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First tracks across Axel Heiberg Island - Arctic adventure, Part two

The twin engine Dakota came in low, dropped three bright orange cargo chutes, and dipped a wing to the guys on the ground before heading back to Resolute Bay.
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Heading for higher ground in the Artic.

The twin engine Dakota came in low, dropped three bright orange cargo chutes, and dipped a wing to the guys on the ground before heading back to Resolute Bay. It was mail day at the Eureka weather station but spongy frost boils on the airstrip prevented the fixed-wing aircraft from landing. The parachutes had barely settled before their precious cargo of mail was distributed and each man was silently absorbed in news from friends and loved-ones in another world.

Zeke and I had arrived with our gear by helicopter a few days earlier. The weather station, located on the western side of Ellesmere Island only a short distance from Mokka Fiord, was an ideal staging site for our planned trek across Axel Heiberg Island. We spent several days there, organizing our gear, studying our route on air photos, and getting to know the fellows who lived on the base.

It takes a special kind of person to tolerate the isolation and boredom of a high Arctic weather station. In 1955, before satellites opened the north to reliable communication, Eureka was one of the most isolated spots on earth. A ham radio set provided a tenuous outside link but it frequently didn’t work. And when calls from “Victor Easy Number Eight Mexico America” drew nothing but static the guys went back to their high speed “bugs” and talked to other stations in Morse code. I was amazed at how they could take part in a three-way dialogue with other operators, chuckle at a joke hidden in the clicks and buzzes, and carry on a normal conversation all at the same time. I tried to imagine what it must be like in the perpetual darkness and bitter cold of winter and wondered why they kept coming back. Yet for the handful of men at Eureka it was a chosen way of life.

By the time our chopper returned Zeke and I were ready to go. The plan was to put in four caches and spend up to a month mapping a strip about eight miles wide across the centre of Axel Heiberg. Our route would take us from Mokka Fiord in the east to the tip of Kunguk Peninsula in the west, a distance of 75 miles.

I climbed into the cockpit of HHU, one of our two Sikorsky S55s, and pilot Deke Orr hit the starter. The engine coughed. The big helicopter rocked on its undercarriage as the massive rotor began to swing, and a few seconds later with a pop-pop-pop of the blades we were airborne and headed for Axel Heiberg. Behind me in the cargo hold Zeke was ready to set out our caches while I marked each location on the air photos in my lap.

We touched down at our first cache site and Zeke set out our camp, a 4x6 foot tent, primus stove, and packboards with our sleeping bags and caribou-hide sleeping mats. At cache two, just east of the central ice field, he dropped off two pairs of snowshoes and a climbing rope, and at cache three, at the head of Strand Fiord, he left a 30-30 carbine along with stove fuel and dehydrated food.

After dropping off our final cache, near the head of Kunguk Peninsula, we headed back through Strand Fjord Pass, flew over our first camp, and landed eight miles farther east. With only our daypacks and hammers this is where we waved good-bye to HHU. We wouldn’t see it again until we reached the other side of the island. From here on we were on our own.

It took a long time for the sound of the helicopter to fade into the distance. We stood silently until it was gone and then went to work. Zeke, an undergraduate from the University of Alberta with experience in the Rockies, was a strong, easy going and resourceful assistant. We soon became an efficient team and for the next few weeks we zigzagged back and forth across the island, measuring thousands of feet of strata, mapping spectacular structures, and gathering data on the glaciers and snowfields of the interior.

The geological work was straightforward but everything else was new. With no trees or any other familiar objects to give a sense of scale we felt dwarfed by the vast sweep of the land. The sun circled around the sky without ever approaching the horizon and with 24 hours of daylight and no schedule to keep we soon lost track of the days. We worked until we were tired, sometimes 15 or 20 hours at a stretch, and slept until we were rested. At first the country seems utterly barren, but hunkered down among the rocks a miniature garden of saxifrages, arctic poppy and a profusion of mosses and lichens thrives in a thin layer of unfrozen soil on top of the permafrost. And in the profound silence of the arctic a bumblebee droning across the tundra can sound like an approaching aircraft.

Crossing the broad upland plateau on the eastern side of the island we quickly learned to walk a zigzag course through the centuries-old frost polygons — stick to their rocky edges and stay out of the central frost boils where the mud is ankle deep. A pair of arctic hare bound off, upright on their long hind legs as though bouncing on pogo sticks. A lone caribou checks us out just before we enter the mountains and begin our long climb across the central ice field. Head and nose held high it glides past on legs and feet that seem to barely touch the ground. It was the last living thing we saw until we reached the head of Strand Fiord on the other side of the island.

The mountains of Axel Heiberg are a geologist’s dream. With no vegetation and virtually no soil or talus to cover the rock we could trace the multi-coloured strata for miles. And the valley glaciers, almost entirely free of crevasses, provided easy access to a broad swath of terrain. The only time we needed our snowshoes was on a few of the higher ridges.

As we approached the west side of the island I picked out our third cache with my binoculars, a tiny speck at the head of Strand Fiord. After camping there for several days we added the 30-30 to our packs and continued west along the shoreline of Strand Fiord. We never needed the rifle but having watched polar bear patrolling the shorelines earlier in the summer I didn’t begrudge its extra weight. I was alarmed one morning by a tug on the bottom of my sleeping bag but it was only a skinny arctic wolf — a perpetually hungry creature that must have thought my caribou-hide sleeping mat or rank duffle sox smelled like a meal.

The wolf and several of his friends followed us most of that day, keeping a respectful distance and pausing now and then to send out a mournful chorus of yips and howls. They stayed with us until their attention shifted to a small herd of musk-ox. With their long shaggy coats and viciously hooked horns these denizens of the high arctic are notoriously bad tempered. We gave them a wide berth and left them staring down the wolves.

I’m not sure whether Zeke and I were the first to cross Axel Heiberg on foot and it doesn’t really matter. For us it was a fascinating journey of discovery. Having more than met our scientific objectives, we arrived at our final camp tired but with a great sense of accomplishment.

As I look back on that summer now, 52 years later, I see Operation Franklin as both a beginning and an end. It was the beginning of large-scale scientific exploration in the high Arctic, but it happened near the end of the pre-technology era. Two years later Russia’s sputnik foreshadowed the age of satellite communication and navigation. Our cumbersome S55s, with their useless magnetic compasses, were soon replaced by sleek turbine-powered helicopters guided by GPS. And the Arctic itself, its ice cover ravaged by global warming, is changing almost as rapidly as the technology.

I’m glad I saw it when I did.