Friday, December 30, 2011

Leaving Lonely for Tesh (December 4, 2011)

Chris looking a trifle frosty


Sounds straight forward…..17 miles, a few hours of daylight, 3 GPS units. What could possibly go wrong?

Well, we woke up frozen. Heidi, particularly, was slow off the mark and even when she did manage to get up and into her super-suit (long underwear, down pants, long underwear shirt, merino wool, micro puff, giant Canada goose jacket, 3 toques, 2 pairs of mitts, 2 pairs of socks, Baffin boots, etc), she had to stomp up and down the 5000 ft runway several times before feeling returned to her extremities. She was essentially useless. Chris started to get things ready, and then had to take his own warm-up break. Basically, we used most of our ‘light’ (twilight) getting ready.

And so we started.

Problem 1: The GPS units were pretty much all popsicles and did not function well. We had to keep putting them in our jackets to warm them up.

Problem 2: There are NO landmarks and NOTHING to point toward when the GPS arrow is not arrowing.

Problem 3: We could see Lonely for over an hour. [Demoralizing.]

Problem 4: Not much snow on tundra = very slow progress. We were slower than a herd of turtles stampeding through peanut butter.

One hour into the trip we stopped to stomp around and warm up.

Heidi: “Let’s take stock.”
Chris: “The GPS’s are barely functioning. We can point toward the sun-ish for about another 10 minutes. We can still see Lonely. I’m uncomfortable. Do you think we should go back?”
Heidi: [Thoughtful for several minutes]. “Probably. But I don’t want to. The lure of a warm cabin is simply too tempting.”

So, onward we forged. It was painful. We saw the tail lights of another snow machine going goodness knows where. Other than that, we saw very little. We lost some bags off the sled and had to backtrack. Heidi did step aerobics on the tundra while waiting for the retrieval mission to return.

The Borough cabin at Teshekpuk Lake is right beside the only feature – some cliffs. (A bank in any other topographical setting). Seeing those cliffs elicited a feeling of indescribable relief. Four hours after our departure, several stops, several course corrections, and 1 retrieval mission, we arrived. And the stove started.

SUH-WEET!

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