Yukon Quest 2014 - Dawson City checkpoint

I (Julien) was pretty bored in Edmonton, trying to figure out what to do after my contract at MEC ended. I was talking to Piia one night and she asked me if I had thought about the Yukon Quest at all. Well I hadn't until she brought it up. Suddenly I realized it would be crazy fun to go there and follow the race. I wasn't bored anymore! I sent a few emails asking if I could help as a photographer and then I was just waiting for my contract to be finished in order to drive as fast as possible to Dawson and hopefully be there on time for the first musher.

Monday 3rd arrived and I left Edmonton in big rush and headed to Liard Hot Springs. I was a bit scared for our old Subaru but it survived the long day. After a bath in the hot springs and a really short night I was on my way to Whitehorse. Brent Sass was supposed to arrive in Dawson on Wednesday so I thought that I had plenty of time left. Once in Whitehorse I went to the Yukon Quest headquarters and learned that Brent would actually be in Dawson in less than 7 hours. So I rushed towards Dawson and arrived there as the light was fading. The drive was so beautiful, it felt really good to be back in Yukon!

 

Once I had settled down in the Dawson checkpoint I met with the photography team (composed this year by Mark Gillet, Tom Barber and Heidi McGuire) and the media team from Outside the Cube (composed by Pixie, Christine, Echo and Kirsten). Soon Brent was approaching and I was in middle of action right away. In Edmonton from where I left the temperature was about 0 °C. When Brent arrived it was about -35 °C and my body and especially my hands didn't really like the fast change.

Brent's arrival was a bit stressful as lot of media and photographers were around him trying to catch some good pictures despite the night and the cold. I was a bit disapointed by the pictures but well that wasn't an easy start and many other mushers had still to come through so...





Allen Morre arrived about 2h30 after Brent so once again, cold and dark were the conditions. Even though some lights were set up around the line I still needed to push the aperture and the ISO at the maximum to get some light in the pictures. The result is not always pretty because of a lot of noise.
Hugh Neff arrived as well by night a few hours later.

My first hours in Dawson were exciting since a lot of people were around the line and many people stayed up that night to see the three first mushers and their team coming in.








Dawson City is an important checkpoint on the Yukon Quest as the mushers have a mandatory 36 hours layover at that point. Handlers get there beforehand and set up "the camp" which consists usually of an arctic tent and a tarp with straw under on which the dogs are resting.
I had the opportunity to go to the camp areas and check the campsites. It seemed like the handlers did a really good job, most of sites looked really neat.

After the first mushers we had long waiting time followed by busy time. I was pretty satisfied as I got to see every musher coming in and the leaders leaving. The last four mushers came in almost at the same time which gave us a nice show: Jerry Joinson, Mandy Nauman, Brian Wilmshurst  and Hank DeBruin all arrived in the afternoon. Then I had the chance to see a few more mushers leaving before it was my turn to head to Pelly Crossing as Matt Hall and Cody Strathe were already almost there.

 
Time in Dawson was good. I met lot of nice people and had good opportunities to take pictures. It was at first frustrating as most of the action happened by night but then came some day action which allowed me to take better pictures.

 

Here is the link to all the pictures I took in Dawson City : 

http://www.flickr.com/search/?q=Dawson%20Julien%20Schroder

News and crazy idea

So it has been quite a while now without posts. Well life can't be always as exciting as last year.
At the moment Julien is working at MEC in Edmonton while Piia is enjoying her last moments of wilderness in Alaska.

After our challenging backpacking adventure this summer I (Julien) thought that I was done with long distance backpacking for a while. Well I always say that and two months after I dream about going back in the mountains.

For a few weeks I have been looking for different possibilities until the ultimate idea came to my mind :
Baffin Island
This island is located in front of Greenland, most of it is in Arctic area. It's really remote, without any high vegetation and the average temperature in July is about 8°C. This is a totally crazy idea, I mean, I'm thinking that we might be able to cross the island from south to north by walking about 1400 km next summer.

So for now, we have about 10% chance to really do it as it is a big project on which we have to work a lot if we want to do it safely. What I will try to do is to share in this blog the different steps that could eventually lead us to the Baffin Island ,or not. Including how we investigate the area, the mapping methods used, the first thoughts about the gear. Meaning all the steps which are in my opinion important while planning a pretty serious expedition like that.

So let's summarize :
-Monday - I get the idea while watching http://www.panoramio.com/, the landscapes are amazing, that looks challenging, not so much vegetation so we would be free to adapt our routes. Okay, project launched.
-Tuesday - Research online, first measurement between the communities using google map. It looks like the distance between the communities through the most interesting area of the Island (East coast), is about 1000-1400 km so our ideal length. Evaluation of first problems : Cold and windy climate, really technical terrains, high density of polar bears on the coast, many glacier to go through.
-Wednesday - Study of climate data using http://en.allmetsat.com/climate/nunavut-baffin-ellesmere.php . Then on google earth I tried to adjust the first draft in order to avoid the most difficult glacier, I mainly focused on the glacier issue and not really on wildlife or terrain issues, that we come after with the input of local advice. The route look like that after this step.

View Larger Map

So a reasonable plan would be to leave from  Pangnirtung and head to Pond Inlet on the North side. The glaciers issue as well as the river crossing issue might be resolved by the use of a packcrafs. (https://www.alpackaraft.com/index.cfm/store.catalog/Packrafts/Alpaca)
-Thursday - Research on the possibility of making a food drop after about 700km. At this point Google Earth is not accurate enough to be able to have a good idea of the terrain, I switched to some GIS data found on earthexplorer.usgs.gov , i focus on some elevation layer (DEM from ASTER) as well as some Landsat 7 ETM+ images which will allow me to assess the shape of the glacier in late July. There isn't any Topographic maps of Baffin Island that we could use so the data downloaded will be used to create our own Topographic map.
-Friday - I mostly plaid with the map on QGIS (http://www.qgis.org/en/site/) which is a free and open-source GIS software. I merged all the images together in order to get a full coverage of the area and produced the contour lines of our future topographic maps.

Contour lines produced on Qgis

 

Relief map, will help for the route planning

-Saturday - Obviously this adventure will be really expensive so I began to look at the costs in gears, logistic and food. I contacted the national parks office and some locals in order to get their feeling about what we plan to do.
-Sunday - We might be able to use some kind of trolley in order to not carry too much on our bags, the terrain seems appropriate to this system. There is a small community : Clyde river located at about half way to Pond Inlet. It is on the coast but it seems possible to reach it by doing a small detour. That might be an interesting option to consider. The layer showing the glacier are now ready and wow, this place looks amazing from a satellite point of view!

Landsat mosaic around Pangnirtung

So here was a short summary of a crazy week. I haven't slept so i was excited about this idea. As I said before it might never happen but we won't know until we try to make it happen so here we are officially trying.

This is just us showing how we plan things, we are not experts and might be a bit messy in our way of doing but you know sometimes you feel like checking maps sometimes you feel more like checking out some gears. The main point is to keep track of everything so everything that is done doesn't have to be done again, in those kind of period my bookmark folder get heavier and heavier every hours :D.

Piia is joining me in Edmonton in about a week, she will be able to give her point of view and to take her share of the huge amount of work that we have to accomplish if we want to go there.

See you soon!

Fall in Yukon

So the summer passed by. The last weeks we have enjoyed Yukon and witnessed amazing fall colors. The weather has got cooler and night temperatures are often below freezing. We love autumn! 


 

After travelling many months we wanted to stay in Yukon for a few weeks before going back to Alaska. We were very lucky to find a place to stay in Tagish (80 km from Whitehorse) where our musher friends Michelle and Ed have their kennel. 


Besides helping with dogs we have had also an opportunity to help them out with their moving. And gotta tell you, after being on a holiday for months it’s great to work on something useful again. 






And besides, playing with a few weeks old puppies can really lighten your day as well!

We also had great time when Piia’s friends Liisa and her cousin Päivi visited us here in Yukon. We went hiking together, checked out some mountain landscapes, even went around in Whitehorse, bathed in the hot springs and the girls went horse riding as well. For Piia it was amazing to see her friend since very long time. Nothing beats spending time with close and important people!

  

After the girls left we went to north, drove along the Dempster Highway and hiked in Tombstone Territorial Park. Nature spoiled us with its best colors and even weather was nice a few a days, except for the first night when we were under a thunderstorm with hails and snow. We shot lots of pictures and ate lots of cranberries. Recommended to everyone!

After staying a couple of weeks in Tagish we are now ready to head to Alaska again. There are some people, goats, chickens and dogs waiting for us there, and we are ready to make the most of our last weeks in the Last Frontier. And it’s snowing there already, yay!!