News

'Dog-tired' but on the move

 

May 10th, 2006, Duluth News Tribune

BY SAM COOK

NEWS TRIBUNE OUTDOORS WRITER

 

Despite open water and 30-foot pressure ridges, Lonnie Dupre and Eric Larsen are making progress toward the North Pole.

The two Grand Marais adventurers are trying to make the first extended summer trek on the Arctic Ocean, pulling specially modified canoe-sleds about 1,100 miles over the next four months. They left northern Ellesmere Island in Canada on May 1 bound for the North Pole. They hope to reach northern Greenland in late summer.

 

They had made 37.1 miles of progress through Monday, said expedition manager John Huston of Ely.

 

Their One World Expedition marks their second attempt to make the first successful trek on the Arctic Ocean in summer. Last year's attempt to cross from Russia to Canada was thwarted after 25 days by poor weather and unfavorable ice drift.

 

"After a full week on the trail, we are bone-weary, dog-tired and whatever other quippy phrases one might use to describe our tired state," the men said in their Web update Monday.

 

Dupre, 45, and Larsen, 34, are traveling on skis and snowshoes, sometimes pulling their 240-pound canoe-sleds, occasionally rafting them together to cross "leads" of open water in the fractured ice. Largely because of ocean currents, the ice sometimes jams together, forming jumbled pressure ridges.

 

"Gigantic blocks, slabs and chunks of ice formed an impenetrable wall," the men wrote Monday. "The whole line extended as far as we could see to the southwest and nearly as far to the northeast."

 

After finding a place to "wiggle through" that 30-foot-high pressure ridge, the adventurers soon encountered a newly frozen lead spanning almost a quarter-mile.

 

"It was covered with 'ice flowers,' so we knew it was safe, with the exception of spots where we got that sinking feeling (literally) as the ice bowed beneath our skis," they wrote.

 

The weather has been good. The temperature Monday was 10 degrees above zero, according to the Web update.

The men will be resupplied with food on about Day 40. At that time, they hope to be at latitude 86 degrees north. They will get an 80-day food supply to complete the trip.

 

"The big unknown portion is still ahead," said Huston, the expedition manager. "And that is how the warmer temperatures which accompany a summer expedition will slow them down or affect them when the pans of ice are softer or there are bigger open leads."

 

On Sunday, Dupre and Larsen offered this thought in their daily update: "We are still settling into this place. It is so vast and so huge that our small expedition seems so insignificant. We could easily die in several different ways each day. But we know this as well, so we ski and snowshoe carefully. We scout leads, discuss options and listen, always, to our nerves."

 

The purpose of their expedition, sponsored in large part by the environmental group Greenpeace, is to call attention to global warming and particularly the plight of polar bears.

 

"We are still settling into this place. It is so vast and so huge that our small expedition seems so insignificant. We could easily die in several different ways each day. But we know this as well, so we ski and snowshoe carefully."

LONNIE DUPRE AND ERIC LARSEN in their Web update Sunday.