Day 16: April 18, 2026
Will experienced a dramatic shift in the Arctic environment on Day 16, going from sub-zero temperatures overnight into a morning "lunar landscape" that became a warm but challenging whiteout.
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Yes, hello. It's Will here, April 18th, day 16 on the Haldane River on the headwaters. This morning around 9 o'clock I checked the thermometer. It was 21 degrees above zero, so that's a pretty incredible rise overnight. That's over a 40-degree difference within a 24-hour period. I was totally surprised. There wasn't any sign of this at all in the sky. Usually you can see when something's coming in. But in the early morning when I was packing up and that, there was this beautiful kind of a misty haze. It just set the whole area, kind of almost a lunar, a white lunar landscape. It was quite beautiful. You could see the sun above the haze. It looked like one of those days where it was kind of a foggy, hazy morning that kind of gets burned off, but I knew better that that wouldn't happen here.
And then as I traveled, most of the day I was traveling in what we could call maybe ravines, higher hills, a couple hundred feet around on either side. It made a lot of elevation gain. It was a really exhausting day because of elevation I was going up. But at first the fog did stay. And for four hours or so, five hours, hazy clouds above. You could see the sun through it. And then gradually that got a little thicker. And the ground, you have what we call a whiteout on the ground. In other words, you can't see the perspective in front of you. Talk about these beautiful, you know, snow drifts and [...] and beautiful, you know, shapes and that on the surface. You couldn't see any snow drifts at all. I mean, these are all hardback drifts. And so, in other words, when you hit a drift, you have to pull over that bump. It's like a bump. They were carrying a heavy load on it. So you couldn't see that, but you could definitely feel it.
But I was on skis all day today. And then the wind started coming up a little bit. Something told me it didn't look like this was a major change in temperature. But I'm not sure how it was going to play out. But it did get ... wind picked up from the northeast as the afternoon wore on. And then it started getting pretty hazy, pretty white-outy, blowing snow under wind. And, you know, I was really getting tired. So it's hard to find a flat spot here, at least the last ... I was making camp on the Bloody River, it was all soft snow, but here I have the drifts and so forth. But I noticed that on the GPS I was on a pond. You couldn't tell it. And I could tell by my ski poles there was ice underneath it. So it was kind of rare to have a flat spot like a pan, a pan of ice like that. So I needed good protection for the tent this evening with this coming up wind. And this worked out quite well because I was able to put these 10-inch, 12-inch ice pitons. You screw them in. We used to use them for holding a dog team of 10. And, you know, even when a fox went in front of the dogs where they all lunged at the fox, these ice screws held real well. But I needed to get my tent anchored down, which I did on that. And I had ice to – rather than snow, ice this evening to drink.
But it was really touch and go, though, getting this tent up. It was a hard setup. The problem being alone, you know, the whole tent can blow away. You've got to watch anything. A stuff sack, anything you leave on the ground can blow away. You have to be real careful. You get a situation where the lighting drops real fast in these coming up blows like this. First of all, when the sun gets low on the horizon, it goes into the clouds. You're seeing the clouds kind of horizontally. That darkens it. But the danger part is when there's blowing snow in the air when it's starting to get dark like this. And when the sun hits that angle, you have a sudden drop of darkness. And there wasn't any real danger here. But I've seen this happen on the Arctic Ocean before where a sudden drop, you know, we can really get lost real quickly. But it was touch and go getting the tent up. But it's really amazingly how warm it is right now. It's 11 degrees above zero. There's no ... effortless ... I don't even have the stove on in the tent right now. So, anyways, we'll see where the weather goes tonight. It could go either way. It might be just a blowout. We'll see what – it's very interesting to see what's going to happen here. And signing off here, it's day 16th and April 18th. Good workout today. Over and out.
Will’s location at the end of Day 16. Visit Will’s interactive map for complete control of magnification and orientation.
White out on the Ekström Shelf Ice, Weddell Sea, Antarctica. Will describes afternoon flat light conditions similar to this in today's dispatch.
(source: Wikipedia: Whiteout)