Navigating in a sea of white

Day 7-DSC_2837-smallHours traveled: 8.5
Miles traveled: 12.1
Total distance covered: 67.8 miles
Elevation: 1776 feet

Translation from voicemail: Hi everybody this is Marty and Chris, team 3belowzero and yes, Marty’s calling in tonight as the guest blogee, so I’ve, I’ve agreed to every seven days I will be calling for the voice blogee. So we had a good day today. The stats will be posted so I’m not gonna say those so I can save time. But we had some questions about navigation and I am going to go into those real quick.

How do we navigate? So right now we’re not heading directly towards the pole. We’re heading on a Bering of 208 True. And we’re doing that so that we can get around this area called the Foundation Ice Stream where there is some major crevassing. And there’s no way we can go through there. It’d be great to turn and head towards the pole. But we can’t do that yet. So we’re gonna head this direction for about another 100 and I think it’s about 30 miles or so.

And when we navigate we have a compass mounted on our chest. And we set that to a magnetic bearing and the person in the front navigates for about an hour. They stay in the front. And the person in the back kinda gets a break during all of that. And when you’re navigating there’s not much out there to look at to point towards. It’s a sea of white and the highest bumps are just a few inches high. So what you do is you pick out your favorite little bump and point towards that and try to keep it in your sights. Sometimes when you look down for a second and look back up, all the bumps look exactly the same.

Day 7 Mask ImageSo we change every hour and switch around and take turns doing that, and we try to do a straight line, try not to weave because weaving wastes our time. So we’ve been doing a good job. We did a lot better navigating. We keep getting better. We are able to see how much we weave by the end of the day and today we didn’t weave much at all. So good job. Chris navigated a lot today too.

So we also had another question on twenty-four hours of daylight. How are we adjusting? Yes, it’s really weird because it’s the exact same amount of daylight, night, day when I wake up. When I open my eyes at 2 a.m. it’s exactly the same as 2 p.m.. So we have these little foam things that we put over our eyes and then we pull our little buff hat over top of that and we sleep with that to cover our eyes. It looks pretty funny but it sort of works.

All right, so one last thing I wanna say, usually we do a sort of shout out to somebody or something. So today I wanna thank Nickelback, the Superman sound track and AC/DC for helping me get through the day, alright.

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