On trail 9:00am, travelled till 1:30pm. The weather is getting too warm to travel during the day so we camped intending to start about midnight. The snow is getting very soft and the dogs feel lazy. Took a mer. Alt. [mercury altimeter] to get appro. Local time. Weather a.m. foggy, light SE wind, cleared up during the day. The wind swung around to the westward.
May 23rd, 1917
On trail 12:30am. Had lots of rough going until 4:30am when we came on some fairly good leads. Hard to pick trail on account of thick weather and snow drifting during the first four hours. We had to cross lots of big soft drifts. The drifts were a little harder after we came on the leads. Stopped at 7:00am. Can’t see over 100 yards. Dist. Made 15 miles.
Aarnout Castel
Master of the North Star
Library and Archives Canada/Mikan 97779
In the Spring of 1917, Stefansson had sent Aarnout Castel and Karsten Andersen south from Melville Island to the expedition camp on southern Banks Island. Part of their goal was to try to find any trace of the missing men, Peter Bernard and Charlie Thomsen, who had tried unsuccessfully to reach Melville Island during the winter.
As the Arctic temperatures rise in the spring, the softer snow makes travelling difficult. When Castel talks about easier travelling on the “leads,” he is referring to the long narrow areas of newer ice which represent places where large cracks in the ice have opened, then re-frozen. With much less snow on the new ice than on the older parts of the floe ice, travelling is much smoother and faster.
They were crossing McClure Strait between Melville and Banks Island. This strait has been known for its thick and hard ice in the past. The ice of McClure Strait prevented the tanker Manhatten and the supporting icebreaker, John A. Macdonald, from traversing this arm of the Northwest Passage in 1969.
Though McClure Strait is impenetrable in late winter, it does not freeze solid until December or January. Other parties and other expeditions ran into trouble trying to cross the Strait too early in the winter. With the warming Arctic climate and changes in sea ice thickness and longevity, McClure Strait will not likely be the same barrier to shipping in the future.
David
