Day 26

An early start for the team. I was glad to wake up and open the tent to see yet another hill to climb. After our morning routine and collapsing down the tents we set off just after 0800. It was a nice steady pace towards the hill and we were making great progress. Until we hit some melt water a few kms in, I’d usually say it went downhill from here but in our case it was uphill.

It was Tom’s time to shine and get the drone up to see if there was any way we could work around it. After much discussion we decided to go with the left-hand side of the “camel looking mountain”. There was no easy route out of this as we still ended up crossing several small water channels at the rush – building up enough speed so the pulks made it across behind us. A few wet feet and you could tell people were getting threaders.

The good news was that we had finally managed to get past the melt water channels, but little did we know we were onto something even worse! Looking uphill the incline seemed relatively nice, compared to the other routes we could see, this was the only way up for us, with plenty of snow and what looked like a clear path through the crevasses, it wasn’t.

We ended up dodging small crevasses on the way up which wasn’t ideal but it was doable. As it started to get steeper with the top in site, it was just getting worse. Some were just not possible and not safe enough to cross, it just wasn’t worth the danger. We stopped and had another discussion on what the next move would be. Tom again had the drone up to look for alternative route, it wasn’t looking good. We agreed to descend slightly back down towards the right side of the mountain and camp up for the night as it was our last pull for the day anyway. Kris keeping the morale up with have a few funny moments, getting caught on the rope and falling on his arse.

Once we got to camp and pitched the tents up in eager expectation of being plunged into darkness by the 96% solar eclipse! Maybe it got a little less bright, it was hard to tell through the dazzle off the snow. Thoroughly underwhelmed, Marcus, Josh and Tom skied out to do a recce without pulks to try and find a safe way up for the team. Today has felt slow and just constant speed humps with getting to the top. Everywhere in Greenland looks a lot closer than it actually is! Hopefully tomorrow we will make it to the top!