A snippet of the story of North Pole Expedition (March & April, 2010)

Frosty Faces

Our arrival at the pole followed a super huge effort to cover miles so that we could reach that magical spot on the earth's surface before running out of time for the helicopter pick up. The huge effort meant that in the final four days of our trip we had only 5 hours sleep. I have never in my life had to be so focused on achieving a goal and pushing for days, weeks really, to achieve it. That push to the end dominated our experience of the second half of the journey when it became apparent that we needed to step up the pace or risk not getting there. We still managed to appreciate how the icescape was changing as we travelled further and further away from the coast. The ice pans were larger, there were more low or old ridges that were easier to cross and more leads that needed to be swum or rafted or took time for us to walk along till we came to a point where we could cross.

The sun had been below the horizon at the start of our journey, coming up as a glowing yellow ball for 20 minutes on day 3 and increasing height and time till it was in the sky for the full 24 hours, after a month had passed. The sun reduced the amount of frost in the tent, made us warmer, made it easier to see and kept us more cheerful.

There’s lots we could say but the following snippets are some things we find people usually want to know about:

• The trip took 56 days, starting on the 28th Feb and finishing on the 26th of April. As the crow flies it was 780 kms.

• As the ice drifted in front of wind or ocean currents our position moved. We mostly drifted east and south. Depressing!

• We didn't see Polar Bears but we did see seals. Just one at a time, poking their heads up through a lead and looking at us to find out what we were up to. They quickly bobbed down into the water again and disappeared.

• It was -38C when we started, we averaged about -30C and the warmest we had was about -17C. We had to worry about getting too hot when it got to -20C as we didn't want to get sweaty (sweat freezes in the clothing - not nice)

• The sleds weighed about 80 kgs. We had two resupplies of food and fuel which were parachuted in. Each of those were about 100kgs.

• It’s not hard to sleep in sunlit nights - we were so tired we could have slept through a rock concert.

• The ocean can be silent but sometimes you can hear the ice moving. It chugs, sounding a bit like a steam engine. Sometimes scraping ice makes a high pitched screeching noise too. Our travel was accompanied by The sounds of our skis and sleds moving over the snow and ice which could be quite noisy.

• We phoned Matty McNair (Sarah’s polar guide mum) daily to provide a position update and to organise the resupplies. We phoned the Australian Base Communication team daily also with an update for our website.

• We didn't suffer from frostbite or any other 'Arctic' conditions apart from a small amount of cold injury Linda had on her fingers. No digits missing or scarred noses. We lost about 10kgs weight each, even though the food was good.

• We are still talking to each other and we’re still friends with Sarah—we had a great experience of working together well as a team.