Thursday, June 11, 1998
Hey, it's Todd. Today was a bit of a rest day. After we talked to you yesterday, after climbing Gunnbjornsfjeld, we had dinner and two, or two to three hours later, we took off to get a re-supply. We skied about, I guess, probably 10 kilometers up to climb Gunnbjornsfjeld, climbed the peak, came back down and ate dinner. After we had dinner last night, Dierk convinced us to go down and catch the re-supply. We really didn't have any idea where it was. The coordinates were a little off of what they had given us. It ended up being 30 kilometer ski round trip, it took us eight hours, so we ended up putting in about 50 kilometers yesterday. Pretty amazing night, it was 20 hours, we got back at 8am this morning. Not a narrow valley, it's actually quite wide. It looks like it's maybe a mile, but actually eight or nine kilometers wide, this valley we're in. We skied down the valley, out close to the ice pack actually, where the last range of mountains exists before you get out into the ice cap of Greenland and head towards the west coast. We just jumped on our skis and took off and tried to avoid crevasses. Skied down as far as we could, and we were able to get down there and find the cache. It was much, much farther away than we thought. It took us an hour and thirty minutes to ski down there and a good six, six and a half hours, something like that to ski back. It seemed like it took forever. We were pulling sleds and moving a couple of kilometers an hour. After we saw our camp, we thought we were close and it took another two and a half hours to reach our camp from there. It was pretty amazing. We're back, and we are taking care of our feet and life is better. The ski plane couldn't land here so it dropped some supplies, as I said, 15 kilometers away. Some fresh fruit and a variety things that make us all happy here in base camp, some fresh meat and some things like that.
— Todd Burleson, Expedition Leader
 68 58 29 42 [click to zoom] (photo: Alpine Ascents Collection)
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