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Re: F6 post# 28372

Wednesday, 06/08/2005 8:06:27 PM

Wednesday, June 08, 2005 8:06:27 PM

Post# of 482496
(COMTEX) B: Arctic explorers call off expedition after treacherous conditions
( Chicago Tribune )

NEW YORK, Jun 08, 2005 (Chicago Tribune - Knight Ridder/Tribune News Service
via COMTEX) -- The close encounters with polar bears were bad enough, but for
two would-be North Pole trekkers, the early breakup of ice on the Arctic Ocean
was an unforeseen development that forced them to call off their expedition last
week.

Lonnie Dupre and Eric Larsen set out on May 10 from Cape Arctichesky in Siberia
in an attempt to make the first-ever summer crossing of the Arctic Ocean, a
1,200-mile journey they expected would take four months.

But the early breakup of the ice forced the two men, who hauled two modified
canoes with them, to spend an inordinate amount of time switching back and forth
from traveling on cross-country skis to paddling across "leads," or sections of
open ocean between ice floes.

All the while, the ice was drifting to the southeast, away from the pole. Like
trying to go up a down escalator, the two men sometimes found themselves farther
south at day's end then they had been in the morning.

"We just determined it was fruitless to keep pushing forward under such odds,"
Dupre, 44, an experienced polar traveler, said in an interview after flying back
from Russia over the weekend. "We felt we'd done the best we could. Everest
wasn't climbed on the very first try either."

The pair hoped not only to establish a new record in polar exploration but also
to call attention to climate change, which has been blamed for melting glaciers
and shrinking the ice caps at the top and bottom of the world. One of the
sponsors of their expedition was the environmental group Greenpeace.

Because of the attention their effort received, not only from the media but also
as indicated by visits to their Web site, oneworldexpedition.com, they refused
to call their thwarted expedition a failure.

"If only one person's mind was turned around about global warming, that's fine,"
said Dupre, who added that the two men may try a different trek next summer,
starting at the North Pole and traveling to Greenland.

Dupre, whose previous treks include circumnavigating the 6,500-mile coast of
Greenland, said the sketchy information about summer ice movements on the
Russian side of the Arctic Ocean indicated that the ice usually moves to the
northwest, toward the pole.

But after an unusually warm winter, during which the polar ice cap did not get
as thick as it usually does, the ice started moving in the opposite direction as
it broke up.

"You can never link one specific winter to global warming," said Dupre,
resisting the temptation to blame the phenomenon they were trying to highlight
for the expedition's woes. "But we can say it was extremely unusual for the ice
to be breaking up that early."

Even if they made decent progress during the day, the southward drift of the ice
would erase much of their gains while they slept. When they were airlifted off
the ice last Friday by a Russian helicopter, they had traveled 150 miles in 24
days, but they were only 45 miles north of their starting point.

Dupre and Larsen, a dog-sled racer, had counted on bigger patches of solid ice
so they could ski for longer stretches. Instead, they encountered a great deal
of "brash" ice - broken chunks of ice that could not support their weight but
were too close together to paddle through. Often, they ended up swimming through
the ice.

"The conditions were just so frightening," said Larsen, who celebrated his 34th
birthday during the expedition. "It felt like the ice was trying to swallow us."

To make matters more difficult, snowstorms dumped fresh snow on the ice most
days, making it difficult to discern the condition of the underlying ice and to
break a path with their skis.

"We had initially planned to have one person lead for the first four hours (of
travel) every day and then the other person would take the lead for the last
four hours," Larsen said. "But being in the lead was really difficult because it
was really hard to break a trail, and it was mentally draining because it's your
responsibility to pick a trail, and you wonder if you're making the right
decision."

The team quickly switched to two-hour shifts.

Soon after embarking on their expedition, the men realized they were not the
only mammals on the ice. On about the fourth day, they had the first of four
brushes with polar bears. As they were setting up their tent, Dupre spotted a
bear stalking Larsen. They scared the bear away with small explosive flares
fired from a pencil-like launcher.

But their most horrifying encounter came on about the tenth day of their trek,
when a 10-foot male seemed intent on entering their tent, despite the pencil
flares. Finally, on their fifth try, a flare exploded beneath the bear, and it
fled.

"Without those deterrents, there's no question we wouldn't be here today because
his intent was to kill us," said Dupre. "You could see the determination in his
eyes."

Despite those moments of terror, however, Larsen came to appreciate the bears'
ease of movement, slipping in and out of the water and crossing the ice without
the laborious struggles Dupre and Larsen endured.

"These are just amazing animals that are very well adapted to their
environment," Larsen said. "If the ice continues melting, someday there won't be
any left. And that's their home."

---

By Stevenson Swanson
Chicago Tribune

CONTACT: Visit the Chicago Tribune on the Internet at
http://www.chicagotribune.com/

Distributed by Knight Ridder/Tribune Information Services.

(C) 2005 Chicago Tribune

-0-

*** end of story ***


Greensburg, KS - 5/4/07

"Eternal vigilance is the price of Liberty."
from John Philpot Curran, Speech
upon the Right of Election, 1790

F6

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