Archive for category: Inspiring Explorers™ Updates – 2018

From Bengt: Sunny and nice weather, cold last night…In total we did 30km, very happy about that. As always we started the day with outmeal porridge. Børge’s secret recipe. 180grams that we mix with hot water. During the day we eat chocolate, nuts, cheese, freeze-dried fruit, chips, noodles, salami and biscuits. In the night we have dinner in a lot of different tastes, made my Real Turmat. Every night we have a meeting in the big tent so everyone knows the plan for tomorrow. Our plan tomorrow is skiing for 9 hours. Divided into 8 legs with a 10 minute breaks in-between. The midday break is longer, we even put up a telt as shelter. All good here, cheers!

From Bengt: Nice day, with changing wind. We could see the DYE station when we started, some 20 kilometres away. We had a brief moment with weather coming over us, then it was gone. The station kept growing as we got further, but it seemed like we never got to it, and then finally we were there. We had a real dinner before we went in to see this monster from the inside.
The building got left in the late 80’s, and it really looks that way on the inside. Paint is falling off the walls, and the interior is moved around, some places are in bits and pieces. It is really good to have reached this milestone. It took forever, with slow progress and 3 days of heavy storms. Now we look forward to the next milestone – the summit. Well, not really the summit of the cap, but for us the highest point of our journey.

From Bridget: Unlucky number 13… or lucky. A hurricane is on its way with winds blasting us with speeds of up to 120km/hr. A comforting thing to encounter in a wide open landscape with nothing to protect us. Yay another rest day bunking down for an extra few hours of peace and tranquility while the wind roars and shakes our tents like a pepper shaker gently massaging us from all directions as its picks up the walls and floors constantly. There is nothing like catching up on a few extra hours sleep while it sounds like you’re camped underneath a 747 taking flight.  Thank god Bengt tied our tents down with a climbing rope and snow anchor.

The wind doesnt seem as crazy as the last storm either as we built a huge snow wall that mother nature enforced with more deposits of snow. Our camp is solid after six hours of digging and building! Such a surreal scene to encounter, wind so strong it was hard to stand up, the sun eerily peeping through the clouds and all of us digging like mad before it got stronger. And now we get to wait it out playing games and reading.

From Nigel: Probably the coldest day so far with a keen wind meaning most opted for goggles and big over-gloves at least for the morning. Skiing into the wind the view is unchanging – flat and white. We strained our eyes to see DYE 2, our next destination point without luck. It is a remnant of the Cold War, an American radar warning site. Mid afternoon we heard a noise and were amazed to see a helicopter fly overhead. We skied on. Excitement today was changing long skis for short ones, which will help with glide and speed. Another 20km day.

Big shout out to Miss Wilkinson, Chris W and class at Christchurch South Intermediate who are following the journey!

Roll on tomorrow.

From Bengt: At 0630 the wind settled down, and we quickly understood that we could move. We used a long time to dig out the tents, but finally could start moving.

In the second break, what we thought was a dog-team yesterday came skiing towards us.

It was an English team of six, which is also crossing the cap. No dogs there 🙂

We spent some time talking before we headed away on a slightly different course. In all we did 8 legs of 50min that gave is 17km – all good!