The following updates from Terje and Christian are phoned in via the sattelite phone they’ve brought with them. They leave their messages to me in Norwegian, and I then translate to english before I post here. So if you notice a sudden drop in the language skills, this is the reason for it. Also I’m not certain about all the technical terms, so I might mess that up a bit. Just wanted to let you guys know! Also I’m touched that so many, even people who have never met them, are following their journey and wishing them well!

P.S.
Remember that all blogpostings are about the day before they are posted here on the blog.

-Clara (Terje’s wife)

Day 1 – Into the icefall:

We drove out to Point 660 today at 13.00. At first we had to carry the pulks over a huge moraine. This took about one and a half hour, and was quite tiring.

We walked for two hours in a challenging icefall. The terrain is like a maze made of ice. The walls of the maze range from 1 to 15 meter in height, and this makes it difficult to get a general view of the landscape, and we had only 100- 150 meters clear sight at any given time. At the bottom of the maze meltwater formed small rivers and streams that we had to wade through.

We find it exciting to finally be at the inland ice of Greenland, and we have great expectations about the experience ahead of us. We’ve decided to take it nice and easy for the next two to three days, to allow both the body and mind to get used to this new routine and environment.

The evening was spent repairing Terje’s gaiters, since they didn’t endure the hardships of the icefall. For a while we had to take off the skis, since it was quite steep. When Terje stepped through some ice and into the slush it was to much for the fastening mechanism, and the gaiters came loose. Christian wears gaiters that are vulcanized onto the shoes, and this appears to be the only good enough solution. Terje fixed his gaiters by using small screws (treskruer) to fasten them, and this will have to do for now.

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