Now for some more photos, we start at the beginning. Our flight into Raven was purely for our put-in which was a good thing as we did a good job filling the plane. Transferring the pallate to sleds was a times consuming task. The flight is only 45 min to Raven. Since Raven had just been put in 24 hrs ago, our landing was essentially open field, so pretty bumpy.
We finished by 8 pm but then had to finish setup of the GPS base station which took another hour. The base station remains stationary in Raven and provides corrections that can be applied to the roving GPS (on snowmobile) to provide sub-meter horizontal and vertical accuracy. We finally departed at 9pm to drive through the night and into the wind. Our strategies of how to tie down sled loads (we called strapology) were still in development and we had to stop frequently to improve our strapology. The tippyness of the Nansens became apparent quickly.
We made good progress the second day with smoother ground.Saddle was gained on the second day. Saddle is the site of an automatic weather station and is the primary topographic saddle between the north and south domes of the Greenland Icesheet. This night was spectacular. We had a full moon rising with the setting sun opposite. At over 7500 ft, Saddle is the highest point along the traverse. Temps dropped to below -30 degrees C.
On the third day things really began to flatten out and we were able to make much better time. The Siglin sleds proved extraordinarily stable even at high speed. Each sled can haul 1000s of pounds and several sleds can easily be chained together. In this case we also carried an extra Siglin on top of another for one of the snowmachines waiting at ACT10-B.
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