Day 18: April 20, 2026
A phone conversation with someone in a position to know confirms that struggles with unanticipated cold April temperatures are not merely a result of elevation and may be due to a historically cold month.
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Hello, this is Will here. It's April 20th, Day 18 here. Another really cold day, miserable day. I took the day off because of weather yesterday, and I was on fuel rations, so that makes all the difference. So sitting in a tent, no fuel is just kind of tough, but that's part of the adventure here, at least the beginning part here. Adventure has been the cold weather and the deep snow to start with and the relaying and the really tough situations. You get what you get. You don't always get what you order. I don't order anything. I just take it as it comes.
I traveled some today. I did a relay for a cache. It's hard to stick around in a camp a second day. That would have been horrible. But it was very marginal taking the tent down in the wind, and it was 11 below with a strong wind this morning. Right now, it's 4 below. It's about a 20-mile-an-hour wind, and I'm in the tent here.
And I talked to my pilot, Dave Olesen. Dave's been up here at his place in the Barrens on the east side for 40 years, so he keeps weather records, and, of course, being a pilot, bush pilot, you know, you're good at the weather, and that's what kind of ... you run dogs, you talk dogs, you fly a plane: weather's a big deal. And I talked, just got off the phone with him, and he said on his record, Dave, this is the coldest April in 40 years, so that was some good consolation. I didn't know for sure. Is it the higher elevation? You know, there's no weather stations in this area that I'm in. This is like ... very few people have ever been here, let alone having weather records. It's both ... Dave gave me an interesting ... the Great Slave Lake, which is a huge lake, and the Great Bear Lake, which is where I started from, is a larger, even a larger lake. Both these lakes are right around 500 feet. I'm about ... let's see, what am I now? 900 feet above that? Yeah, about 900 feet above that. That elevation might be something to do with it, but the jet stream probably has.
Dave and I date way back. Our first major expedition we did together, 1980, we did a trip up the coast of Hudson Bay and then into Baker Lake. It was about a 500-600-mile jaunt, and we both had our own dogs back in that day. Dave is much younger than me by about, I think, 12 or 14 years. And we date way back. That trip in 1980 was a coming of age for both of us. It really turned me on to major expeditions. And, you know, it was ... I'd never conceived of the Arctic or the Barrens. That was my first thing. And the really brutal weather there, too, that's always bad in that area. And then that was an inspiration for me for expeditions. And then Dave's inspiration was bush pilot, and he's been a bush pilot now, he moved to Canada back then, him and his wife, Kristin, have been together. They raised their two kids. Home schooling them, the whole thing. I did a couple of pieces on video. I don't know if they've showed it yet. But this is '04 when I passed through. And the two kids there were running dogs, real cute little thing. But Dave's the real person and the last of the major, you know, bush pilots. And he also still has dogs. He has about 20-some dogs now. He ran the Iditerod rod in the 80s. And he's the real thing. He's 200 miles east of Yellowknife with nobody in between. But so, anyways, I'll tune in tomorrow. And Earth Day is in a couple of days. This is Will on March ... what is it? April 20th, day 18th, 2026. Over and out.
[The videos Will mentions can be found on the posting titled “Flying With Dave Olesen” from this log.
Dave’s personal blog entry for March affirms that that month also was the coldest he’s recorded.]
Will’s location at the end of Day 18. Visit Will’s interactive map for complete control of magnification and orientation.
This shot from a 2004 video shows Dave Olesen’s daughter mushing, which Will mentions in today’s dispatch. The video and another that surveys the Olesen homestead may be found on the previous post on this log titled “Flying with Dave Olesen.”