice surges made it even more difficult to progress. Taking a head start, wanting to quickly gain some mileage and feeling obviously too dry, I decided to avoid the “barricades” and go for the flat “mine field”, hoping that the temperature had dropped a bit, hardening the new ice enough to sustain my own and sled weight…. After just about 20 minutes and moving carefully forward while probing each forward step with my poles, I started to move backward out of a sketchy area when once again, BINGO, I fell through the “quick sand” up to my chest, but was quickly able to get myself completely out of the ice by grabbing myself on the side of my sled. After having voiced a few French colorful words, I rejoined Karl who was grinning at that point from the top of his safe barricade, referring to me as the “Marine Mammal Man”. … Not willing once again to change my clothes for drier ones, I asked that we continued to move forward and in some cases, even started to take a few risks again…Charging forward, referring to myself, I would start saying ”Bring in the Navy” to Karl, the ex Paratrooper. After all, it was fairly warm (35F) and I was also getting warmer by having to climb all of these ice surges with my sled in tow. Above all I was quite concerned that we were not making any faster progress. Only 6 miles the previous day and by that point, we had only moved 1.3 miles in 4 hours. This represented an alarming rate, which could lead us in a few days to run out of fuel and food, while still miles away from Wales. We needed to take action quickly and this is when we arrived at the mouth of the frozen Kotzebue creek jetting out of the cliffs into the sea. We studied our map carefully and agreed that we could have a chance to make faster progress by moving through the network of creek canyons and river valleys in the York mountains range. So we moved inland, and within an hour I switch from a Summer Olympics discipline (if one can consider dunking/walking between ice pans as such…) to a Winter Olympic discipline where I removed my bunny boots, ring out my wet socks the best I could after the earlier soak and switch on to Back country ski boots and skis with the required skins underneath! I will eventually get punished with two big blisters on the ankles for not having taken the time to change to dryer socks… In any event, we were now definitely moving inland in the middle of a beautiful mountain range and had to climb and pull our sleds on progressively steeper canyons and mountain passes. However, we were ecstatic to be out of the “minefield”, although a bit concerned that we could come face to face with a wall that would have been omitted from our maps. It’s one thing to climb a wall on an adventure race to progress from one valley to the next, it’s another to attempt the same feat with a 150 lbs sled potentially anchoring you down while trying to climb with skis. Moving carefully with our maps, we progressively went from one creek to the next and then on to wider frozen rivers. In narrow and steep passages, we were sometimes concerned with the potential avalanche risk that can be quite serious in this part of the world with high accumulation of snow and drastic change in temperatures. On that note, a few days earlier, the Alaskan press reported the death of a snowmobile rider in an avalanche at Rainy Pass while setting up the Iditarod course: http://www.adn.com/news/alaska/story/7475729p-7385953c.html At around 6pm, noticing that a strong storm was picking up, we had to stop and camped in the middle of the valley which instead of protecting us a bit, acted as a fantastic wind tunnel. At one point in the evening, we both had to get out of our tent and readjust our tent because one of our sled partially filled up with gear (~80 lbs), which was anchoring our tent down at one end, had been lifted up by the wind, turned upside down and thrown against the tent. Inside the tent, throughout the night, I once again felt as if I was inside a Mexican Piñata being beaten by some kids afflicted with the furious rabies type…. A bloody fair ride! Although buried inside my cocoon I was thankfully able to gain some valuable sleep. --------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------- Monday Feb 20th: Great weather (Temp 20F, sunny, limited amount of wind) Total approx 12 miles After having spent time digging out our sleds, anchored ski poles, skis, shovels and tent, we were able to depart and move forward through a network of river beds in York mountain range, We progressively came across larger and larger valleys, and start climbing mountain passes. At point, we saw a herd of caribous/reindeers (?) and another herd of prehistoric looking musk oxen in a wide valley, digging through the snow. Karl pointed out that for him “Hell would be being metamorphosed as an Alaskan musk ox, digging constantly through snow for any type of moss and lichen to survive the harsh artic winters! Through the day, pulling our sleds through mountain passes, we had to wear less layers of clothes to avoid sweating profusely and therefore could not stop for too long to enjoy any beautiful vistas along the way. In particular, my fingers still suffering from earlier frost bites (feeling like open wounds), were definitely reminding me that I needed to move to keep them as warm as possible. On that matter, Carl Hutchings, a British biker and friend against whom I raced last year in the Iditarod Trail Invitational suggested by email that I should listen more to the Marilyn Manson song: Irresponsible Hate Anthem and repeat “…I wasn’t born with enough middle fingers…” In any event, at around 6pm, we camped in a pleasant valley where we were able to catch up on our sleep, with a noticeable almost eerie absence of the wind. --------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------- Tuesday Feb 21st: Great weather (Cooler Temp 5F, sunny, No wind) Total approx 15 miles Took off around 10am and arrived in Wales at 5pm. A good day, pushing uphill to get on top of the continental divide which allowed us to progressively descend through the interior plateaus, ending up on the Northern side of Cape Mountain where we were able to pick up for the last few miles the snowmobile trail that goes around Cape Mountain from the moth balled Cold War military outpost of Tin City to the village of Wales. When we arrived in Wales, a few locals such as David Richards’s son, with whom we were supposed to stay, nicely greeted us on their snowmobiles. Taking into consideration that David is currently suffering from pneumonia, we decided that it would be safer for us to let him recover and move instead into our usual habitat: an Alaskan school wood shop. In deed, Wales School principal Craig Probst welcomed us very kindly and gave us a key to the school! Karl and I were also quite thrilled when we noticed in the horizon the islands of Diomede (US and Russia). We could therefore actually see a tidbit of Russia 25 miles away. It definitely felt good to have arrive in Wales ! Looking back, despite the challenges we faced in the last section between Brevig Mission and Wales, we were both satisfied with our change in strategy moving in land through the mountain range and switching to skis. In the end, we achieved the trek in 5 days. We have no idea in how many days other humans have done this section in the past since no one takes the risk anymore to travel on land between these two villages, even by snowmobiles. One noticeable exception is Rosie Swale Pope, which states the following after having completed the same section in 14 days in the opposite direction: http://www.rosiearoundtheworld.co.uk/News%20of%20Rosie%20B.htm “Oct 29th 2005: The journey from Wales to Brevig was much harder than expected, it took two weeks instead of one as expected, and I totally ran out of food for two days, but survived by making a soup out of Brian Wesley vitamin pills. (…) Lots of snow, but distinct absence of trail.” --------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------- Wed Feb 22d – Sun Feb 26th - Settling down in Wales: Karl and I made a presentation for the school on our expedition. http://waa.bssd.org/goliath/goliath.html An Inuit student logically asked us during the talk if we would be prepared to eat a polar bear in the situation where we would have killed one in self-defense, during our Bering Strait Crossing. This comes naturally in a land where this type of meat is highly prized. A polar bear is in fact considered fair game when it ventures too close villages as some of them have done recently. We were also asked as usual, if we had tried local Inuit food and which ones did we like. I responded that we enjoyed them all but still had a few to try such as musk ox meat, walrus skin, potentially polar bear meat, and finally akutuq, a local ice cream, which is whipped reindeer fat with berries. More items on http://www2.grand-forks.k12.nd.us/iditarod/inuitact.html Over the last few days, Karl has also been busy doing interviews over the phone with British newspapers and radios since he has now reached a major milestone in his trek: the completion of the South and North American continents by foot! In any case, we are now busy planning the next phase of this journey, trying our new Navy tactical operation dry suits and the rest of our “swimming” Bering Crossing kit. All geared up, we start walking Westbound out on the ice yesterday to test our equipment in about –10F and 30 mph. The new suits definitely keep us warm, although they are a bit bulky to walk in. After about .5 miles in the fog, we decided to turn around since we only had our GPS with us and apparently were not going to find close by water holes in the ice to dive ourselves in. We took a few pictures though that I will send in a separate email. We will do more intensified testing in our usual spot in the Chena River once we get back to Fairbanks. We now also have to repair and/or improve several items such as fix a few holes in the bottom of Karl’s sled that may have been created while pulling the sled through rocks piercing through the swept away snow on the top of mountain ranges. We have also been spending time with the village elders and whale captains to gain as much information as possible on the ice movements in the strait. However, the information that we gather is sometimes contradictory and in the end, we will have to use our best judgment to define our departure date between now and March 15th. We are also consulting some of the information available on line such as the following website: http://pafc.arh.noaa.gov/ice.php We need to wait for the situation to change to be able to launch. The perfect conditions would appear to be: Considering an imaginary line running from Wales to the Diomede island as our North/South demarcation line. - At first a Northern wind that would stack ice on the Northern side of the cape where we could start walking Northwestbound. - Then followed by a Southern wind, which would allow us to stay North of our demarcation line during our crossing. Currently the Southern winds have pushed some of the ice away from the cape leading to a large amount of open water on the Northern side of our demarcation line, which prevent us from leaving the coast Northbound. One of the villagers wanted to bet with me 10,000$ (as he stated “pretty much my snowmobile and what I have inside my house”) that we will not succeed this year. I responded by asking him if he was willing to make the bet for a period of 5 years to which he responded categorically “NO”. This in a bizarre way instills a bit of confidence in me ! Now, if you want to see what Cape Prince of Wales looks like, feel free to consult the following video, however keep in mind that the village is currently buried under several feet of snow… Info/video on Cape Prince of Wales: http://www.bssd.org/qt/waa_med.mov Bering Strait web cam link: http://24.237.247.165/. You can actually control the camera and on a good day, you can see the Diomedes islands and Russia if the mount of snow in front of the school is not too high ! Wales web cam link: http://24.237.247.165/straitcam.html That is all for now ! On On Dim Sum / Dimitri