Conquering the Impossible (11 page)

BOOK: Conquering the Impossible
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The wind shifted suddenly, and enormous sheets of pack ice began to drift southward, following the same course I was. Pushed by winds out of the west, these huge sheets of ice are driven out into the open ocean where they ultimately melt. But now they were pushing back in the opposite direction, and I found myself caught between the coastal cliffs and blocks of pack ice many miles in length. I could sail out of this situation, but I didn't want to run the risk of heading back out into open sea. I preferred to stay close to dry land. Here at least, should the worst case arise—that is, if I was forced to abandon ship—I could still reach the mainland with my equipment and continue on my way. And from my point of view, that was the only thing that mattered.

The battle lasted five days and five nights. All sails set, I slipped among the icebergs, ramming slabs of ice that lifted the boat up and then let it drop again with a thump. Wedged between the granite cliffs and the giant blocks of pack ice, I tacked and veered to avoid being crushed or colliding with the icebergs which, just to make things harder, did not always seem to move with the wind or the current. In fact, the immense segment of the iceberg that jutted out of the water acted like a sail, with the same angles of thrust. It was impossible to think of abandoning the helm, and so I struggled to fight off sleep. But fear, and the need to bail constantly to reduce the level of the water that was once again filling my cockpit, were enough for the most part to keep me wide awake.

When I could no longer stay awake, I would drive the boat onto one of the little flat ice floes and leave it grounded there, bow in the air. I would let the boat drift with the floe, confident that it wouldn't collide with anything for the time being. That would let me close my eyes for minutes, even hours, until the hull of my boat would finally slip off the floe by itself. The smack of the hull hitting water would wake me up, and I would set off again, taking care not to run into any of the many icebergs lurking in the fog.

When I finally sighted the fishermen's houses of Angmagssalik, little multicolored wooden boxes scattered on the ice high atop the cliff, I felt as if I had been saved by a miracle. I had sailed along the Greenland coast for hundreds of miles; I was completely exhausted, half-asleep at the helm; my hull was full of water and badly dented from all the collisions; but I had arrived.

My crew landed at Angmagssalik the same day, after a journey that had certainly been less trying than mine.

Before leaving Switzerland, Jean-Philippe had placed a small classified ad in the newspapers: “Wanted: volunteers to take Mike Horn's boat around Greenland.” He had received twenty-four responses and had chosen two prospective pilots. Angelo and Pierre-Yves arrived with him. Dominique, another companion, was waiting in Switzerland so that we could send him a detailed order for other spare parts and tools to bring on a later flight.

Working with the tide, we got the boat out of the water, using its winch to haul it along a ramp, the only piece of maritime equipment in the place, which is more of a natural harbor than a real port. Once we had the boat in dry dock, the
Arktos,
the name I had given the boat and my expedition, became a dorm where all four of us crashed, crammed in together for as long as it took to repair the boat. Angelo proved to be a gifted mechanic and handyman. Soon the boat was as good as new and perfectly watertight, as proven by the test runs we took in the open waters.

On the administrative side, things seemed to go as if by magic. After a few discussions with the authorities in Angmagssalik, my permit was issued in no more than twenty-four hours. Work on the boat took ten days, and I was becoming impatient. If I got too far behind schedule, my whole calendar would be thrown out of whack.

Wasting no more time, all four of us boarded the boat and left Angmagssalik for good. A few hours later I was leaving the boat again, setting out with all my polar equipment a short distance farther south, at a landing point where the slope of the terrain ran straight up from the water's edge all the way to the ice cap.

Last farewells and a round of hugs. My teammates all urged me to keep my spirits up, and I wished them good luck. If God and the ice field were both willing, we would meet again at Ilulissat, on the west coast of Greenland, where I would be counting on them to be waiting with the boat.

I no longer had to worry about my boat; it was in very good hands. Now I could focus on my next goal: the 450 or 500 miles of ice field that I would have to traverse in my solo trek across Greenland.

*   *   *

First of all, I would need to climb. A long gradual climb up to the main plateau, which stretches out at an elevation of ten thousand feet above sea level. The delay that had been caused by the problems with my boat had forced me to start across Greenland at the beginning of autumn, and I was greeted by snow squalls and a head wind blowing in my face. None of this was at all encouraging, since I had allowed myself only about twenty days—with a ten-day margin—to make my crossing (and so I had allowed thirty days for Jean-Philippe and the others to reach Ilulissat).

I wanted to beat the speed record between Angmagssalik and Disko Bay, which is just south of the camp from which Paul-Émile Victor set out to discover the Greenland ice cap. The speed record was set by a four-man German team, and they had taken forty-five days to complete the same route. (There is also an “official” record of nine days, but that did not apply to me because it followed a different route, a straight line along the Arctic Circle from Angmagssalik to the west coast.) But I hadn't forgotten that on my first attempt, with Erhard Loretan and Jean Troillet, we had been forced to spend two weeks in our tent without being able to venture outside at all, and had finally been forced to give up. I thought about them and the lesson of patience that they had imparted to me when, immediately after beginning my ascent, bad weather confined me to my tent for twenty-four hours. During the night I had to get out of the tent every half-hour to shovel away the snow, otherwise its weight would have crushed the tent. My sled, on the other hand, was completely buried in snow.

This sled was originally designed by Børge Ousland for use on ice. I adapted it to work on any surface I might happen to encounter—snow, ice, rock, tundra, brambles—by making the bottom of the sled thicker and stronger. Same thing for the runners, which were the same width as my skis, so that they would naturally run in the ski tracks. If one of the runners was damaged, it would cause the sled to steer toward the damaged side and that would force me to expend a considerable amount of extra energy to pull it back straight. I needed to be able to fix any such damage quickly and easily by remolding the Teflon with the flat of my knife blade. The front of the sled was rounded and raised so that it would rise up over bumps and slide over them without snagging. The sides of the sled had a rounded bulge so that the entire sled would tend to stay upright rather than overturn in case of violent impacts. The sled was unsinkable, superdurable (it would survive falls of several feet on the ice), and very light when unloaded. I hooked myself up to it with a harness that I had dug up in the back room of Ferrino, my tentmakers. After trying on countless climbing harnesses that were fairly comfortable, I asked to see the most comfortable backpack that they made. With a few quick cuts of my knife, I had separated the backpack and its harness; I added two polyester rings to the harness, big enough to clip carabiners onto even when I was wearing my mittens and in the middle of a raging blizzard.

The 265 pounds of the sled's weight consisted almost entirely of the weight of the load. That load consisted of one month's food supplies and ten aluminum bottles, each holding a quart of the benzene fuel that my stove burned. Each bottle weighed about two pounds. I could have carried a single large jerrican but if it leaked or there was a fire, that would have been the end of my fuel. By breaking it into separate compartments, I would reduce that risk.

The bottles were packed separately and insulated from each other to limit impacts. They were sealed with a plastic stopper that accommodated the expansion and contraction of the aluminum under conditions of extreme cold, which increases the volume of the liquid. For that reason the bottles were not completely filled. The bottom of each bottle was reinforced with a layer of rubberized foam to prevent the thousands of hours of constant rubbing against the Kevlar surface of the sled from wearing a hole through it. If that were to happen, not only would I lose my fuel, but I would also lose my food, which could become contaminated with benzene and rendered inedible.

*   *   *

Without a teammate to take turns beating a track with me, I struggled to open a path through the snow, which varied greatly in depth. But weather conditions would eventually improve. They couldn't have gotten any worse, and the fury of the wind would actually work in my favor by compacting the snow ahead of me.

I couldn't see any farther than the tips of my skis, and I would constantly stare at these two boards that were carrying me. I needed to make sure that they were always perfectly parallel, otherwise I might begin to drift off course. Because I am right-handed, my right leg is a little stronger than my left leg, and it always tends to push me to the left. I have to compensate for this on a regular basis.

My skis were white, and they would have blended right in with the color of the snow-covered ground if Annika and Jessica hadn't been allowed to express their youthful creativity. With tender, loving dedication, they had drawn our home in Switzerland in black magic marker. Plumes of smoke curled out of the chimney, and little people at the windows were speaking in word balloons: “Daddy, we miss you.… Come home soon.” A little farther along, a seal was poking its head up through a hole in the ice, and a polar bear was smiling at me and saying, “Good luck, Mike!” At the tip of one ski my daughters had drawn a cat; at the tip of the other, a mouse; and they whispered in my ear that the cat would catch the mouse when I got home, when my skis were finally standing side by side, with the tips close together.

Progress was already difficult, and it was made even harder by the countless crevasses that were opened in the slope by the contrasting movements of the glaciers and the ice fields calving icebergs into the ocean. Those crevasses were fatal traps. The unfortunate soul who falls into one is wedged helplessly in the sharp angle at the bottom of the crevasse and is gradually swallowed by the ice as his body heat melts the walls. The effect is something like being digested alive by a very large, very cold creature.

When there are two teammates traveling together, one teammate can help the other one out, especially if they are roped together. That is why it was theoretically forbidden to venture into that region alone. And that is why I obtained a permit in the names of two people from the authorities in Angmagssalik, knowing that once I was far away from civilization, no one was going to come after me to ask about it. Unfortunately, that also meant that nobody would come to my aid if I got into trouble.

During the three days of my ascent, my heart would race every time I had to thread my way, with my sled, between two of these bottomless chasms. Or whenever I would prod the ground with the tip of my ski pole to discover invisible crevasses covered with a bridge of fresh snow that would never hold my own weight, much less the weight of my sled.

Luckily, there was still daylight twenty-four hours a day. The harsh light that reflected off the ice would have burned my eyes if I hadn't been wearing sunglasses that adjusted to variations in light intensity and whose unbreakable plastic stems would not adhere to my skin under conditions of extreme cold. The positive side of all this sunlight was that it allowed me extra time to wend my way carefully through this mortal labyrinth, making detours lasting several hours around some of the crevasses.

I crossed the narrowest ones using a method borrowed from mountain climbing. I took off my skis and put on long, pointed crampons. Then I drove a titanium piton into the ice on the inside face of the crevasse through which I slid a rope that was fastened to my harness. Then I climbed down into the gap and jumped across to the opposite face, hooking on with the help of my crampons and my ice ax. I would climb back up and drive in a second piton. Now, I would have a piton on each face of the crevasse and that would allow me to install a network of pulleys and ropes between my two anchoring points. I would stretch the cords as tight as possible and shuttle my sledge across, hanging from its two portage hooks. And then all I would need to do was recover the piton screwed into the “wrong” side of the crevasse, haul myself up out of the crevasse on the “right” side with the aid of the other piton, unscrew it, and continue on my way.

Of course, all this took up a lot of time, and I wasn't making much forward progress—three, six, eight miles per day. That fell far short of the distance I was hoping to make, and my dreams of setting a record were beginning to vanish before my eyes. All the same, I held out hope that once I was on the plateau the relatively flat surface and the slight downhill slope would allow me to make better time.

When I reached the plateau, the wind suddenly shifted as if it had only been waiting for me. All the conditions had lined up perfectly. I was finally going to be able to use my kites.

I had five of them, each suitable for a different wind speed. They had been custom-made for me by Eric at Vade Retro, and they had the unusual property of working not only when the wind was blowing from behind you but also in crosswinds and even when the wind was blowing almost from straight ahead. The inventor called them the Edge, with a clear reference to the aeronautics term “leading edge.” To me, though, they were sails, and I was hoping to convert them into wings.

Doubly harnessed—to my sled behind me and to my kite in front of me—I headed through the powdery snow, traveling north to skirt the major glacier formation that prevented me from following a straight line between Angmagssalik and Ilulissat. This lengthy detour was made up for by the speed that my kites gave me. The smallest of the kites was twenty-two square feet; the largest was 237 square feet. To make them more visible—but also to cheer up my days and to put a little color into this pale landscape—I ordered them in a multicolored array of blue, green, and orange. You use them just like the sails of a boat, choosing a size inversely proportional to the force of the wind. The wind force also determined how far out I would play the line. I would let the smallest kites out to about fifty feet's distance, and sometimes I would play out more line to get the kite higher to catch an elusive wind. The larger kites, in an ordinary wind, would be played out four or five yards ahead of me, like imposing spinnakers. The effectiveness of this technique immediately translated into greater distances covered—fifteen, twenty, even twenty-five miles a day! And I didn't even need to use my legs. I was just letting my skis slide over the snow!

BOOK: Conquering the Impossible
5.2Mb size Format: txt, pdf, ePub
ads

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