Arnaud: “It’s the toughest going we have ever known…”
Published on 19.05.2009 - General Info
Charles Hedrich and Arnaud Tortel have really been in it up to their necks in recent days. They don't know which obstacle to tackle next, so frequent and virtually insurmountable have their problems been...
But there was some apparent good news on 16th May: the negative drift of the sea-ice that has been constantly pushing the two Frenchmen north finally -and almost miraculously, we would add- came to a halt. Good news? Not really. Because for the past few days, the terrain that Arnaud and Charles have had to contend with has been absolutely dreadful.
We have to say that it is quite unusual for us to see explorers pitting their wits against the sea-ice like this at the end of the season (the most recent ones were the Belgian explorers, Alain Hubert and Dixie Dansercoer during their crossing of the Arctic in 2007). All of which means that not much is known about the condition of the sea-ice as we approach the end of May.
But now we do know something (or at least we have a good idea): it's worse than hell itself. On 17th May, Arnaud told his wife Lycia, who receives news from the two men twice a week: "It's the toughest going we have ever known..." Which translates as, one: the ice is so broken up that Arnaud and Charles are having to travel wearing wetsuits. Two: the walls of ice, hummocks and compression zones that stand up on end amid the sea-ice are sometimes over 3 metres tall. Three: they are barely covering three or four kilometres in a single day. Four: the ice is thin and treacherous. Five: Arnaud took an unscheduled bath the other day, although no serious harm was done... As he reported: "The areas of ice are completely broken and smashed up. We had to convert our two sledges into a catamaran to be able to cross the shattered compression blocks. Impossible for us to pull our own sledges in fact the two of us had to push them. And we had barely got past these great buildings of piled ice than we had to cross stretches of open water. So we had to march all day long wearing our wetsuits."
All of which indicates that it's truly hellish out there for the two men. What's more, they are still 360 kilometres from the Greenland coast. And the ice waiting for them ahead in the immediate vicinity of the coast (we've been looking at satellite maps) is more broken up than ever. Not to say impassable...
