Kevin Vallely and Ray Zahab had unfinished business in the high Arctic.
In 2022, the Royal Canadian Geographic Society explorers sought to cross Ellesmere Island – Canada’s northernmost landmass – unsupported, on skis, in the coldest and harshest time of the year.
Though they’ve traversed some of the most extreme environments – hot and cold – on earth, Ellesmere Island’s unforgiving winds and snow, with its texture like shards of broken glass, would simply not allow them, and after 10 days, the expedition was over.
In the years since, Zahab went through six rounds of chemotherapy to treat lymphoma, and Vallely entered his 60s.
The pair retooled, rethought their tactics and returned to Ellesmere in March. Now back at his Lynn Valley home and nearly rested up, Vallely is having a chance to reflect on their journey, skiing eight hours a day, pulling 150-pound sleds more than 500 kilometres from a climate research station in the middle of Ellesmere Island to Grise Fiord, a tiny settlement of just over 140 people on its southern tip.
“More people have stepped on the moon than have stepped on certain parts of that landscape. It’s so remote and so completely desolate,” Vallely said. “It’s really the most wildly harsh, incredibly beautiful terrain on the planet. It really was magical and everything we had hoped it to be.”
For the first 25 days of the journey, the temperature never went above -30 C. With the windchills they were facing, that would feel somewhere between -70 C and -80 C. At those temperatures, you can watch frostbite take hold of exposed skin within seconds, not minutes, Vallely said.
“It’s the consistently coldest spot in North America, without fail. In March, the average daytime temperature there is - 36.6 C, so it’s effing cold,” he said. “We wanted to experience the Arctic when it’s the most arctic.”
This time, they planned their journey to have the wind at their backs, going from north to south, with buried caches of food and fuel on the way. Still, it will go down as one of the most physically strenuous journeys of Vallely’s career, which has also included overland trips to the South Pole, across frozen lakes in Siberia, the Iditarod Trail and through jungles in Southeast Asia. Much of that was to do with the unique consistency of Ellesmere’s snow.
“It’s like dragging a sled on the road. There’s just no glide. Zero,” he said. “It’s unforgiving, right? It’s just non-stop brutal. You’re in this ice locker 24/7.”
Despite taking in about 7,000 calories per day, Vallely still lost 10 pounds over the course of the trek.
Their journey was daunting mentally and emotionally too, Vallely added. As they moved, they were constantly keeping watch for polar bears that may have been keeping watch of them. At night, they slept with a trip wire around the tent, designed to alert them if bears ambled up in the darkness.
“There’s no real rest,” he said. “I had a 12-gauge shotgun right at my hip and loaded and ready to go.”
Though they saw plenty of polar bear paw prints, which Vallely said looked more like elephant tracks, they never did see any of the apex predators.
Arctic wolves
More than the goal of successfully making the trip back to Grise Fiord, Vallely said they had their fingers crossed they’d see just one of the 200 arctic wolves that populate the massive island.
“Well, we ran into 31. More like they ran into us,” he said, adding that a Disney film crew that had been looking for the pack for two weeks had far less luck.
A single wolf can bring down an 800-pound muskox, which was a scary thought to have as the pack sniffed around their camp, Vallely said. But, in their 10,000 years on the barren island, the wolves have had almost no interactions with humans. It was clear from their body language, they regarded the interlopers as more of a novelty than a threat or food source.
“You can sense there’s no aggression. They’re just kind of curious about you,” he said. “They come within 10 feet of you, and if you were to sit down on the ground, they would actually come sniff your head. It’s amazing. Intimidating as all hell, I’ll be honest with you.”
Inuit knowledge
Though he’s an experience Arctic traveller, Vallely said none of his journeys in the North would be possible without including local Inuit people on the team. Grise Fiord was never a settlement of any kind until the 1950s when the Canadian government – seeking to assert Arctic sovereignty – lured Inuit families from Quebec with the promise of housing and plenty of game to hunt, both of which proved to be lacking. The government later reneged on a promise to relocate the families back to their home communities, effectively making it a case of forced migration.
They did adapt and the settlement remains today, and no one knows how to survive on Ellesemere Island without their guidance, Vallely said.
“It was fascinating to watch how patient these guys are, because things never work…. These guys are the master travellers in that environment,” he said. “This is where they live, and this is that they do, every day.”
True north, strong and free
Vallely acknowledged it’s sometimes hard to explain the appeal of this sort of adventure to folks whose idea of travel is sipping cocktails with their toes in the Caribbean. But, he said, there is a logic to it. The greatest satisfaction comes only after you’ve invested some suffering, he reasons.
“You don’t transcend yourself when you go to those places,” he said. “The best food is when I’m hungry. The best drink is when I’m really thirsty and the best sleep I get is when I’m really tired.”
And in that respect, 28 days on Ellesmere Island delivered.
“It was just genuinely, insanely difficult all the time. And then and you only realize that at the end, when you’re trying to recover. I was taking three and four naps a day for the first few days,” he said.
Because of their close encounters with the wolves, Vallely and Zaheb were able to provide extremely hard-to-acquire intelligence about them for biologists. Through Zahab’s non-profit impossible2Possible, the updates on the pair’s journey were made available to upwards of 25,000 schools.
But there’s still something bigger Vallely said he hopes his fellow citizens – almost all of whom will never leave footprints in the glass-like snow – take away from their journey.
“We’re going out on Canadian territory, and we’re going to do some really interesting stuff out in Canada. I was feeling this sort of sense of pride, I suppose, with all this rhetoric coming from Trump. This is our country. It’s huge. It’s amazing,” he said. “There’s so much up there that so few Canadians are aware of, so it’s really shining a light on that, saying, ‘Hey, man, look North.”
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