The expedition

The expedition took a total of 20 days to complete from put-in to pull-out at Raven. That means 20 days of camping in sub-zero temperatures, 20 days without showers and 22 GB of photos. All objectives were completed however one major obstacle remains. The cores could not be extracted via snowmobile because the ice will quickly disintegrate from the bumps. Thus the core have to be extracted via twin otter. The core extraction was in our original and combined core extraction flights with repositioning flights thus saving $$$. Our current situation forces us to bring a twin otter up from Canada to do the final extraction. Flight timetables, weather and money will make this a difficult task to accomplish but we aim to complete retro flights by the 20th staging Jet fuel out of Raven and caching everything there before returning it to Kanger. The cores are burried under 2-3 feet of snow to protect from melting. However spring is coming on fast and we are uncertain how long the cores can last. I have a few photos from the expedition below.

We put in to Raven at about noon. Here our pallate was just released and we are preparing to drive the snowmachines off. At this moment we discovered that one snowmachine was missing its keys, and another machine's key broke off when turned it. We were able to hotwire the one machine and extract the broken key in the other and get all machines off quickly.


Dissassembling the pallate, building the sleds and and setting up our GPS took longer than expected. We left Raven at 9 pm and drove through the night. We saw the best aurora of my life on the way and by the time the time we began to get into bed at about 3:30 the sun was just about ready to come back up.


We towed equipment using two types of sleds. The traditional Nansen is constructed entirely of wood, rope and twine-no metal. Unfortunately these sleds were prone to tipping which can have consequences. This tip threw Jason from his machine and broke the sled but we were able to field repair. Next year we will only use the more stable Siglin Sleds.

After three long days of driving, usually into the night. Jason, Clement and Evan arrived at ACT10-B with Terry and Rick. The united team prepared to advance to the lowest, site A to drill in the data void.

The drill was working great and weather was getting warm but still no major problems. If it gets too warm the ice on the drill melts then freezing, seizing up the motor. Cold temps are a must.




Core quality was good but the huge quantity of ice layers was indicative of heavy melt. We can only hope Joe's insoluble dating can deal with the melt.

With ACT10-A compete we began our return completing GPR all of the way from ACT10-A to Raven, a total of over 250km. GPR surveying meant long days, as much as 11 hours of driving at 10km/hr. Over this period, the first days of our 5 day storm began to lay down close to 2 feet of snow.


Drilling ACT10-C was not hampered by the snowfall but instead by temperatures close to 0 degrees C. We drilled from 7-10am and from 6-11pm. As we finished the precipitation and wind subsided.





The leg from ACT10-C to Saddle was 80 km and too far to GPR in a single day. Clement and Evan left C a day early to camp along the way.


Clement and Evan stopped shortly before sunset. The snow fallen earlier had melted in near 0C temps midday and then refroze. Ropes, clothes, sleeping bags, etc. were all frozen solid (literally).

Three days later the team made it successfully back to Raven having achieved all goals!!! We were rewarded by at tour of the DYE-2 radar station. A remanat of the Cold War, the DYE stations were built as an early warning station for ballistic missiles coming from Russia. The station is 130 ft tall, and was entirely self contained, housing over 100 employees. To avoid removal costs the military pulled some fancy paperwork and deserted the station in the 80s so quickly that half eaten sandwiches were found in the cafeteria. We went inside. This is certainly the most creepy place I have been. More photos later.

Finally after waiting out a 4 day blizzard at Raven our Herc-pullout flight finally arrived on the coldest day yet. At 9 am when we left it had warmed up to -28 C.