And speaking of survival at the Poles. Just read in today’s Vancouver Sun about the unearthing of 5 crates of brandy buried in the Antarctic ice…a whiskey distillery in Scotland paid for the digging up of what was supposedly Shackleton’s whiskey cache – and the brandy was a bonus. If the whiskey can be siphoned out of one of the cracked-but-still-intact bottles, the plan is to re-create the original recipe, which has long been lost in time — until now. Talk about an “ad man’s” dream.

Anne
Editor/MyWestworld.com

I am reading this article sitting in Dawson City working for the Quest again this year. In fact, I just had the pleasure of watching Hans Gatt lead the way into Dawson City and the half way point of the 2010 Yukon Quest.

The race, as usual, has been great. The weather has been ideal – much warmer than usual – and the people have been fantastic.

You can get updates on the Race at yukonquest.com and find it on Facebook at facebook.com/YukonQuest

Yukon and Alaska are definitely the place to be for 2 weeks in February.

Brian

Thanks for your responses and for showing the sneak peek behind the scenes of the article. I fully appreciate that aspects of any story get trimmed and revamped during the editing stage. I recently finished reading Freuchen’s “Viking Vagrant” and am now enamored with the man and his Forrest Gump-like life, and was thrilled to stumble upon an article with a Freuchen anecdote as an opener.

Anne, I will definitely check out Frozen in Time, have been meaning to read more about Franklin, and Frozen seems like a perfect starting point. And no, I’ve never been to the Quest races, but it looks like fun!

Kevin

“I’m glad that it’s scraped its way back onto the page.”

As I remember it, he’d fashioned a chisel from his own excrement to chip his way out. In Peter Freuchen’s account of his 1924 journey through Canada’s far north, the Danish explorer recounted how in a driving storm his sled dogs had refused to go any further. He took refuge under his dog sled, overturned against the wind side of a large boulder.

While he slept, snow had buried his makeshift shelter and he awoke to find himself entombed and his feet painfully frozen. Barely able to move, he’d scraped at the hardened snow. After many hours of agonizing effort, Freuchen remembered how, during the previous day, his sled dogs’ turds had frozen solid almost instantaneously in the extreme cold.

Freuchen thus thought to resort to his frozen poo chisel. Despite narrowly escaping a slow death he lost an entire foot to frostbite.

Perhaps what pushed the lead over the edge and off the page was this addition:

His is not the only such tale to come out of the north. Famed Canadian ethno-botanist, Wade Davis, recounts a similar story collected from an Inuit community on Baffin Island.

An elder had resisted a 1950’s Canadian government plan to relocate the Inuit into settlements. In an effort to force him to move, his family took away all his tools and implements.

The elder stole out of the igloo that night and dropping his caribou and seal skin drawers in the harsh cold, he defecated and shaped the rapidly freezing feces into a knife. He spit on it to form a sharp saliva edge and butchered a dog. Using the dog’s ribcage as a sled and the hide to hitch onto another dog, he “put the shit knife in his belt and disappeared into the night.”

There you have it. When I was outlining this story, the first cue card on the cork board read “poo chisel.” My officemates, fellow writers, referred to what I was working on as “your poo chisel story.” I’m glad that it’s scraped its way back onto the page. Thanks for giving me the opportunity to post.
Masa

But I’ll dig up the quote re: F. in its entirety and post … tomorrow if I can…because it’s an amazing story. It reminds me of some of the incredible stories I discovered after editing a book on the Franklin Expedition a few years ago, and the crews’ harrowing, drawn-out last years of life on the ice of Ellesmere Island. The book’s called Frozen in Time (Greystone Books), and the scientist who co-wrote it, Owen Beattie, is the guy responsible for confirming that the Franklin crew was doomed due to lead poisoning (caused by improper manufacturing of food tins; this was just at the start of the tinned-food-manufacturing industry).

Are you at the Quest race this year? Have you seen them? Do you race yourself?
Cheers/Anne
Editor/MyWestworld.com