Iliyra

Gateway

I'm writing this shortly after departure from Canada's capital city - Ottawa, and en-route to Resolute bay, a small hamlet well inside the arctic circle - and the staging point for many an Arctic expedition, including the one I'm involved in - the Rock Solid expedition 2008.

Since my departure form the UK 3 days ago, Its been a fairly hectic schedule, including sorting out some of the variety of technology due to accompany us on the expedition (some of which hasn't quite made it in time), the inevitable last minute spend at some of the great outdoor shops in Ottawa (Mountain Equipment Co-op being my favourite) - buying everything from an extra pair of merino wool underwear (extravagant I know) down to bear-scarers and pepper spray - in-case of any particularly close encounters (during an expedition in svalbard last year, an overly inquisitive bear, cut a hole in our tent - no doubt intrigued by the variety of smells emanating from the seasoned inhabitants within)

One particularly challenging aspect of the expedition so far has been sorting out the food. No mean feat when you need to procure enough food to provide 4800 calories per day (not a massive amount considering we're attempting to man-haul sledges weighing c.80kg over 300 miles) for two people, for 25 days - just under a quarter of a million calories.

Breakfast and dinner is largely taken care of by specialist dehydrated meals and whilst they can't exactly be described as the finest of dining, after a couple of hard days, you're soon glad of them. It's sorting out the dining in between that's the tricky part, as you don't stop to cook anthing, it's a case of having high calorific food to graze on at regular intervals - anything from oat bars to beef jerky to slabs of chocolate. Its all just fuel.

I'm working on a 30-50-20 split on calorie consumption throughout each day - that's 30% (1440 calories) for Breakfast, 50% (2400 calories) for 'lunch' / regular interval grazing and a modest 20% (960 calories) for dinner. How well this will work out remains to be seen, as consuming over 1400 calories for breakfast isn't an easy thing to do (even for someone like me whose appetite could conservatively described as 'very healthy indeed'). On my last arctic expedition I took too little food and really felt the effects - including quite a drop in muscle mass.

So yesterday saw me pushing a comically overloaded trolley around one of Ottawa's supermarkets, trying to make up a shortfall of 89K calories. Every item thrown in the trolley would be first entered into a spreadsheet on a pda, so I could keep a running total. Inevitably this behavior attracted quite a bit of interest from the other shoppers who stopped to enquire what the hell we were up to.

I'm due to land in Iqualuit shortly and am looking out of the window at the awesome view over the vast pans of sea-ice below. From there it's another 4 hours of flying to reach Resolute Bay, and getting back to the frenzied organisation of food, pulks, clothing, tents and technology that needs to happen before we leave for Grise Fjord on Thursday - the start point of our expedition.