DAY 17 24/05/2015 AND WE GOT PICKED UP BY A BOAT
Good to picked up by the boat which came up the Stikine river. At this stage, we had no batteries and food left. Couple of hours later, we came to the town of Wrangell. But do we really want to get back to civilization ?
CONCLUSION
We became the first expedition to complete successfully the traverse of Stikine ice field from North to South. It proved challenging and sometimes dangerous. Pretty much every single day on this expedition was special. ''What a day!'' became basically our quote at the end of each day. The glacier is active, it is subject to many different pressures, with ice melting in the compressed valleys changing the configuration of the environment. Certain branches of the glacier, in particular the entrance, surprised us. We hadn't planned to have to spend 4 days on foot in Sawyer, crossing crevasse after crevasse for several kilometers. There were some very fractured sections of the glacier with chaotic complex ice, and no possibility to avoid them or get off the glacier. Going off the ice on solid is also quite challenging in regard of the steepness of the mountains around. Yet some of the area forced us to take long detours in order to avoid large crevasses fields and avalanche dangers. " Very hard but amazing experience" declares Borge. It was my toughest expedition so far. I don't want to imagine the same trip with bad weather. Oh no !
On a ''scientific level'', we have discovered a snow, greyed by soot, made up of particles resulting from the partial combustion of hydro carburants. In these grey zones, the sunlight's reflection is stronger and, as we know, a grey or black colour absorbs light and matter heats up. Here is an example of a bird's feather they found along the route. The snow surrounding the feather had melted so much that the feather was at the bottom of a hole. The same thing had happened to the carbon particles, as with the grey coloured feather. But if the feather fell naturally onto the snow, the soot came from industrial activity which means, without a shadow of a doubt, the implication of humans in global warming.
CONCLUSION
We became the first expedition to complete successfully the traverse of Stikine ice field from North to South. It proved challenging and sometimes dangerous. Pretty much every single day on this expedition was special. ''What a day!'' became basically our quote at the end of each day. The glacier is active, it is subject to many different pressures, with ice melting in the compressed valleys changing the configuration of the environment. Certain branches of the glacier, in particular the entrance, surprised us. We hadn't planned to have to spend 4 days on foot in Sawyer, crossing crevasse after crevasse for several kilometers. There were some very fractured sections of the glacier with chaotic complex ice, and no possibility to avoid them or get off the glacier. Going off the ice on solid is also quite challenging in regard of the steepness of the mountains around. Yet some of the area forced us to take long detours in order to avoid large crevasses fields and avalanche dangers. " Very hard but amazing experience" declares Borge. It was my toughest expedition so far. I don't want to imagine the same trip with bad weather. Oh no !
On a ''scientific level'', we have discovered a snow, greyed by soot, made up of particles resulting from the partial combustion of hydro carburants. In these grey zones, the sunlight's reflection is stronger and, as we know, a grey or black colour absorbs light and matter heats up. Here is an example of a bird's feather they found along the route. The snow surrounding the feather had melted so much that the feather was at the bottom of a hole. The same thing had happened to the carbon particles, as with the grey coloured feather. But if the feather fell naturally onto the snow, the soot came from industrial activity which means, without a shadow of a doubt, the implication of humans in global warming.