“Tourists would rave over this scenery.”
-- Douglas Robertson, 1931, while visiting Ellesmere by ship
SPECIAL NOTE:
The store is open! You can now buy books, calendars, prints and the Sledding Equipment List with one-click shopping, via Paypal. Just go to the Store link at the top of this page. Jerry's latest book, Arctic Eden, based on his travels on Ellesmere, Axel Heiberg and Devon Islands, is now available.
May 23
Under the guise of an "expedition", some young tourists led by a couple of guides are off to climb Barbeau Peak. I have a history with Barbeau: in 2002, I was part of the sixth party to climb it. Ours was hardly an expedition, either. It was closer to a made-for-television event, because it was done for the film, Horizontal Everest. We landed on the ice cap at the foot of the peak, skied up 2,000 feet or so, then affixed crampons for the last 15 minutes. Here's a YouTube clip from that June evening:
There were three people in our group. Neither myself nor the producer/sound person were climbers. Ironically, the only real alpinist was the cameraman filming my progress, fellow Canmore-ite Glen Crawford. It gave me a sort of perverse glee to see our climb reported in the American Alpine Journal as among the noteworthy ascents of that year.
Barbeau is basically a two- or three-hour walkup. The only reason that this highest peak east of the Rockies has been so infrequently climbed is how remote it is. If you have the money to charter a Twin Otter there and back from Resolute (about $40,000), you can get to the summit.
Approaching the summit of Barbeau Peak. You can walk to the end of the rock band, then stomp up the last icy bit with crampons.
May 6
Geologist Ray Thorsteinsson died recently at the age of 91. Ray was a legend, one of the few scientists whose work in the High Arctic bridged past and present. He went north by airplane but traveled by dogteam or on foot for months at a time, like the old explorers. His "geological investigations" in 1956 led him from the newly constructed Eureka Weather Station on Ellesmere overland to Canon Fiord, then to the Schei Peninsula on Axel Heiberg, and back across to Borup Fiord, which became weirdly famous a few years ago when the media latched on to its "alien-like life forms" -- really, sulphur-loving bacteria. From here, he continued to Hare and Otto Fiords. Otto Fiord, he told me, wallowed in knee-deep snow, while Hare Fiord, immediately south, was marginally protected from westen snowstorms by the mountains of neighboring Axel Heiberg and its bare ice was so fast that he couldn't even get off his dogsled to pee.
Ray's travels led him to make historical as well as geological discoveries. He found Hans Krueger's 1930 cairn note at Andersen Point on Meighen Island, and a pickax left by Fitzhugh Green of Donald MacMillan's Crocker Land Expedition in 1914. He also retrieved some cairn notes left by Vihljalmur Stefansson during his Canadian Arctic Expedition in 1915, including one marking the discovery of Meighen Island. When I visited Ray at his office at the Geological Survey of Canada in Calgary, he gave me a color photocopy of that cairn note, which I've framed and hung in our home.
Occasionally, decades later, I visited the same sites as he did. At Robert Peary's wind-blasted cairn above Cape Thomas Hubbard, at the northern tip of Axel Heiberg Island, I found a fragment of a bottle that Ray had left when he looked over this site in the 1950s. He was the first to visit the Peary cairn since Sgt. Stallworthy during his search for Krueger in 1932.
Ray had a theory of where on Axel Heiberg Island the missing geologist Hans Krueger's remains might turn up, and one summer Alexandra and I spent three weeks around that site, looking unsuccessfully. But that same summer, a previous undiscovered Krueger camp was found by a geographer a mere 15 miles away.
Nowadays, scientists aren't travelers, but Ray was one of the last of the researchers who also qualified as explorers.
February 15
More unpublished Ellesmere images:
A sled boat used by the RCMP in the 1920s or early 1930s. It had steel-shoed runners on the bottom so it could be dragged more easily over sea ice.
Crossing a glacier-fed stream in Quttinirpaaq National Park: the hardest part about summer hiking in the High Arctic, especially during warm spells when those streams can run dangerously high.
Iceberg on Eureka Sound.
February 8
Some unpublished Ellesmere images:
Spring mirage, Buchanan Bay
Camped on the icecap at the foot of Barbeau Peak, just before climbing the highest mountain in Canada and the US east of the Rockies.
Arctic hares often assume cat-like positions.
Alexandra in Fram Haven, explorer Otto Sverdrup's first wintering spot.
The grave of Niels Petersen, who died of scurvy in 1876 on the Nares expedition. Located near Alert.
First night on Ellesmere: Aug. 1986. Time, just after midnight. Gotta love it.
January 18, 2012
The New York Times published an article yesterday about Jon Turk and Eric Boomer's circumnavigation of Ellesmere. It's always interesting to review the comments following a mainstream article like this one on arctic travel. Most were supportive -- "Good work", "You're living my dream," etc. Predictably, a small number of negative remarks came from the No Tomfoolerys --sober paterfamilias types who seem to regard adventure as a tacit rejection of the life that they themselves have chosen. You always run into a few of these; they are also the ones who write angry letters to newspapers about search and rescue costs, but find nothing contradictory about contributing to Medicare for smokers and overweight people.
