Adjust and Adapt

Since my last post we have been preparing for our North pole expedition, especially the training and getting the gear in place. As I spoke abut in the last post some of the tings have been taking very long to get hold of, so it almost got me into “ok, now we just need to get this info place” modus. Becoming a bit impatient as I felt like time was flying fast and I had e.g. still not the skis I was to use in place.

First email

Then we got an email asking us if we were willing to travel via Murmansk instead of out of Svalbard. Reason for this was the travel restrictions for people coming into Norway. We said yes to that, looking at it as it would be a bit more of an adventure than if we flew out of Svalbard. We started to adjust to the idea and easily found that there would be a few extra challenges vs traveling out of Svalbard. One obvious one was brining guns with us. I guess you don’t just pack that in your bag going to Russia…

Then finally skis, ski boots, over boots etc. came into place. Look at how happy I was coming out of the shoemaker after he fixed my over boots for me. I was so ready to test it out and see if the fix we did on them would work. I started to calm down, gear seems to be getting into place. The fur for my jacket arrived. All was good.

Another email

A late Sunday morning, I read my emails…. and the news was that the 2021 season of the North Pole was canceled. (!)

What can you do? Not much. The only way we had to get there this year got canceled on us… so no matter how much we wanted to go or if we had our equipment ready or not we could not go. We have to wait 1 year until next opportunity to go there.

All the hours of training we will have to do over again, thankfully all the gear and the things we have in place is now ready for next year. So we are not loosing all the work and cost we have spent.

I waited a few hours so I was certain that Håkon was awake and called him. Of course not the best of news on a Sunday

I think we both had it in the back of our heads that it could happen, but we had really believed that we would go to the North Pole this year. It had looked so good, especially with the flying out via Russia option.

This video shows my thought just a few hours later:

New Plan

What happened was that just after I read the email that told me that the North Pole season was canceled I started to think about what we could do instead. Our plan was to go to Greenland this fall, would it be possible for us to go to Greenland this spring?

A) Is it during the current circumstances possible to go?

B) Going to Greenland in the spring and in the fall is two different things, so we need a new plan

C) Do we have enough time to pull it off?

We decided to give it a go – we’ll try to make it this spring. It will demand a totally new plan, and fast action now to get it all together. It will be a totally different expedition than the North Pole so here we go – the only thing we could do was to adapt and adjust since what is going on in the world right now is way outside our control.

#expeditionplanning #Northpole #Greenland #SivHarstad