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Charlie Walker
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Crossing the tundra

27/3/2017

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The tank was noisy. Soviet-era tanks certainly weren’t built for stealth. We clambered down through a porthole into the cabin on a clear fresh morning of around -15˚C and sat, sweltering, next to the clanking, groaning engine for the next eight hours. Slava’s headless body groped expertly at the levers next to us, steering us across the tundra. His exposed face braved the increasingly inclement elements outside the hatch. Our driver owned the convoy of four tanks that we’d hitched a ride north on and he makes regular journeys to Ust-Kara: a small Nenets (indigenous peoples of the Russian Arctic) settlement to trade in fish and reindeer. We’d been introduced to him by Nadia and a different Slava, friends we’d made in Vorkuta, who affectionately termed him a “brutal Russian man”. He was thickset, scarred, crop-haired and looked like Tom Hardy’s wayward twin. He was also very kind.
 
We lacked the necessary documents (which would require money, a six-month wait, and a return journey almost to the border of Finland) to visit Ust-Kara which is in a restricted military “zona”. So, Slava agreed to drop us somewhere shortly before arriving there. We didn’t know where but trusted him. It was after dark when the convoy stopped at what seemed to be a restaurant at the end of the world. We were somewhere on the tundra, apparently on the banks of the frozen river Kara. There was a single building with a dog, a kitchen, a dining table and a little dormitory upstairs. There was a windswept snowman by the door holding a fishing rod and a bottle of vodka. A wooden pistol hung from his belt. We all bundled inside for bowls of borsht, smoked fish, sweet cherry blinis and shots of vodka. One man pointed out that tomorrow was international women’s day and so we (nine men and Callie) toasted the women of the world. Slava said we should sleep upstairs, covered our dinner, shook our hands warmly, said shastlieva (good luck) and exited with his team. We shared the dormitory with one very drunk man in a bold Christmas jumper. He fell loudly out of bed in the night.

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In the morning we loaded our sleds, heaved on our backpacks, clipped into our ski bindings and finally put one foot in front of the other. We moved slowly. Our bags contained rations for twenty-eight days and our legs contained lethargy from a week’s inactivity. My blisters from our ‘trial run’ had healed a great deal and the sadistic ski boots were rendered just about workable with a collection of innersoles, blister patches and zinc tape covering half my feet.
 
It wasn’t a sunny day but it was clear enough and we could see several kilometres. Our navigation was simple. The GPS gave us the compass bearing to a point, roughly a hundred miles away, at which we’d leave the tundra and follow a valley up into the Ural Mountains. We looked at our compasses, picked a feature in the far distance that lay on the correct bearing, and headed straight for it. The light began to fade at around 3pm, so we threw up our tent and crawled in. When we looked at the GPS it said that we were 10km closer to that valley. Only 10km. Shit! We’d calculated our rations on an average of 15km each day. Well, we thought, no need to worry. We’ll get faster and stronger and our routine will grow slicker. And we’ll start earlier. We stopped fretting and went to sleep. ​
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​When the alarm sounded ten hours later we were both already awake. The tent was flexing and flapping and fluttering in a strong wind, and had been for hours. We had to speak loudly to hear one another while spooning porridge and prunes (gotta keep oneself regular, you know) into our mouths. We peeked outside and saw only white. It was hard to tell if it was snowing (unlikely at the temperature of -15˚C) or if it was simply “blowing snow”. If we set off, the fierce wind would be largely at our sides and slightly in front of us. The real problem was that visibility was around ten yards and so navigation would be tricky with no distant features to aim for. We decided to wait and see if it calmed. Our dilemma was that we didn’t know if this was an exceptional “storm day” that we were justified in sitting out, or if this might be the norm for the area.
 
By midday it had only grown worse so we decided to stay put. Callie wryly noted that our daily average was now three miles. The following morning conditions were exactly the same so we layered up, wrestled the tent down and into its stuff sack, and set off into the blizzard. The going was even slower. We took turns to follow one another. The leader would have to halt every hundred yards or so,  fumble their compass out with mittens and correct their direction. There was zero definition and it was often hard to tell if we were on an incline or not. On a few occasions we thought we were about to lunge down a steep embankment, twenty yards or so tall, only to find that it was a gently slope dropping only a few feet. Lunch (a frozen sandwich each, semi-thawed in breast pockets during the morning) was taken standing side by side, back to the wind, in the course of five or so minutes. Standing still any longer stole sensation from extremities which was hard to win back. After six hours of this, we pitched our home again and fired up the GPS. The bearing of the turning into the mountains had changed a few degrees so we’d evidently veered off course. As the crow flies, we were only another 10km closer. We knew we had to up our game and set the alarm 30 minutes earlier for the following morning.
 
Over the next week the conditions were consistent each day and only marginally better than those two storm days. We forgot what shade of blue the sky is and largely spent our waking hours bent forward, trudging painfully slowly across the tundra. However, our daily distances improved: 15km, 17km, 19km, 16km, 20km…
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​​The leader would spend their two-hour stint up front squinting into the howling purgatory of whiteness, trying to fix upon and not loose sight of scraps of shrubbery poking through the snow on the correct compass bearing. The other would enjoy falling into a trance, staring at the hind of the leader’s sled a few yards ahead. Despite our best efforts with navigating, we found that somehow we were veering a little right (West) of our bearing every day. Embarrassed at such a novice’s error, we eventually realised that our GPS was set to “true North” and our compasses, naturally, worked off “magnetic North”. These two systems vary by roughly 30˚ at seventy degrees of latitude.
 
One day we were chanced upon by a passing snowmobile. The odds of this seemed absurdly slim in such a remote and uninhabited place. The riders were two young Nenets men, dressed all in reindeer skins, and a scrappy-looking dog. We chatted briefly before they roared off. Nenets clans exist on both sides of the Urals but are divided into two categories known as the ‘European Nenets’ on the western side and the ‘Asian Nenets’ on the eastern side. To my eye these men looked unarguably “Asiatic” with facial features akin to Mongolians or Tibetans. Dividing their tribe into ‘European’ and ‘Asian’ subcategories is clearly just for convenience but seemed absurd and was the first time on our expedition that we saw the arbitrary nature of a Euro-Asia border so neatly illustrated.
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After a week we spotted an unusual silhouette in the distance and, as it wasn’t far off our line of travel, we detoured towards it. When we got close it turned out to be a Gazprom (Russia’s largest petrochemical company) installation with rows of mobile homes and massed ranks of hydraulic diggers. There were only a couple of men there, acting as winter guardians, but Nicolai and Alexei welcomed us into their cramped trailer home for the night. The temperature was stifling inside (as in all Russian homes) and, after we’d washed and put our dirty clothes back on, we each watched our battered feet swell and start to throb. They were evidently acclimatised to the cold now. Nicolai jovially roasted a chicken and some potatoes which we tore through with impolite excitement. With various items of kit hung to dry, we then crawled onto the bunks above our hosts and passed out while a scavenging Arctic fox picked through the discarded chicken bones outside. ​
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​When we finally reached the valley and turned into mountains we were enjoying our second day of sunshine (out of twelve days). We’d been hugging the range’s western flank for a few days but entering their seldom explored valleys was a landmark moment for us. Over the following few of days we climbed up and over our first pass and crossed a small plateau before tracing another valley down towards the eastern side of the mountains. At some point on that plateau we technically crossed from Europe to Asia. There was no line or sign or fence, just snow and ice and rock, and not a trace of human civilisation. The only thing that had changed was that, unbeknownst to us, our watches were now two hours behind. And we were now in Siberia.
 
The valley led us down to an abandoned mining town on a still-functioning railway. Hulking, rotting metal structures leaned crookedly in the snow. The molybdenum (a metal with an unusually high melting point) mine had dried up and the people left. Things are always abandoned rather than removed in remote Russia. That night we were invited in by a young man and his family who were staying in their dacha beside the railway for a long weekend. Vadim, Natasha and their young children fired up the banya (sauna) for us where we scraped ourselves clean, sluiced the dead skin off with cold water, and once again donned our dirty clothes for the last two days to Kharp: our first resupply point. Our shy but charming hosts spoke halting English which they learnt together with audio lessons. They were also skiers and friends of Nadia and Slava in Vorkuta. 
 
We skied along a frozen river surface towards the village in clear sunshine. The weather had been generally much kinder since entering the mountains. Kharp perches on the eastern hip of the Urals. We were finally below the tree line and so now on the ‘taiga’ rather than the tundra. As we approached the first buildings, we saw a snowmobile track running up a bank toward them. We followed it and were soon at the corner of a large razorwired compound with several armed, sour-faced guards striding towards us wearing fur hats and leading mean-looking Alsatians. Kharp was originally built as a gulag prison for forced labour during the Soviet-era. Most of these sites had closed down but this one is still an active prison. We smiled nervously at the guards and found our way around the compound to Kharp’s only hotel for a weekend of rest.
 
Tomorrow we embark on the next section of our adventure which will take us out of the Arctic Circle and southward through the mountains for 3-4 weeks. ​
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WE MADE IT...ahem...back to Vorkuta!

5/3/2017

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Written by Callie Morgigno​, expedition partner on Following the Line
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Well, we’re back in Vorkuta, in the Russian Arctic, after a one-week first attempt. We have several reasons for the decision to turn back and re-group. First, we had planned to try to find some kind of lift, by snow tractor perhaps, as far north as possible, so that we weren’t spending over a week skiing just to reach our start point. We weren’t able to find a ride, so we took off on skis just 10 kilometers north of Vorkuta, with the intention of skiing north 200 kilometers to the coast, and starting our traverse of the entire Ural range from its northernmost point.
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In Vorkuta, with our Couchsurfing host, Vasily
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The end of Day 1, Charlie decides an ice beard may, in fact, NOT be the way to go...
​Temperatures were registering -30°C in the afternoons, and we aren’t totally sure how cold it got during the night. However, I think, due to the extreme cold, we were using much more fuel than I had anticipated! We were going through our 0.5 liter bottles in less than two days, which is more fuel than I had previously used even at 17,000 ft on Denali.  At this rate of fuel consumption, we would have 18 days worth of fuel, which, combined with not getting a lift north, would not be enough to complete the first leg.

​In addition to our fuel shortage and the general lackluster feeling of skiing north through freezing head/side winds simply to reach our starting point, Charlie had developed some pretty serious blisters on the inside arches of both feet. Looking at a three-month long ski traverse, it seemed wise to give his initial blisters time to heal and harden, before putting them through the relentless trek ahead.
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Someone should have worn-in their boots more...
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Needless to say, it was still a hard decision to turn back so quickly after setting out, but we had an entire day of sitting out a severe whiteout to discuss it.  So, here we are: leisurely re-grouping at a Soviet-era gastinitsa  (guest house) in Vorkuta. However, this stay in Vorkuta has proved very lucky! We met a woman named Nadia, who owns a camping/fishing/outdoor store in Vorkuta. She speaks English, and even named her shop “Alaska”, which she visited twenty or so years ago, and fell in love with. She has been an incredible resource in translation, helping us source gear, and even – finding us a ride up to the coast! Her friend, Slava, has agreed to drive us north in a souped-up snow tractor/tank vehicle. He does some kind of trading business with the Nenets, the indigenous people of the Russian Arctic, bringing them supplies and bringing back dried fish. The idea of visiting an indigenous settlement is really exciting, but there seem to be government restrictions in the area due to its location on the coast. Most likely, we won’t get permission to visit the settlement, Ust-Kara, but instead will be dropped at the top of the mountain range.
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PictureSt. Basil's Cathedral, Moscow
Meanwhile, we’ve been practicing Russian with the ladies (all ladies for some reason!) staying and working at our guesthouse. They all seem to prefer to talk with Charlie, must be his British charm… or perhaps that he knows much more Russian than I do. Every time I want to say the complicated greeting “Zdravstvujtye”, I seem to come out with “Nazdroveya” (which means “cheers”!) or good-bye, or something else that doesn’t make sense.
 
We spent Friday and Saturday night drinking the only locally-brewed beer in town at the pub that our new friend Nadia also owns. We seem to be the only tourists that have ever been there, and everyone is very friendly and wants to say hello, take pictures with us, and herd us into the back room for illicit shots of whiskey.
Vorkuta is probably a difficult place to live; it’s extremely remote, there are no roads in or out, and it can only be accessed from Moscow via a 45-hour long train ride. Most people here work in the mining industry, and our friends told us that last year, a local mine exploded, killing thirty-six people, and resulting in about 1,000 jobs lost. Vorkuta was initially settled as a Stalinist-era gulag, which means that ‘political enemies’ were forcibly relocated here to serve out sentences of slave labor. In fact, one resident told us that the only foreigners he’d ever heard of in Vorkuta were Germans visiting their ex-POW grandparents who never made it home after being released, often many years after the armistice.
 
Before arriving, we found an article describing present day Vorkuta as an “economic gulag”, because people cannot afford to leave. I don’t know how much of this is true, but the city center at least is bustling with well-stocked shops and is livelier than I expected. It’s hard to get a real feel for a place in such a short time.

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Detail on a statue in downtown Moscow. Perhaps depicting the silly bourgeoisie?
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A visit with an all-time favorite. Fyodor Dostoevsky outside Moscow's Lenin Library
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Expedition Planning

7/2/2017

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Expedition planning is both exciting and exasperating. There’s no right or wrong way to do things; no textbook with all the answers. By its very nature it’s a vague business. Many expeditions probe into uninhabited corners of the world and are an exploration into little known places. They are often things that have never been done. So, naturally, there’s usually little information to be had.

This week I found myself pouring meticulously over Russian military-issued topographical maps of mountains in the Polar Ural region. I was searching for possible re-supply points on a 1,700-mile winter ski traverse starting on the Arctic coast of Russia and running south through the length of the Ural mountains.

“Where the hell is that village?” I asked again. “What did you say it’s name was? Polypripstaya? Polypripskova? Pripoly-yardstick?!” My teammate Callie was hunched over a computer, strafing across barren snowy tracts on Google Earth.
"Which village?"
"The one with more syllables than inhabitants. You know, Polyparacetamol, Poly-sir-prance-alot!
“It’s called Pripolyarnyy.”
“That's the one. What're the co-ordinates again.”
“They haven’t changed from when you last asked.”
“Well then, Prip-poly-pavlova should be right here,” I said, jabbing my fingertip down on a patch of Arctic tundra, completely devoid of markings.
“Wait, how old did you say those maps were again? Like, from the Soviet times, right? 1950s or something.”
“Of course! How stupid. Poly-Prittstick must not have existed when they made the maps.”
 
Many such confusions have unravelled in my cramped living room recently. Our research is conducted surrounded by piles of thermal clothing, scrapyards of stove parts in desperate need of repair, and precariously perched skis with shiny new bindings glinting enticingly in the corner. We are about to set off on a 5,600-mile triathlon (ski-paddle-cycle) travelling the length of the Europe-Asia border. This is the first ever expedition to do so and it’s expected to take 8 months.

The objective of the expedition is to interview people along this perceived boundary and ask them what they know or think of it. In reality there is no such thing as a continental divide between Europe and Asia. Eurasia is a huge, single landmass. However, for over 2,500 years Europeans have propagated this arbitrary dividing line as a way of differentiating between “enlightened” Christian Europe and “barbarous” infidel Asia. Upon completing the expedition we plan to put forward a case (through writing, film and speaking) for finally putting to bed the pernicious, prejudice-producing concept of a line cutting through the middle of Eurasia.

Back in the flat, working through the bottomless ‘to do’ list, in amongst saying goodbyes to friends and family (inevitably involving more alcohol than my training schedule would advise), is a never ending task: cut ski skins, freeze batteries to test longevity at low temperatures, modify clothing, calculate necessary rations, grow an unsightly beard for warmth in Arctic winter (Callie is exempt from this chore), print maps, practice using video camera with bulky gloves on, learn the Russian for “I’m cold and hungry”, test and re-test GPS units, ruthlessly eliminate any arguably superfluous kit to cut weight, get to know teammate (Callie and I have only met twice before).

With only 12 days to departure the clock is ticking but we’re riding out the chaos safe in the knowledge that as soon as we fly north our to do list will simplify. Ski, eat, sleep, repeat.

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This blog was originally written for TRIBE who have generously provided the expedition with a supply of their excellent sports nutrition products.
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85KG of luggage ready for the taxi to Gatwick
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