They needed just another two days!
Published on 27.04.2009 - General Info
Sebastian Copeland and Keith Heger didn't quite make it to the North Pole in time. They were two days and under a hundred kilometres short of their goal. But time waits for no man -and certainly not Boyarsky's logistics team: the final MI 8 flight had to be made by 26th April and no later.
We have already mentioned this on numerous occasions: because the ice conditions have altered so dramatically in the area around the North Pole in recent years, Viktor Boyarsky decided to close down Barneo base a good two weeks earlier than in previous years -for obvious safety reasons. And this year, the base closed on 27th April.
But two expeditions managed to reach the Pole by 25th April (from Ward Hunt, of course), because the final airlift out aboard the MI 8 helicopter had been flagged for the 26th, the day before the base closed. The two successful expeditions in question were the two Americans, John Huston and Tyler Fish, and the trio from the 'Peary-Henson Centennial Expedition 2009', consisting of Lonnie Dupré, Stuart Smith and Maxime Chaya.
Unfortunately, Sebastian Copeland and Keith Heger needed another two days. Two more little days. On 25th April, their position was 89° 07' 88" N / 36° 36' 45" W, or about a hundred kilometres from their goal. But it has to be said that their final few days out on the sea-ice were the most exhausting of the entire trip.
On Tuesday 21st March, Sebastian wrote: "Hunger and a lack of visibility is how I will remember this day which was, I have to say, the hardest of the entire expedition. It all started with dense cloud cover and a headwind of 40 km/h! ... A few hours after we set out, visibility was already pretty bad and it soon became virtually nil, with a strengthening wind. After three hours of slogging on like this, and after dreaming of lovely hot sausages and when this horror would finally end, we threw in the towel. Our progress was too slow and I told myself that it would be better to conserve our strength to continue later in better conditions and be able to march more quickly, than to carry on in this pea-souper. 7 hours and a half had only taken us 5 nautical miles (9.2 km). So we stopped. And now that we have been in our tent for three hours, I see that we have already drifted at least a mile to the south. I have to admit, it's been a tough day..."
We have not had any further news since the teams were choppered out to Barneo.
