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22.3
Location: Peera On the road at last! We (Pete and Vesa) left Tampere at 19.00, the others of our group will follow on wednesday. We packed and checked our sledges once more before departure to make sure that everything that we are going to need in next four weeks was there. The drive to Peera went nicely, mainly talking about this trip. We saw the first marks of dawn at four o´clock in the morning. That was the time when we started to feel quite tired. We had a rest of one hour that Pete spent in an acrobatic position taking a nap. When it came time to go forward, he just turned the engine on and continued the driving all without stretching. Quite a monkey-man, I tell you. We arrived to Peera at midday and it wasn't long until we got a room and now we are setting GPS-coordinates on our GPS equipment. The weather is nice and everything is fine with us! 23.3
Location: Longyearbyen Now we got the views! The mountains near the capital of Svalbard seem like the ones we've been looking at the photos. You can see mine tunnel holes on the mountain sides and cable tracks following the mountain walls. The weather surprised us at the moment we arrived. The wind has a significant effect with only -8 Celsius degrees. We were on a walk to Governor's office to arrange the permits etc. and when we were walking back from there, our faces were freezing and talking was difficult. This day started nicely with a coffee that Peera's owner served to us. In the morning after breakfast we headed to Tromssa and on the way we phoned a radio report. Jami was waiting for us by the Scandic Hotel of Tromssa, where he got earlier. We continued straight away to airport's freight terminal where we left all our equipment. Luckily our freight costs were only 6000 crowns instead of estimated 10.000 crowns. The flight to here took only two hours. The city is quite lively, with supermarket and all the things. Surprisingly, when we think how far north we are. This evening Priitta will show us some photos from up there, and maybe we go for a pizza in the end of the day. Until tomorrow! 24.3
Location: Longyearbyen Old crew together again! Sepe, Sami and OP arrived this afternoon with the sledges and weapons. Then began the phase that I always love so much: playing with the stuff! I thought that I had arranged everything already to the sledge following the advise of my stepfather:"Everything in its time, everything in its place". I had slight argues with him, when I was a teenager, conserning the (dis)order of my room. If I had lost some item, he always used this phrase. Well, today I had to rearrange my well arranged sledge totally in the search of a cap that I bought for Sami from Helsinki. I couldn't find it anywhere and I had to unload all the items from my sledge. At last I thought of looking around and there it was in Sami's head. I had put it in his sledge already in Tampere and forgot it. Yesterday we arranged the permits and transportations (well, they were arranged a long time beforehand, but the last things). Everything has gone well and people are very friendly. To one who has grown up in Helsinki it's weird to meet this kind of friendliness. Priitta, for example, has helped us unselfishly in all practicalities. We have heard many conceptions of polar bears, as many as there are people in here, so we have to trust in the information we have got earlier and follow our own noses. We think that our alarming system and equipment is adequate. Tomorrow comes the zero-hour, when Johan Sletten comes to pick us from his office at 9.00 am. We hope that we will be able to give our next update from the glaciar. Let's get back to the issue tomorrow. Have a nice Easter to all of you! The group has everything fine! V.L. 25.3
Location: N 78.39.45 E 17.16.26 On the glaciar, at last. My day started at about 2.00 am, rolling on my bed and thinking of this journey. It was the last night indoors for many weeks. New day dawned as clear and windless, a dream weather. The first step of the day was a snowmobile-ride to Gipsdalen. Our original plan to start from Billefjorden wasn't possible because of poor ice-condition. One driver on our snowmobile-safari was a finnish student, Tuomas, who was called to cover for a regular driver because of illness. We are grateful to him for his help. All of us were wearing almost all personal clothing on a ride, and it was really necessary for a six-hour ride. When we were dropped on our starting point, we were so cold that we thought to take the first meters immediately. First down- then uphill, as so often in our lives too. Almost straight away a view down to valley opened in front of us, where locates an abandoned miner-village, Pyramiden. There you can find abandoned houses, in the library there are books, and in a bar there is a working grand piano. Maybe we have time to visit there on our way back. Living here is not yet going smoothly, but it will improve as the time goes on. Even that we are high up on the glacier, bear-alarming cords surround our campsite. A good portion of rice-cassarole (what is that?), with 100 grams of butter is waiting for me, so I'll quit writing from this day and start packing it to my stomach. 'Till tomorrow, everything is fine with us! V.L. 26.3
Location: N 78 43.78 E 17 30.33 We didn't get on the way until 10 am, even we woke up at 7 am. It should take only two hours to get on the way, but it takes time to get used to living this way and develop the routines. Everyone had lots of expectations in the morning -this days mission was to ascent slowly to 1000m altitude. We didn't think, though, that our sledges weight 100kg instead of usual 50kg. Well, it wasn't long until we came across with crevassed area with snow bridges and deep crevasses. It was a hard job to get everyone over it with 100kg sledges, but with hard work at lots of sweat we made it. We don't have resistances here, just steep slopes and then a bit steeper slopes. All the day we were skiing in total white-out. We are travelling in the middle of the most beautiful sceneries of the world, but we can't see them! White-out is such a treacherous thing -when you can't see anything but white around you, you easily loose your balance and soon you might found yourself on your knees, humbled yourself to kiss the snowfield. During the evening we decided to stop at 6 pm. Eight hours of work is enough with such a hard ascent at this point. Our camp building routines begin with using avalanche probes to find out if there are crevasses in the area where we plan to set our tents. Today I found a crevasse in the middle of our planned camping site. It had two-meter thick snow cover so we decided to mark it with probes and set up our tents. Macaroni meal is waiting, so we'll continue tomorrow! P.M. 27.3
Location: N 78.49.74 E 17.23.28 Oh boy, what a day! Funny freezing rain had covered all our stuff with a pleasant thin ice during last night. It gave us hard times in the morning when we were trying to pack our sledges. It snowed in the morning and visibility was zero meters. We've been skiing for two days without seeing anything but white! It would be nice to see something, because they say that there is nice scenery in here. All I know that we've been ascending a lot and we are skiing along some kind of saddle, which figure we can see at times sticking out of fog. Somebody insisted that it shouldn't rain in Svalbard and it should be very dry climate here. In three of five days we've been here it has snowed. It is very enjoyable, because trailing a 100kg sledge in 30cm of new snow is extremely hard. Good thing is that there is five of us opening the track. I feel pitty for that poor Czech, who is skiing alone in the same area. He has to open his own track, if he won't find our track. After eight pulls we ended up on this ridge and we are having a high-quality time in our tents at the moment. It's calm outside and we are hoping that tomorrow we'll see some sceneries and there would be crusted snow in the morning. So, untill tomorrow, the group has everything fine! V.L. 28.3Location: N 78.55.86 E 17.19.90 In the small hours I woke up and felt a bit cold. No wonder, because last night it
was under minus 30 degrees of Celsius. Then I rememberd an old aphorism: "freeze
tames a naturist", which didn't make me laugh then. Another thing with hard freeze
is that vapour of your breath condenses into tent's roof and then snows from there on
your face. And again comes to mind that with this money I could sleep in a hotel in
Cuba, or some other warm place.
At night we experienced hard winds and we thought that it would produce crusted snow. Well, we were wrong -the only "advantage" of frost was that it felt like pulling the sledges on 30cm of sand. A blessing in disguise was that ahead of us was an eight-person group opening the track. Otherwise our daytrip would have been much shorter. We thought to catch them and negotiate of opening the track in turns, but they were skiing so fast that we weren't able to catch them. Our explanation is that they have equipment for two weeks in their sledges and we have the equipment for four weeks. Well, at least they are heading towards Newtontoppen. By the way, the sceneries in here are marvellous! Glacier and mountain peaks all around of us, as far as you can see. Tomorrow we try to reach the basecamp of Newtontoppen and on the day after tomorrow we'll try to top it. We are trailing behind of our original schedule by one day, but there's no reason to be worried about it. The weather has been tougher than we expected. Well, that's about it so far. I got to start eating that macaroni-meal of the day (again)! V.L. 29.3Location: N 79 00.10 E 17 15.20 During last night the wind and snowfall made our skiing difficult. Now there is 50
cm of new snow. It´s quite hard to understand what this means, because when we were
in Longyearbyen, one local was totally amazed when there was a couple of snowflakes
descending slowly from the sky. Well, maybe all the snow of Svalbard will fall over
us at the moment. We don't still need to worry about our progression. Even that
snails would laugh to our speed, we are still in schedule. According to our previous
plans, we were ment to top Newtontoppen today. If the weather is fine in the
morning, we will start climbing it.
I suppose that there will be a change in snow-condition. At the moment it´s blowing hard from north and it hardens the surface of the snow. We have done some load-sharing, taking a couple of kilos from OP, Sami and Vesa. There's one minus though in this sharing -my sledge grew 11 kilos. Well, we should continue with these things that we have. Our main goal is 80 degrees and there´s only one degree left. Today we met the group that we were following yesterday, Belgians as it showed out. They were just doing their morning routines when we passed their camp on our second leg of the day. They are also on their way to this mountain. We were opening the track for them for a couple of hours before they reached us. From that on the we opened the track in turns. We crossed 79N in international spirit -"seventynine completed". The Belgian group was also trailing two days behind of their schedule because of this snow condition. Our group has been in good physical fit so far. Some blisters, Sami has numbness in his toe, my Achilles tendon creaks in ascents. Vesa has been fine -he has been only dirty, and I can see that he just washed himself. Strange behaviour! OP is physically fine and mentally as he use to be. Sepe, though, doesn't have his beard anymore. Everytime he rips ice off his face, a bunch of beard comes with it. We´ll be in touch! P.M. 30.3
Location: N79.00.10 E 17.15.20 Some news at last. We have reached our first goal: Newtontoppen. In the morning,
when we had a talk about going or not, anything looked good. Clear night with
northern lights was gone, instead we had gray sky with a slight snowfall. Some
mountain walls loomed in the horizon and we decided to go for it. We are not
returning here very soon, if ever, so it was worth trying.
We left our campsite at 10.40am, following GPS coordinates in the mist over the glaciers. Sepe stayed in our camp. Already in the beginning we were skiing such a steep slope sidewards that I thought if it was wise to continue, but we went on. I didn't say anything aloud. Soon the inclination evened out as we got to glacier of Chydenius. Half-way of the glacier was again a GPS-spot, where we had to turn right towards Netontoppen. The mountain itself had been there all the time, but we hadn't seen it yet. It wasn't long until we were climbing up the glaciers. Of course we were using skins in our skis and heel-lifters to make ascent easier. We were observing crevasses all the time, but didn't see any around of us. At last, after slow progression, we reached the top at 3pm. On the top GPS showed altitude of 1720m, the highest peak of Svalbard. Officially it's height is 1717m. We took a couple of photos and headed down almost immediately. It wasn't too easy either. I skied downhill slowly with GPS in my hand until we were back on Chydenius glacier. When we got back to our "home-valley" of Trebrepasset, we noticed that there was 50 cm of new snow again and snowfall continues. There was snow up there too, but not this much. In the morning we might be buried in snow.
Sepe had spent his day dreaming of warmer and drier circumstances. He had made coffee and then dreamed again. Maybe he dreamt of someone trailing his sledge for him. Well, in the morning we'll see how deep is our track. We have lots of kilometers left. And in the end; thanks for all those messages that you have sent us via Jami. It's kind of melancholic to read those, but it's giving us strength. Ok, take care folks, time to quit. P.M. 31.3
Location: N 79.05.25 E 17.13.56 Hello again. First of all, thanks for all those messages. They really cheer us up in these expanses of snow and ice. We can't reply to all of you personally, but we try to give answers to your questions in these diary updates. This day started as well as others; 50cm of fresh snow. First we had to dig
ourselves out to liberty. This day's legs were punishing, even we went downhill. We
continued with approved method, which means five minutes leading per person and
after five minutes the leader steps aside and continues as a last skier. This way
it's possible to progress even those 10km that we made with eight legs. The weather
has been so bad all the time, that we have to prioritize things and forget
Perriertoppen. Maybe we can use the time that we save with this process, in
Pyramiden on our way back. Especially now that we have OP with us, who has declared
himself as a governor of Pyramiden.
We have had lots of questioning about our menu. Here it is, per person. The morning starts with a liter of porridge, where you put 50 grams of butter and some crispbread with that. During skiing we have 100g of chocolate, 50g of cookies, 150g of hot chocolate powder, 80g of Nature's Best power drink powder, and 7,5dl of mash-soup (potato flakes in hot water). For the evening one liter of cassarole with 50g of butter and 100g of cheese and some crispbread again. This diet will do it for one day. That's all by now, we'll get back to issue tomorrow. We have 24 degrees below zero
at the moment and north wind. We are hoping a better weather for tomorrow and maybe
at last crusted snow to make our moving easier, towards 80N, our main goal.
Everything is fine with us! V.L.
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