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Summer 2003Year 2003 was a busy time in arctic exploring. Many Finns were heading northwards. In all there was 14 of us in three different expedition-teams. The boom was started by Dominick Arduin trying to reach The North Pole as a first woman alone. Her expedition was followed by Finnish parachute troops guild's (LJK) journey to the magnetic north pole.
Both expeditions failed at least partially - Arduin got in trouble a couple of weeks after beginning of her journey and LJK's group didn't reach the magnetic pole. Remarkable in LJK's expedition was that they spent 47 days on a glacier in arctic conditions and temperatures of even -40 C at the coldest. In the conditions of The Arctic, where very few Finns have been, even staying that long is an achievement. After these expeditions Petri Mäkelä and Petri Vuorenmaa did the third Finnish polar expedition crossing The Greenland on may 2003, which succeeded. The journey took 31 days and 670 km of skiing. It was just one month after our return from the Greenland expedition when I felt I had had enough of normal everyday living and called my mate Petri Vuorenmaa asking the question: "Where then?" I had been thinking about places where we could go next; we had visited Greenland and Iceland, so the next places should be The Poles, Siberia, Alaska, Northern Canada or Svalbard. Because Svalbard had been in our discussions earlier, I suggested that we should give some fresh meat to the polar bears travelling to their playground in distant Norway. His answer was "Yes" without hesitation. Getting the other participants was not a problem. Some were long-time friends and some we met by coincidence. After one test-trip and two meetings there was five of us: Vesa Luomala, Seppo Virtanen, Sami Nytorp, Olli-Pekka Lahti and me. (As it later turned out Petri Vuorenmaa could not join the expedition after all, because his new employer didn't like the idea of him having a full months leave so soon after he joined the company. His absence is a great loss to me personally). In addition to us five, there's also two guys keeping contacts, updating web-site and taking care of the logistics: Jami Kangasoja and Heikki Lindgren. Fall 2003Our knowledge about Svalbard was based on the shared experience of the previous expeditions, like LJK's trip to Newtontoppen and a book "On 110 years old footseps of Nordenskiöld", written by Eero Keskinen. We needed to know about polar bears, glaciers of Svalbard, circumstances on our route etc. Luckily we got in touch with Priitta Pöyhtäri, a local guide, and she promised to provide us with all the information we needed. Priitta has been living in Svalbard for years and has spent long periods of time in the wilderness -this way we got a same kind of source of information as Pentti Kronqvist was on our Greenland expedition.
Arrangements of our expedition went ahead so quickly that we would have been able to start our expedition on spring 2004 already, but we wanted to have time to make our group solid and we didn't want to do things in a hurry. Our first meeting was on November 2003, where we counted the budget, approx. 3000€/person including equipment. We also thought that this kind of project might be interesting enough to make it public. We also agreed that the "test trip" would take place on February 2004 and on our next meeting on may 2004 everyone should know will they participate to the Svalbard expedition or not.
© 2004-2005 Svalbard 2005 retki |
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