Submarine surfacing through sea ice. Our method of transport...

Submarine surfacing through sea ice. Our method of transport will also be nuclear-powered, but not nearly so stealthy.

Apparently early nuclear subs had CCTV so that they could look for polynyas and thin ice (”skylights”) to surface through. Do modern subs still have this capability? The internet suggests no, but it seems odd to lose the capability and subs still go up to the pack.

Gif from Jalopnik.com.

While breaking ice this summer we will be recording sea ice...

While breaking ice this summer we will be recording sea ice thickness and extent, and melt pond distribution, depth and salinity. We’ll be providing these data to a number of scientific institutions in the United States, and it’s really exciting to be part of a ‘citizen science’ project.

Check out the video, and if you’re really interested in helping then go to:

http://bit.ly/2015ArcticOcean.

Well, Canada is behind me. Time to prepare for the next...

Well, Canada is behind me. Time to prepare for the next project…this summer I will be travelling to the North Pole four times aboard 50 let Pobedy (50 Years of Victory), a Russian nuclear-powered icebreaker.

I’ll be working as geology lecturer and expedition staff, guiding excited and adventurous travellers, but I will also be collecting sea ice data in an ambitious project

Thanks to Lauren Farmer (if you don’t follow her yet you should) for the photos of the icebreaker; she’ll be there with me on her second contract aboard the ship, and has been organising and putting the whole data collection project together while I have been away in Antarctica and Canada.

If you’re interested in the data collection project then I’ll be posting more here shortly with ways you can get involved. Stay tuned!

Thanks to The Alpine Ski Club and Canada Goose for providing...

Alpine Ski Club


Canada Goose

Thanks to The Alpine Ski Club and Canada Goose for providing support for this trip. The ASC provided an extremely generous grant, expensive emergency equipment and also a group of experienced mountaineers and skiers from which to select team mates. Canada Goose were very generous to me in providing waterproof clothing which is essential somewhere like the Coast Mountains!

Homathko Part Five – Nine Mile Creek

Homathko Part Five – Nine Mile Creek
Being just nine miles long, we felt that however bad the vegetation was in Nine Mile Creek, a day would be enough time. We were in no way prepared for it taking two entire days.
The first day and a half we had to keep skis on the majority of the time, making the steep and convoluted ground between the trees extremely difficult and very slow. At one point the ground suddenly opened up and the snow disappeared, allowing us to make very rapid progress on foot but within a few hours we were bogged down in incredibly heavy deadfall and Alder from hell.
We made an unplanned open bivouac in the woods, unable to get the tents up, but a fire allowed us to dry out from the rain and wet snow that had soaked us during the afternoon. At this point we were just 2-3 km from the beach and so we rang Roland Class, telling him we would be at the beach at 15:00 the next day (we thought we should add plenty of hours to allow for complications). In the morning the vegetation, amazingly, got significantly worse. We were climbing deadfall six feet high and dragging our packs through Alder so thick that during the first two hours we gained only 300m of distance towards the beach. We wove back and forth across the ridge with increasing desperation and under the strain our gear finally began to break up; ski boots were disintegrating and my pack began to shed one of its shoulder straps.
Finally, at long last we began to make progress. Game trails allowed to to move steadily and we navigated towards an area of braided river where we hoped we would really make progress; this worked out at first, but soon we were backtracking and struggling to cross the many streams. In the end, with time pressing, we started to just walk across and down the streams, struggling to stay upright in the knee deep glacial meltwater.
We emerged onto the beach at 15:40 and to our relief there was Roland with his boat. We were exhausted and collapsing under the weight of our packs, but it had been an incredible trip. Ironically, the best adventure was had in the final nine miles, with no skis on our feet, but that’s exactly why we came to Canada. It provided almost everything we came for and I will be back for sure.

Homathko Part 4 – Leaving the Icefield

Homathko Part 4 – Leaving the Icefield

Given the sustained bad weather we’d been sitting through, we were surprised when the forecast came true and blue skies appeared. It took a long time to dig everything out of the snow, but eventually we were packed and bid farewell to the igloo. The 2-3′ high ridges of snow that had built up between the tents were impressive and showed a fair amount of snow had been moved around during the storm.

We were starting from Sasquatch Pass, where we had left our food cache on the flight in, and figured three days to be a reasonably generous amount of time to get to the Franklin Arm of Chilko Lake, where Roland Class was going to pick us up with his boat.
Immediately after cresting the pass our first obstacle was the Alph Glacier, which passed surprisingly easily despite a steep serac band. Ahead lay the final hanging valley, guarded by very steep slopes. We stopped early in the day so that we could tackle these slopes in the cold of the morning when avalanche risk is much lower.

The second morning we climbed into the hanging valley that would give access to our exit route, swapping skis for crampons on the steep and hard snow. By late morning we found ourselves looking along the long ridge leading to Snowsquall Pass. Our plan was to reach the pass and drop onto the Stilly Glacier by the evening, but below us a series of ramps beckoned invitingly.

We made the decision to get onto the ramps an into the final valley floor as quickly as possible before the sun made the slopes too soft. What followed started as a worrying crossing of big, steep and heavily loaded slopes  but ended as the only good downhill skiing of the trip; good soft spring ego snow allowing long lazy turns despite the steepness of the slope. We then had some fantastic easy angled tree skiing into the head of Nine Mile Creek and, we thought, the trip was pretty much done. Turns out those final nine miles would be the longest of the trip! More in Part Five…

Homathko Part 3

Homathko Part 3

We had an auspicious start, with two solid days of good weather that saw us well established on the icefield. However, it quickly became unsettled again, a common feature of the weather in the Coast Mountains! We were often able to make distance across the icefield, but it was always too poor for downhill skiing.

Occasionally storms would pass through and we’d be woken by the tent flapping and vibrating in the gale. We built high walls from snow blocks to prevent damage to our thin nylon and aluminium shelters, and once we were safe we opened the whisky and lit our pipes, broke out the books and the iPods and enjoyed some downtime. Roger built an igloo as the latrine kept filling in with snow, but before we ruined it we had a Scotch and Christmas cake party inside, happy to be both a) out of the wind and snow and b) standing up!

Eventually time grew short enough that we had to think of leaving we had a boat to catch and so we used our Yellowbrick beacon to request a forecast. Fortunately a break in the weather was expected so we holed up, kept digging the tents out and waited for the sun…