AS FAR AS DAYDREAMS GO, THERE ARE NONE BETTER THAN THOSE MENTAL WANDERINGS THAT ACCOMPANY WILD ADVENTURE SEEKING. Embarking on an Arctic snowkiting expedition leaves the world of the mundane behind, with the unknown and dangerous delivering these reflective moments in spades, at least when the conditions are near perfect: When you have had a good night’s rest, when the temperature swings well north of minus 30, when the terrain is free of sastrugi dangerous yet aesthetically beautiful ice formations, and when your 400-pound sled is your friend rather than foe. Snowkiting expeditions are both heaven and hell; the struggle against nature puts you in a state of simple gratitude, a place in which you can distill the chaos of civilization into the greater context of life.
When the flags don’t fly, Flemish explorer Dixie Danscorer is on
standby.
On a two-month ice expedition around Greenland, nostalgia is a common destination for the idle mind. On my most recent trip I revisited my earliest negotiations with the wind, the series of firsts that have placed me on a pioneering circular path around Greenland’s Arctic shelf. 1981 was my first time on a windsurfer and 1984 was my first time in Hawaii subsisting on a diet of ramen noodles and strong northeast trade winds. Windsurfing and Hawaii introduced me to my competitive self and a year later I was traveling around the world as part of the Gaastra/Browning World Cup team.
Oddly enough, despite this traditional windsurfing trajectory, kites entered my world via Arctic explorations in the early 1990s. I stitched together my first kite to harness the wind on a straight-line expedition across the Greenland Ice Sheet. In the following years my adventure partner, Alain Hubert, and I adapted a Nasawing, a frumpy parachute-like kite, in order to cross the Antarctic continent in 1997. The Antarctic crossing took 99 days to traverse the vast expanses of the “greatest ice field on earth” and for those who know a bit about Belgium’s cultural divisions, placing a Dutch-speaking Flemish man and a French-speaking Walloon together on the ice is, by itself, is an impressive accomplishment. Although the successful expedition covered 2443 miles, it only made waves in the small polar community, but in my mind it showed.
The following years were filled with more snowkiting adventures in the polar regions. We began working with Ozone and the advancements in kite profiles yielded increased efficiency allowing us to traverse greater distances, and in turn, collect an ever growing number of expedition records. Back in 1997, Alain and I had struggled to travel 168 miles in 24 hours, but in 2010, Canadian Eric McNair-Landry had doubled this distance record during his south to north expedition in Greenland. I stored Eric’s name in my internal hard drive for future use.
At that time snowkiting expeditions were conceived as a challenge from point A to B, but in 2011 I partnered with fellow explorer Sam Deltour to chart a new direction. I had a theory about the katabatic winds that flow from higher elevations in Antarctica down to the coastal or lower-lying regions. With the distances so great, the flow of these winds is subjected to the motion of the Earth’s rotation, a phenomenon called the Coriolis effect. Instead of the logical straight line down to lower elevations, the direction of these winds is slightly bent so that it’s conceivable to kite in a circle around the enormous high plateau in East Antarctica. After careful analysis of the scientific mathematical models, I was certain the katabatic winds offered up the possibility of a circular trajectory in which we started and ended the expedition at the same point.
Our first attempt at circumnavigation was planned for Antarctica. It was truly a step into the unknown, and a daring one because of the limited or non-existent fuel caches and challenging search and rescue logistics. In fact, we learned only after the expedition that The Antarctic Company, an air support outfit responsible for our rescue, could not guarantee a search and extraction operation on a circular route. The Antarctic trip did not start well with Sam and I losing precious time at the beginning due to bad weather. After struggling 3112 miles it was in our best interests to get off the continent as the favorable austral summer season was coming to an end. We were picked up before we could close the circle, but despite the setback, the promise of circumnavigating only strengthened our resolve.
The opportunity to revisit circumnavigation presented itself when Eric was looking for a partner to attempt a circumnavigation of Greenland. I gladly offered to construct the support team and we scheduled a training expedition on the Norwegian island of Spitsbergen in March of 2014. Two weeks later we held a joint press conference in Brussels and flew to Angmassalik, East Greenland, where we had a helicopter drop us off on the white expanse of the continent’s ice sheet.
The first three weeks of the expedition was a complete disaster. As we attempted to cross the southern expanse while conditions were still cold we encountered back-to-back storms, chest-deep snow, unfavorable winds and sastrugi almost as large as those on Greenland’s bigger brother Antarctica. We averaged 13 miles a day when we needed to cover at least 45 to stay on track. At one point Eric’s sled got lodged in the aggressive wind chiseled sastrugi and his kite pulled against his rope tether to quickly lift him 30 feet in the air. From a distance I could see my expedition partner suspended above the horizon, but Eric’s confidence allowed him to casually pull the brake on his kite for a controlled descent and he was able to free his sled from the ice formation.
In order to successfully complete the circle we needed to make up for lost time. Our weather forecasters suggested we take advantage of a solid easterly wind to make the transition to the west coast where we could stopover at Dye 2, an abandoned radar station, before heading north on the stable wind highway to Thule.
As our kites pulled us toward the large domes of the abandoned radar station, a snowmobile came unexpectedly racing towards us. Dye 2 was one of four Cold War radar stations erected on Greenland to warn of a Soviet invasion over the Arctic, but it was no longer in use. Eric immediately recognized the snowmobiler from a previous Greenland expedition. It turned out Eric’s friend was trying to warn us that a Hercules aircraft was on its final approach as we were standing in the middle of their ice runway with our kites. We watched as the American Hercules practiced its ice landings and spent the night exploring the abandoned station. We met three Brits waiting for a medevac to pick them up after an injury foiled a west to east crossing. The next day we carried out some repairs and then we were off again into the white.
Eric and Dixie clear the runway moments before a US Airforce Hercules aircraft practices ice landings against the backdrop of an abandoned cold war radar station sinking into the Greenland Ice Sheet.
The success of a polar kiting expedition requires the team to be on standby all the time. The wind dictates our travel; even with the advantage of 24 hours of daylight you must be ready to move as soon as the tent canvas starts flapping. This was our first expedition with the 18m Chrono, a new design that allowed us to pull our 400-pound sleds in the slightest breeze. Out of a quiver of 6m, 10m and 15m kites, the Chrono was our main kite because we could begin traveling when our wind meter ticked above four knots.
On a good day we averaged 8-12 hours on our skis, but even under the best conditions keeping your morale high can be difficult with the extreme cold, the monotony of a monochrome environment and only a single person to talk to. It can also be quite stressful between the sharp sastrugi, deep powder swallowing sleds, or whiteout conditions impeding any kind of visibility. Despite these challenges our great love and respect for the Arctic landscape combined with a desire to complete our circular path kept us motivated.
After a long day out on the ice, the tent is a comfortable bubble where we can find respite from the wind, hot food, a warm sleeping bag, and some music to inspire us for the next day. Eric had brought a Kindle with sixty-some books while I travelled old school with two paperbacks. It didn’t take long to get hooked on Eric’s virtual books, so the Kindle would sit between us and whoever was not asleep could grab it for a quick trip to another world. When we were both awake we would frequently battle it out over a game of Yahtzee that we spiced up with our own additional rules.
Home sweet home: Dixie makes himself comfortable
within the utilitarian confines of the tent.
While the tent is where we enjoy the small luxuries of our expedition, it is also the single most important piece of equipment we carry. It protects us from the wind and the cold, yet it’s constructed of thin canvas just like our kites. When fierce storms force us to pull the brake on our kites and seek refuge in this frail piece of cloth, it’s essential to set it up correctly. Taking a second tent is not an option as we shave every ounce of each piece of equipment during preparation, yet without a functioning tent we would be exposed to the wind chill and soon find ourselves in a life-threatening situation.
In addition to our circumnavigation mission, we had planned on collecting wind data for research purposes. We launched fixed position kites upon which we hung four miniature weather stations in order to study the katabatic winds that drove our expedition. We managed to launch the weather kites every other day and made daily observations of snow temperature at various depths and observed the state of the snow in order to investigate the role downslope winds play in the warming of the polar regions. We sent the data to our headquarters in Brussels, who in turn forwarded our recordings to a scientific steering committee for analysis.
The 39th day into the trip we reached the northern part of the Greenland Ice Sheet. We were ready to tackle the eastern coast which we referred to as “Terra Incognita” because no expedition had used kites to travel this area before. In preparation we had studied the wind models back to 1980, yet it was still very difficult to forecast the predominant direction and strength of the wind for our final segment of the trip. We were on constant standby to grab the wind whenever it came, and we worked hard to average 77 miles a day during that stretch.
On day 54, Eric and I thought we had it made with only a couple hours between us and our starting point almost two months earlier. With the end in reach the wind died and would tease us throughout the day. A little puff would come through and off we went on our Chrono’s, only to be stopped by a stillness so quiet that the weight of the kites was simply too much to stay airborne. The doldrums brought the temperature up and it quickly became too hot for our polar clothing and Eric was the first to change into shorts.
Throughout the day we embraced even the slightest breeze yet we were 16 miles from our final goal. Sleep deprived, I suggested we set up camp and walk the last stretch the next day but the thought of finishing the expedition on foot didn’t sit well with Eric. Just as I entered into the full depth of much needed sleep, I felt an insistent tap on my shoulder bringing me back. “Dixie, Dixie, I think we have some wind, are you game to git”˜r done?” This familiar phrase whispered in my ear over the Iridium phone by Troy Henkels had pushed me in past expeditions, so despite my exhaustion I crawled out of my sleeping bag half awake and rigged up for the final pitch.
That evening under solid wind, it took us less than an hour to close the circle of the Greenland ICE expedition. Eric and I celebrated exactly at midnight with the compulsory photoshoot. Two days later we were picked up by a helicopter at Greenspeed Ridge, overlooking a grand view of both the Trillergerne Mountains and the Labrador Sea.
Eric and Dixie sit for a celebratory pose as they successfully circumnavigate the second largest ice sheet on earth via kites.
Since the beginning of my polar career I have strongly believed that there is no greater adventure than the discovery of uncharted territory. We believed in the possibilities of katabatic circumnavigation and despite my failed first attempt in Antarctica, Eric and I proved it possible in Greenland. In addition to the valuable climate change data we collected, we demonstrated members of disparate generations, Eric as a 29 year old and myself as a 52 year old, could flawlessly work together by combining hi-tech and experience while both striving for a common goal. Expeditions come in all shapes and forms; those which pioneer new territory entail much greater risk and potential for failure, however in the case of success, yield far greater satisfaction.
Words by Dixie Dansercoer // Photos by Eric McNair-Landry
This story first appeared in The Kiteboarder Magazine’s FALL 2014 issue available here, for free. Want more? Subscribe now.
Flemish explorer Dixie Dansercoer’s next expedition was a kite/kayak route over ice sheet and open water starting at the North Pole and ending in the Russian Archiepelago of Franz Jozef Land. You can keep tabs on Dixie’s latest adventures at www.polarcircles.com