Arctic Trip 2012 Report: Part Two.

Sunday: No matter how much you plan there is always something that gets forgotten. In this case I hadn’t noted down the rendezvous time. I knew it had been changed from the original time and I had a vague memory that it was 11:00 but because I wasn’t sure I was at the airport from just after 09:00.

There were not many tracks in the new snow so I didn’t think I’d missed it.

The roads were easier for a bit of fresh snow. The temperature was still a mild 0°C. I sat and watched the world go by to see what happened.

I must admit that by now I was looking forward to some company. Solitude is great at times but it’s also nice to share experiences sometimes.

11:00 turned out to be correct.

Dropping our gear off at the “Firehouse” it turned out we were to spend our first night in Katas with stoves we could use if necessary. First job was to sort traditional bedding out using coniferous vegetation thatched with birch twigs. Quite effective I must say.

It was a large investment in time for a single night but as it transpired, the tents were to be used for another course running at the same time so fair enough.

With nothing needing drying we decided not to bother with the stove for that evening.

We returned to the Firehouse to cook and for a briefing on clothing and kit for the environment followed by time to sort out our packing for travelling to the course location in the morning.

By Monday morning it had blown up a bit of a hoolie with driving wet snow and one of the Laavus came down the hard way.

Chris the Cat’s alarm went off at 05:00 instead of 07:00 which gave us some extra time to air the sleeping bags in the Firehouse.

We were going to build the shelters that we would use and sleep in for the rest of the course. Woody showed us the Sledge knot, a useful little knot for fastening two spars together and then most of the other participants took a trip to the local supermarket for provisions.

In theory I could cut anything I liked for my shelter but I’ve never really felt comfortable cutting live wood  for such a temporary purpose.

I had a couple of tarps and some cordage so I quickly threw up a simple shelter.

Most took the opportunity to build sturdy frames for their tarps that might seem wasteful in UK woodland but here provided a useful service to the farm owner, thinning his woodland somewhat.

In addition to my trusty poly cotton tarp I had brought a silvered plastic tarp/reflective blanket. This saw much use over the fortnight and certainly earned it’s place in future kit lists for this environment.

I’m not normally a fan of plastic tarps or even lightweight synthetic ones for that matter. I find they tend to flap noisily in the wind.

Something I soon discovered on this trip though is that they also shed snow a lot better than poly cotton and when frozen the noise is pretty similar anyway.

The plastic tarps seemed to hold up fairly well against sparks from the fires and at the end of the day are cheap and easy to replace.

Some made natural beds while others like myself relied upon the bedding we had brought with us.

Pete and Shane were my next door neighbours and were ambitiously building a large lean to but as the snow began to fall again and with the light fading I offered to build a fireplace for them if I could share it for cooking.

This saved us running two fires, needing twice as much firewood and seemed a satisfactory arrangement.

For the first night, I dropped a large dead pine that actually provided us with wood for a few evenings. We later added two or three other dead standing trees to our woodpile and had more than enough to see us through.

Woody joined us under Pete and Shane’s tarp for a convivial evening as the snow gathered all around us.

I used a few spare cut tree tops from the building debris and propped them against a make shift frame to act as a snow break in front of my entrance and by morning that precaution had proved it’s value.

Tuesday: Snow on the tarp and some on the dry bags near the entrance but non at all on the bedding.

The days proceedings started, of course, with melting snow followed with breakfast. I was getting heartily fed up with porridge by now and wished I had stuck to my normal fare of fried bacon or sausages (Although my previous comments about Scandinavian sausages still holds true.)

By living out in our own shelters part of the objective of the course was to develop the routines that make life not just sustainable but comfortable as well.

By taking a week out in advance of the course I felt I had things pretty sorted.

Others that had just arrived seemed to be coping well too. Temperatures were hovering around freezing point so it was wet snow we were dealing with but so far no major problems.

Working in this environment it is essential to remain organised. An axe sheath or even the axe itself soon disappears under fresh snowfall.

Clothing needs to be brushed down before standing anywhere near to a fire to prevent ice or snow from melting and soaking you through.

It is the little things like this that make the difference between comfort and hardship.

The schedule seemed quite relaxed but there was always something to do.

Once day sacks had been packed we were on our way to a local lake for our next tutorial.

After some instruction about ice safety and procedures it was out onto the ice to have a go with the ice drilling equipment.

The ice we were on was a little over a metre thick so little chance of penetrating it by any other methods.

These narrow holes would be the sort of thing we would be fishing through later in the week.

The next thing we were shown was how to use an axe to produce a hole big enough to drop a bucket into for water collection.

It seems a foolish thing to admit now but I couldn’t help wonder how we were going to cut through a metre of ice with an axe?

In practice, you only need to dig deep enough for the bucket and the ice drill connects the bowl to the water underneath which  then fills up the bowl.

I can’t believe I didn’t think of that.

Possibly because most of the books on this subject are written for mountaineers I hadn’t seen any suggesting the use of cut boughs and foliage to support a snow roof before.

Fast to build and very effective.

With the addition of some bedding such a shelter could be very comfortable indeed.

It is often such practical and simple ideas that get overlooked in books and courses like this can be a good way of helping you to cut to the chase.

This is an efficient shelter that is much faster to build than a quinzhee and in any kind of emergency situation such speed of construction could make all the difference.

We all sat down for lunch around the shelter and while most of us tucked into a variety of cold snacks like salami, cheese or gorp, Woody gathered a few sticks, lit a fire and fried himself a meal of Blodpolse on Polarbröd.  Now that’s what I call style.

After lunch we were looking at tree felling in extreme cold. Unfortunately, at barely freezing temperatures, this would have to be just a basic tree felling lesson.

Apparently trees become much more unpredictable when semi frozen and safety becomes an even greater concern than it normally is.

Added to this the difficulty in moving quickly in the snow if things go wrong and the potential dangers soon mount up.

For this kind of job there really is no substitute for a decent axe.

While this might just have been possible with my little trailhawk it would have taken me all day.

In a little over 40 minutes with a medium sized axe we had the tree down, trimmed and sectioned ready to transport. That included teaching time.

One thing that needs to be considered when melting snow for water is that it is a very good insulator.

A pot full of snow just put on the fire or over a stove can very quickly ruin your cooking pot.

The first thing that happens when the snow in the bottom of the pan melts is that it is soaked up by the snow above it.

Back at camp the thawing / barely freezing conditions were making those camp routines even more important.

Tarps were getting wet and then freezing solid. Knots were seizing up. Condensation was seeping into everything not well sealed up. In many ways this was a lot more challenging than if the temperature had been ten degrees colder.

That leaves a space between the pot and the snow which can heat up sufficiently to melt a thin aluminium pan or warp a steel one.

To solve this problem I tended to keep one water bottle purely for “sacrificial” water.

By heating this water and then dropping packed snowballs into it there was always liquid at the bottom of the pan to circulate the heat and melt the snow.

This led to the common description of this constant practice being “making snowball soup”.

In the evening we returned to the lake to set up a few night lines under the ice and to see if we might see the Aurora.

We did get a show but nothing like I’d seen the week before. Disappointing for some I suspect but sadly that is the nature if such phenomena.

Thursday: A quick demonstration to illustrate the dangers of getting buried in snow by a collapsing shelter. This involved burying each other but Bob more than most.

This is followed by a team effort to build a quinzhee.

It takes a lot of work to build one of these and this was just designed for two people. The principle is simple.

Make a large pile of snow, pack it down a bit and then poke sticks about 12 inches long into it. These sticks are to help you gauge the thickness of the walls as you dig it out from within.

With a little experience you can dispense with the sticks and judge it by the light filtering through the snow but we decided to go for the hedgehog method.

Once you have your pile you need to let it “set up” for a while, during which time the snow consolidates and sets much harder.

Once this has been done you can then tunnel into the mound and excavate your shelter from the inside.

Ideally you keep your entrance hole quite low so that warmer air will be trapped in the upper parts of the quinzhee.

One approach is to cut a bigger hole for ease of access and then fill it back in when the inside has been dug out.

Ours seemed to fall in between these two schools with an entrance that was a bit high really but using the excavated snow to build a wind break at an angle to the entry way.

All that remained was a competition to decide who would sleep in it.

The first two people to make a sustainable fire in the area around the quinzhee get to use it for the night.

I had just emerged from an hours digging and shaping and thought I had no chance.

Pete beat me hands down, but much to my amazement, with the help of a handful of birch bark handed me by Ted, I came in second place.

The afternoon was spent back at the lake.

We checked the lines which had secured none of the wary fish below and then set about trying to tempt them with various jigs and lures. Again, unsuccessful.

We are told that the locals take lots of fish out of this lake, it’s just a shame they don’t put some back in so we can catch some.

As evening fell, the temperature was now well above freezing and raining too. Pete decided at the last minute that he was already struggling to keep his gear dry so a night in the Quinzhee was not likely to help.

That left me with a double sized shelter all to myself but with a thaw well in progress it turned out to be the least comfortable night of my stay.

It was not cold but that was the problem.

The roof was domed so that most of the drips would run down to the sides but it was still damp and rather humid.

Friday: last day of the course. I struck camp soon after leaving the quinzhee. It didn’t take long as there was no major structure to deal with.

One of the lads noticed some large paw prints running straight through the camp which interested Woody because something had attacked on of the sheep at the farm during the night.

It looked like a large dog, somewhat bigger than the sled dogs on the farm.

In theory it could have been a wolf but if so it is from a very small population. They are critically endangered throughout Scandinavia and particularly in Norway.

This seemed a fitting time for Woody’s final lesson of the course which was about trapping.

He demonstrated a number of ingenious methods, mostly based upon a simple toggle system.

To round off the course we all had to go off and create our own traps showing our understanding of that toggle system and for the most part we all succeeded.

A little time left to demolish our shelter structures, removing all cordage in the process before making our way back to the farm to collect a few belongings remaining there.

The course was formally ended but a few of us had two more days in the area before our flights home.

Ravenlore is a site promoting Bushcraft and Wilderness skills as a way of working, living and enjoying the wilderness with minimal impact on it’s resources. Bushcraft should be practised in a responsible manner with consideration for the environment and other people who seek to enjoy the outdoors.

Bushcraft skills complement many outdoor living pursuits such as walking, mountaineering, canoeing, hunting, fishing and in my case at least landscape photography. In fact I find the equipment suited to bushcraft often far exceeds the specification and usefulness of other high tech outdoor equipment.