Intro – Lets Goto the North Pole!

(photo courtesy of Glenn Wallace)

So what is this all about?

The adventures of Stevan and Kristin continue (flying in zero gravity last year wasn’t quite enough), and in less than 2 weeks we depart on a 5,000 mile adventure to the Arctic Circle and back. We are competing in the Alcan 5000 Winter Rally which departs from Seattle, takes us up through British Columbia, into the Yukon, past the Arctic Circle and eventually to Tuktoyuktuk in the Northwest Territories, which is the furthest drivable point in North America. We will finish approximately 2 weeks later in Jasper, AB, which co-incidentally is Kristin’s favorite place on the planet (so far).

Since most people have never heard of Tuktoyuktuk or have any idea where that is, so you can click on this link for a map:

Tuktoyuktuk, NWT, Canada

Route

We made the decision to compete in this event almost a year a go, and it has been a serious financial and personal time commitment for both the preparation, and the event itself. Just the other day Kristin was talking about how 3 of the things she dislikes the most are doing math (as she pretty much does that all day), getting car-sick and being cold. This is sort of ironic as Kristin will be primarily acting in the role of navigator, which means she will pretty much be doing math, in temperatures up to -50 C, in the car, for 2 weeks solid. Why are we doing this you might ask? Here’s are our top 3 reasons:

• We want bragging rights to say we’ve driven north of the Arctic Circle.
• We both want to see Aurora Borealis (the Northern Lights). Multiple Times.
• We want to drive on the ice roads as seen on the History Channel TV Show – Ice Road Truckers.
• We are running out of crazy adventure ideas (honestly, when we both heard about this event, we had pretty much decided to go)

Our plan with this blog is to provide our friends and family with some insight to this time of our lives during the last few weeks of preparation and during the event itself. We’re not exactly sure what the internet access will be like north of say, Prince George, BC, but as we are technophiles we will both have Internet smart-phones and 2 laptops with wifi. Worst case scenario is that we will call MikeP (tugger) from the sat-phones and give him updates to transcribe onto this blog.

We are expecting temperatures of upto -50 C, so your thoughts, comments, and encouragement is very much appreciated throughout the duration of the event.

– Stevan and Kristin