Doing the Northwest Passage, the hard way

Eric and Sarah McNair Landry stand amidst some of the gear they packed for a a 75-day, 3,000-kilometre kite-skiing trip through the Northwest Passage. The adventure got underway March 16 ffor the brother-sister team, who are blogging about their expedition at pittarak.com. (PHOTO BY CHRIS WINDEYER)

Any trip, it seems, begins with a last minute scramble to ensure everything is packed.

Sarah and Eric McNair-Landry are involved in their own scramble, but in this case, they’re making last-minute preparations for a 75-day, 3,000-kilometre journey by kite-ski through the Northwest Passage, which began March 16 with a flight to Inuvik.

Preparations for such a trip involve far more than just packing a suitcase. The brother-sister team is packing satellite phones, rip-stop nylon kites, skis, heavy-duty boots and solar panels.

They’re arranging for supply drops of food along their route, which will take them from Tuktoyaktuk to Pond Inlet.

Along the way, they’ll have to be prepared for shifting pack ice, leads, polar bears and any number of other natural hazards. So why undertake such a massive trip?

“Nobody’s done it before,” Sarah, 24, says, adding that the 3,000-kilometre expanse is one of the last places in the world you can kite-ski that kind of distance without encountering a major city.

“The other big reason is it’s in our backyard,” Eric, 25, says. “It’s really close to us… It’s really awesome that we get that opportunity right in our backyard.”

Along the way, the pair plan stops in several Nunavut communities, including Gjoa Haven, which played its own important role in the history of the Northwest Passage, as the temporary home of Norwegian polar explorer Roald Amundsen, who learned Inuit survival techniques that helped him become the first person to reach the South Pole in 1911.

Eric says he and his sister plan to take time in each community to talk to hunters about local ice and weather conditions to help plan their exact route as they travel.

“We’d like to do talks at the schools and just meet people,” Eric says.

The pair also plan to blog the expedition at pittarak.com, although they want to offer readers something more than the standard expedition diary fare of “It’s beautiful here. I’m cold.”

They’ve lined up Nunavut residents historians, climate experts, ice scientists and artists to write “mini-articles” on the various elements of the trip.

“We want to use the expedition as a method of tying together all these little stories from all different angles and just use the expedition as kind of a thread that brings them all together,” Eric says.

Sarah says they’ll also produce some one-minute short films offering how-to advice and humourous asides from the trail.

For the McNair-Landrys, this kind of trip is almost routine, and decidedly close to home.

The pair have both skied to the South Pole, and kite-skied across the Greenland ice cap no fewer than five times. At this point, a trip to the North Pole is almost a commute.

And if you think that a brother and sister, travelling mostly alone, in the elements, for more than two months, might get on one another’s nerves from time to time, you’re not wrong.

But Sarah says the two are so used to travelling together in hostile environments that the predictability is preferred to the unknown quirks of strangers.

“It’s so much better to go with somebody you know well and you know his bad side and his good side,” she says.

“Or hers,” Eric interjects.

The Northwest Passage has graduated from being a graveyard for British sailors to the perceived frontline of the very open question of what is going to happen in the Arctic as polar ice levels recede and nations begin to eye the region as a source for natural resources.

It’s expected that commercial ships will one day traverse the passage regularly, and the number of private vessels sailing through the passage is increasing every summer.

But few travel the entire region before the ice breaks up, and fewer still travel on skiis while being pulled along by the wind.

(And if there’s no wind, the pair will have to push themselves along with ski poles — with two 150-pound sledges of equipment and supplies tied to their backs.)

So for the McNair-Landrys, this trip is an opportunity to remind the world that the Arctic is still remote, and despite what climate change is doing to the region, the Arctic is still frozen.