Wk 03 Nuts!
Location: 41º9'N 86º6'W
Sawyer, Michigan, United States
Weather Conditions: Sunny, 30° F (-1°C)
...Going nuts with excitement! Packing nuts! We are nuts about what is going on in classrooms around the world. That just about sums up week three of GoNorth! Fennoscandia 2008. On Tuesday morning Timber was rolling around on his back, legs up in the air and Peto's bark was cutting though the noise of 30 amped-up Polar Huskies! Domino was flying through the air with long strides circling and circling while his eyes, along with that of the other 18 adult Polar Huskies, were fixated on the dog truck. It's time to go! | ||||||||||||
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| Just like a house dog can sense when the family is going somewhere, the Polar Huskies can sense the intensity as we get ready. Every move we make is being monitored very closely, and hearing the sound of the door opening on the dog truck even a quarter-mile away from the dog yard gets the Polar Huskies howling. They know the drill; being let loose one at a time they sprint to the boxes where Paul stands to load them up. As they are all checked and counted one last time the dog truck pulls out of Expedition Basecamp. The GoNorth! Fennoscandia 2008 adventure learning expedition is on the road and underway! | |||||||||||
| There is a lot of 'checking' going on when it comes to planning and executing an Arctic adventure learning expedition. Have you ever gone camping or even just traveled somewhere for a day? Multiply that by a factor of preparing to travel on the land for more than 80 days, by dog team that is, on another continent. Frankly, it is a huge undertaking. In last week's chat, Paul was asked what he finds to be the most stressful about an Arctic expedition? When the rest of the team members would have responded maybe polar bears, open water or setting up the tent in a 60-mile an hour storm, Paul promptly answered, "getting the paperwork and permits required lined up correctly." Huh? Well, such is the reality of Paul's role as the expedition leader. Though the rest of us certainly do what we can to support the effort and make it glide as smoothly as possible, we are not facing that challenge on a daily basis. Day in and day out for months and even years on end there is so much to consider before the day arrives when we finally stand at the location of the Expedition starting point. Getting this adventure learning expedition off the ground and to our starting point in Sweden has been no less of a challenge! | |||||||||||
"It just doesn't stop!" says Paul. The most difficult part is the constant uncertainty. Answers to questions we started asking months and months ago, still change on us daily. "As late as yesterday, I was on the phone checking up on the shipment of our cargo to Sweden. I was told that the cargo will now be loaded onto a Korean Airlines instead of Scandinavian Airlines as we had it set up, which means some minor differences in regulations. I was then told that the cargo actually will not be shipped to Stockholm, Sweden where we need it and where Mille and I along with the Polar Huskies are set to land on Wednesday morning. No! Our sleds, gear and the food we are allowed to bring will actually ship to Oslo, the capitol of Norway! From there it will be trucked across the mountains to the airport in Stockholm, Sweden for us to pick it up. While I was being told this, Greg, who I have now worked with for months at SAS Cargo stated 'and you will still have 16 dogs?' To my great horror, in the background I then hear, 'There is no way we can ship 16 large dogs all at once!' Imagine my heart sinking into my stomach. Greg and the other gentleman get into a longer discussion as Greg reminds him of all the meetings where this has already been discussed and permissions had been granted. Finally, I hear, 'Oh yeah, well, I guess we can' and I take a deep breath of relief." |
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Speaking of the food; planning the food for this year's expedition has been challenging. As is the case with most countries and in particular between continents (traveling to North America included) there are very strict restrictions on the food products that can be brought in and out of a country if you are not actually 'importing and exporting.' This is, of course, at least in part to limit diseases that can easily be brought from one continent to the next in that manner. Really, it is just like how the early explorers, traveling by ship for example, would carry diseases and pests on board the ships and at times causing entire communities of Native peoples to be devastated from disease in the regions they traveled to. One example of this are the epidemic diseases, like smallpox, brought to North America by Christopher Columbus when he 'discovered' America, which then spread like wildfire among the Native Americans killing millions of people. |  | |||||||||||
 | The Swedish regulations are rather cumbersome, but basically as long as we do not try to bring anything that has meat, milk products, egg products or potato products along, we are good to go. Mmm, well, that is certainly easier said than done. The facts are these: each team member has to consume 5 to 6,000 calories a day to get enough energy to keep warm and stay healthy skiing and working for 12-14 hours a day, days on end. That is a lot of calories! The normal recommended daily calorie intake for an adult human being is 2 to 3,000 calories! The kind of calories we need are mostly from fat, because it is 'slow burning' and that is what we need in the cold for the days of work and staying warm at night while we sleep. We get the majority of our calories from butter, cheese, and whole milk that get put into everything we eat. We also eat salami, sausages, bacon, chocolate in one form or another, gorp, oh... and nuts. | |||||||||||
If you work through that list, it is really only the nuts we are allowed to bring! Besides from that, we can tell you that we have had to read a lot of food labels and the majority of foods have either eggs or some sort of milk product like 'whey' in them! From many of the instant oatmeal packages to candy bars and even the spaghetti sauce. Try it for youself! Go food shopping and take notice just how difficult it is to avoid these products! Given that each of us normally eat a stick of butter a day along with five ounces of cheese, this year's packing has been difficult! Also, the cheese and butter is an important safety measure and we always carry extra of these because we can share this supply with the Polar Huskies if need be! Therefore, we had to find a way to get butter and cheese, and preferably without us having to go to the local supermarket in Sweden to purchase some 200 sticks of butter (very expensive!). Mille called her Mom, Elsa, in Copenhagen, Denmark and asked if she could ask some of her friends who are in the restaurant business to purchase all of what was missing on the list! Elsa did and she is meeting the team in Stockholm, Sweden with the goods. That said, during the all-day-food-pack-out on Thursday, we packed a lot of extra nuts... |
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With all these regulations we also cannot bring the dog food. Missing much of the food for both two- and four-legged team members lightens the load of what is being shipped. When Paul and crew arrived in Chicago on Thursday to hand over the gear and equipment for cargo there were 73 pieces to be shipped ranging from skies and tents to bags with spare rope, screwdrivers and harnesses. All together it weighed 1,234 lb. or 561 kg of which about 300 lb. or 129 kg is food. Oh, and toilet paper - 32 rolls to be exact! | ||||||||||||
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| Everything we travel with is actually fairly lightweight and given that we need to fit it all onto the two sleds to be pulled by the Polar Huskies, this is very important! Fully loaded, we expect each sled to weigh about 900 - 1,000 lb. Some of the heavier equipment we carry relates to the field research, such as the tube and tools used to gather snow for snow water equivalent measurements, which is part of the GoNorth! mission on the trail as we work with NASA in collecting data to develop climate models. Adding the most weight to the sleds is probably everything we need to carry with us to report back to you! Computers, satellite communication systems, satellite phones, cameras, solar panels, generator, cords and all-important gadgets that make adventure learning from the field all possible! | |||||||||||
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| But then, that is why we are heading out there to begin with - to communicate and share our experiences with you! Make sure to check out this week's photo journal to see more images from GoNorth! classrooms. "What goes on in the classrooms are so incredibly inspiring to us." says Mille. "In one of the two of this past week's chats, I was asked how we get through the tough times and frankly the students are what pushes me always." Join this week's upcoming chat to talk about Arctic Exploration with best selling author Jennifer Niven on Tuesday, February 26th at 1 PM CST. | |||||||||||
During the chat there was one question we were not sure how to answer. It was whether, if we had been on the expedition trail in Fennoscandia, if we would have been able to see the eclipse we saw here in North America? Aaron contacted our GoNorth! expert Dan Dix at the Weather Channel in Atlanta to see if he could help us with the correct answer to that great question! It turns out Mr. Dix was out that night taking some pretty awesome pictures - and he indeed knows the answer: Yes, the lunar eclipse was also seen in Fennoscandia though it was not quite as spectacular as in North and South America because these locations were turned towards the moon, thus being in the best position for the sky show! In Fennoscandia and the rest of Europe, Africa and a part of western Asia, they could also see the eclipse, but it took place in hours just before sunrise on the morning of February 21. |  | |||||||||||
Have you had a chance to experience the new Google Earth Sky to explore the universe? Made any space discoveries? Locate the North Star on your night sky? Share it with the rest of us in 01: Explore Zone. | ||||||||||||
In just a few days we will again be turning north - well, north and west really! For now the Polar Huskies are in Sawyer, Michigan at Paul's family farm, which was the location of the Polar Husky Expedition Basecamp for years. The stop will be brief because early Tuesday morning is when it will be time to load the sixteen Polar Huskies going on the expedition into their boxes on the dog truck and to drive to Ohare Airport in Chicago. Here Mille will join Paul and the Polar Huskies as everything is loaded into the belly of the plane to depart for Stockholm, Sweden. We guarantee you - it will be nuts! |
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 | With all the talk of food and travel, this week's two Polar Husky Superstars are two very different dogs... But they are both a bit nuts - about food and traveling. Lipton, this week's first Polar Husky Superstar, is an incredible traveler. Lipton is the largest Polar Husky in the kennel. These days that may be contested by his best buddy Baffin, but that is in part because we are very cautious to keep Lipton trim and fit at all times. Otherwise, he has a tendency to get lazy, very lazy. That laid-back attitude can at times be a challenge on the trail where it can take some negotiation to convince Lipton to put his incredible power into that harness. But, it also means Lipton loves to hang out with people. The more the merrier, and that laid back attitude is just wonderful when it comes to events and happenings. Nothing can really rattle him in a 'city setting' and he is at his best lying on his side swamped by kids. Now, part of why we consciously have to watch Lipton's waist line is simply because, that besides from people he also loves food! Lipton was born the smallest in his litter and he was rather lethargic about getting to the milk at first as a newborn puppy. That all changed once we taught "little Lippy" how to eat from a bottle. Soon Lippy was found sleeping in the food pan on top of the food, and with a new habit that he still has today: laying down with the big pan of food between his legs to make very sure no one gets the idea that he would possibly share! | |||||||||||
The only other Polar Husky we have ever seen lay down to eat is this week's second Polar Husky Superstar, Kodiak. Unlike Lipton, Kodiak is not particularly food crazed and it is not about guarding his food. That's just Kodiak and one of his many funny little habits that make him so unique. Since a tiny puppy he has liked to lay on his side eating - only raising his head to take a bite out of the pan! That might make one think that Kodiak is laid back and of a somewhat lazy nature too. However, that is where the similarities with Lipton ends. Kodiak is intense. He is the smallest male in the kennel, but he has a working heart, energy, a drive and mental strength to match any Polar Husky. Kodiak can seem aloof, even shy or at least without much eagerness for affection. This is not the case, however. Kodiak just doesn't care much about 'pushing-matches' for attention. But he loves attention and he loves working. He might be small, but he has a very solid body with plenty power and drive to move it. We never predicted it to happen, but today Kodiak has worked his way into the position of being a point dog! The team rarely stops without Kodiak being hard at work getting the team going, constantly launching into the air - simply going nuts! |  | |||||||||||
