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Day Sixty-Five - Photo Gallery

Jul 24, 2009 Latitude: N 0° 00' | Longitude: W 0° 00'

Check out the photos from the expedition!

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Day Sixty-Four - Re-Acclimated to Home

Jun 25, 2009 Latitude: N 0° 00' | Longitude: W 0° 00'
"Despite muscles that are still a bit tired, Tyler and I are now pretty much fully re-acclimated to our normal lives at home. It took us about 2 1/2 weeks to gain back all the body weight we had lost on the expedition. Our stomachs are no longer complaining. We are sleeping fairly normally, although plenty of strange dreams about the expedition keep the emotions of our on-ice experience alive.

Following the media circus in early May, Tyler and I both took a few weeks away from the Victorinox North Pole '09 Expedition project to recuperate, rest, relax and reconnect fully with our loved ones.

Tyler is now back at work running the youth-at-risk (Intercept) program for Outward Bound in Ely, MN, where it is sometimes still 40°F during the daytime.

I am back in Chicago, where spring is also cooler than normal and where the play of my favorite baseball team the White Sox seems to be copying the weather.

This summer Tyler and I will write a book about the expedition, pursue a documentary film and do a lot of public speaking. Since our post-expedition lives will not be nearly as interesting as our lives on way to the North Pole, we will not be blogging very often.  Thanks for listening and more to some soon."

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Day Sixty-Three - The Long Road Home

Jun 10, 2009 Latitude: N 0° 00' | Longitude: W 0° 00'
"Good evening. This is Tyler calling in from Ely, Minnesota. I believe it is the 20th of May. I think so. Anyway, I wanted to title this blog, "The Long Road Home".

I thought I would fill people in on what it's like, actually, trying to get home and getting home after the North Pole expedition.

Well, coming home is not as easy as one might think. In fact getting there can take a long time, sometimes by design. It'd be easy to fly from the pole to Oslo and then the next day to Minneapolis. But thank goodness we didn't do that. That would have been shocking amongst other things. Well after the Fram event, John spent time with his family in Oslo and then he was off to Chicago for 8 hours before flying east again to New York. I journeyed over the border to Sweden, in the meantime, spending time with friends, family. And then eventually I flew to New York. And there we rendezvoused.

And then there were two exciting events. The TODAY Show with Kathy Lee and Hoda. and some, well the second event would be the really great food. It's pretty fun to eat anything you want when you can use the expedition and being in New York City as an excuse. We ate a variety: from stops in the Italian district to gourmet cupcakes to street vendor hotdogs. It was pretty fun. It was kind of like just fulfilling parts of the expedition that we weren't able to do. We talked about it a lot but all of a sudden there we could do it.

Well eventually John flew home to Chicago and I went off to upstate New York to be with family. About 3 days later I flew to Minnesota, spent an overnight with family, drove north, spent a day with friends along the way, and finally I was home in my house, in my bed for 24 hours before driving south again to Minneapolis for media and business for about three days. John and I were in the Twin Cities together. Interviews with the University of Minnesota for the Psychological research component of our expedition and there were TV appearances, yet to air, radio, and not to be overlooked, throwing out the first pitch for the Twins game. John is warming up for the White Sox - I believe that is this week.

John and I said good bye again in his car and he sped off to Chicago where, for all I know, he'll be for the foreseeable future. We meet again on occasional phone interviews and of course on the internet or when we call each other to see how we're doing.

So I'm back home. I went straight into work the next day for 6 days straight and now I've come out the other end and this is my first official day off and I can tell you it's not easy coming home. Expeditioners that go on long trips like we did; we are the sailors, soldiers or maybe the study abroad students. We leave home but the world continues without us. We return and we need to fit in to that world. In the meantime no one understands what we've done and I guess it would be wrong to expect that of them. Yet here we all are together trying to relate, both sides wanting to understand.

John and I left home in early February. So in some ways we've only been gone for a number of months but, considering each of our lives for the past 2 or 3years, we have been partially gone for much longer than that. People ask, "How does it feel to be home? Is it good to see your family? What did it feel like at pole? What's next? How do you top that? Are you gonna pull any tires this summer?" Well, the answer to the last question is easy: no. If you want any real answers to the rest of the questions, well those are difficult.

So, John and I are in transition. I think it's good it took us while to get home rather than taking the easy, quick flight home. We need to honor the experience by giving it space and by giving it time. We will continue to do this as we unpack, journal, answer questions, and figure out how to be in this new place called home. If the Arctic Ocean taught us anything it is, yes, to be optimistic but also to be patient and to be good to the people around us. And if we do this now, in the last steps of this journey, then we will feel as positive about this part of the expedition as we did in the first days, in the middle, and now at the end."

 

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Day Sixty-Two - Dreams Come True (Part 2)

May 13, 2009 Latitude: N 0° 00' | Longitude: W 0° 00'
Audio Transcript:

"This is John calling with the Week in Review, titled "Dreams Come True, Part Two." Tyler and I are back in the United States and enjoying our first few days at home. This blog will recount our final days in Oslo which contained two full circle "dream-come-true" moments, amongst others, but two significant ones. The first is the celebration at the Fram Museum, the origin of our company and inspiration in some way and the second is a wonderful meal at the Bergans of Norway headquarters where we fulfilled our dream of eating a fat boy burger.

The Fram Museum in Oslo which is set on Oslo Fjord is one of the most special places in the world for Tyler and I. This museum houses the polar ship Fram, spelled F-r-a-m, which was sailed by our polar heroes for Fridtjof Nansen, Otto Sverdrup, and Roald Amundsen of Norway and these historic figures undertook some of the most significant and successful polar explorations 100 years ago. And the way they went about approaching those massive challenges has been a huge inspiration to Tyler and I. Specifically we looked at several models of success in polar exploration history and then adapted those people's mental approaches to those challenges, i.e. preparation, Amundsen's look at details, and kind of standing on the shoulders of the existing polar exploration library of knowledge to form our own approach to getting to the North Pole on our Victorinox North Pole '09 Expedition.

The Fram Museum houses the entire ship, so this entire polar ship which is about 90-some feet long, maybe a bit longer, is inside a building. And it's open to the public and for special events, open to people like us where we invited our friends, families, sponsors, and some wonderful people who live in Norway to join us for a dinner and slideshow on the Fram. It was a special evening and Tyler and I really felt that the vibe of success was in the air, and it was something very special to stand and celebrate our success where our heroes had walked and sailed 100 years ago. Fram in Norwegian means forward, and of course, our company is Forward Expeditions, so there is no more perfect place to celebrate. We tried to do it nice and slowly because such huge events don't happen very often in our lives. And we were most happy as well to celebrate with the people who support us and that was one of the big thrills of arriving at the North Pole successfully on April 25th.

The next day Tyler and I drove out to Hokksund, Norway, about an hour outside of Oslo, to visit the headquarters of Bergans of Norway, our official performance outerwear sponsor and makers of excellent camping equipment as well. We talked about the equipment, talked about the expedition, and then went to fulfill our dreams of eating a Fat Boy burger for lunch, and to do so in the sun next to a babbling Norwegian river or creek was just a perfect setting. The Fat Boy burger, if you don't remember, is a huge half-pound burger, lettuce, tomato, onions, mayonnaise, a little catsup, bacon, a fried egg, topped with onion rings (forgot that one little detail earlier), and it has been one of the objects of our food fantasies during the expedition which has been quite intense and all-consuming at times. So we made a goal of getting to the North Pole and then going to get a fat boy burger and relaxing and tasting different foods, and to do so was just a big thrill and a lot of laughs, so that was good fun.

Coming next - Tyler and I return to the States. We'll talk about the transition back to our home lives, which is not as easy as one might think. OK, thanks for listening and Tyler and I will talk to you next week. Bye, bye."
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Day Sixty-One - Dreams Come True (Part 1)

May 4, 2009 Latitude: N 0° 00' | Longitude: W 0° 00'

Audio Transcript:

Hi, everybody. This is John calling in from Oslo, Norway on May 1st, 2009. Well it has been what Tyler and I can safely say it's been one of the most intense weeks of our lives. Last Saturday, although the days are quite blurry, we arrived at our destination of the expedition the North Pole at 5:30pm CST, almost exactly 10 hours before our April 26th deadline of being picked up at the North Pole. The last 66 hours, or roughly 4 days of the expedition, Tyler and I slept only 3 hours. What had happened, which is still quite emotional to think about, is that around day April 21st, Day 51 or 52 of the expedition, Tyler and I realized that the southerly drift of 6 to 8 nautical miles per 24 hours was just too much for our current travel schedule and that we needed to do something extreme if we were going to succeed in our mission of becoming the first Americans to ski unsupported to the North Pole.

So, after a whole lot of deliberation, quite a bit of stress and a little bit of fear of failure which always comes with expeditions and the kind of "do or die" moments on expeditions as that moment was, Tyler and I decided to travel for 12 hours, put up the tent and then sleep for 1 hour and have a meal and then about 4 hours later continue on our way toward the North Pole.  So that's roughly 12 hours of travel and 3 or 4 hours in the tent with only 1 of those hours sleeping.

Our food resources, which we had rationed just perfectly, held out and we were actually able to up our calorie intake to 10,000 calories per 24 hours for those last few days. Our fuel situation, which we were worried about the entire expedition; fuel is our lifeblood, without fuel we can't cook and we can't turn snow into water.  Our fuel turned out just perfect as well.  We reached the North Pole with over 1 liter of fuel left, which is roughly 2 days of fuel.

Knowing that April 26th was the deadline because of the Russian company who operates an airstrip near the North Pole during the month of April, we were in communication with this logistics base the entire race for the last week. They knew our position and if we had failed to reach the Pole they would pick us up at the location we had reach by April 26, short of the North Pole.

Not sleeping was a huge challenge, especially for Tyler whose body kind of shuts down at 10:00pm to 2:00pm everyday. So, it's safe to say that both Tyler and I did some sleepwalking, although very safely.  We were looking out for each other quite closely during those last intense 66 hours to make sure that we felt safe and that the decisions we were making were well thought out and not impacted by sleep deprivation.

We reach the North Pole exhausted and without enough energy for a jubilant celebration. In fact the moment didn't warrant such a celebration in that we were more so awestruck and humbled by the power of the Arctic Ocean and the immense energy output it took every single day, culminating in 66 hours with only 3 hours of sleep in order to race the drift to reach the North Pole. It's hard to describe all the emotions coming together at that point that are still affecting us.  But I think humility and I think a bit optimism that we are able to reflect upon our strategy successfully. It's an extraordinarily proud moment. I feel fortunate to have succeeded when there's so many odds against us there at the end.

And we felt absolutely, I think, most jubilant for our supportive network:  the wonderful folks at Victorinox Swiss Army, Bergans of Norway, Delorme, our friends and family, our office, the CaringBridge network, and just everybody out there rooting for us.

It's been half a week in Oslo now. There's more to come in the next blog about "Dreams Come True" in Oslo. It's kind of a full circle story of our original inspiration, which started our spark toward the North Pole - that's coming in the next blog. Tyler and I have started to fatten up a little bit. We are really reveling in the proximity to our friends and family who are here with us in Oslo. I'm wearing shorts and a t-shirt - that feels so nice to be warm without having to work. But my hands are bit tingly, and so are my quadriceps, or upper leg muscles, from a cold exposure and just over use in some ways.

It was fantastic to see Tyler reunited with his young family. And we are really looking forward to just returning to simple normal life back at home and telling our story to the world and whoever is listening. We feel a good deal of gratification in that the unsupported, unassisted ski expedition to the North Pole by Americans is such a positive story and has received quite a bit of interest from the media. So that's a pleasant surprise.

So stay tuned, thanks for following and Tyler and I will continue to blog about every other day and continue the Week in Reviews until further notice. So the story is over as far as the mission but the story continues as far as the transition and positive effects of our success. Thanks for listening and on behalf of Tyler, talk to you soon.  Bye.

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Essential Gear - Night Vision II

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