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The
next morning, my team was on breakfast duty, which involved boiling
up enough water for everybody's flasks, making porridge and setting
out the lunch goods. The family who lived there were also in the
kitchen, and the lady I spoke to said that this was just the start of
the ski season, as it was too cold earlier in the year – and that
she might be able to ski up until the middle of June. She had
apparently skied down the river in the last week of May the previous
year.
This was an easy day, with breakfast an
hour late at 8:30 and some repairs to sledges before we set off. The
dogs had been encamped amongst trees, and I found Siberian Tits
flitting amongst them – the first lifer of the trip – which I
managed to point out to both Alastair and David, and even managed a
couple of photos (which I managed with one eye still on my team).
The distance was the same as the first day, but mostly up a river and
over a lake, travelling at the centre of a great bowl of white with a
blue sky overhead. Shortly after we set off, we had more birds –
several Willow Grouse, flying from across the river, over our heads.
David said later he thought he'd seen as many as 30.
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I think I was the only one who managed to fall off that day. Given the
easy conditions, I thought I should practice manoeuvring the sledge
in advance of the big downhill we'd warned of on the last day. I got
pretty adept at getting the sledge up onto a 30 degree angle by
pushing my centre of balance off to the side. Judy, behind me,
called out to suggest I try standing on my head as well. I'd noticed
BBC David leaning down to take footage at dog's eye view, and tried
the same trick. That worked, looking forward, but looking back at
the sledge behind, I was hanging off the side of the sledge and it
all came tumbling down on top of me. Fortunately, I had my camera
around my neck and even more luckily, the snow anchor slammed into
the snow and brought the dogs up short. I was back on and going in
about 30 seconds. When I looked back at Judy, she enjoyed a good
chortle at my expense, so I had to have another go at getting a good
snap of her, but there were no further mishaps.
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The evening routine was fairly settled by this stage. We swung to a halt
to wait for “the staff” to tie the dog's stakeout lines to trees
or posts; one or two of those with quieter dog teams and good
knotting skills were able to help with this process. Then we'd be
assigned out piece of chain and line up our four dogs in a row –
wheel dogs before lead dogs. Once they were all on the line, take
off their harnesses and stick them back on the sledge in a memorable
order then, if others were still waiting, help them get their dogs
settled for the night. Then we'd park all our sledges in a group,
find out which hut we were sleeping in, and see what beds were still
available. There would be a little cast iron oven to warm the room,
and the fire needed either starting or stoking, before getting some
water on for tea and coffee. The coffee drinkers would, inevitably,
take the nearly boiled water whilst the tea drinkers waited for a
proper boil, and hoped someone would make up some milk from the
powder, and that we could find the sugar. Whilst Per Thore made up
the dog food, we had some relaxing time, where the diarists would get
to work and anyone with any energy left went out to take photos or
“gather the ambience”. Here at Joatkajavri (known as Jotka, with
a hard J), there were a couple of Icelandic horses, which apparently
have a different gait to other horses. There was also a passle of
skidooers who stopped at the “big house” for half an hour. Then
the sun would set and the dinner crew would get going. I ended up
never doing dinner, due to the swap on Tuesday night, but it was well
planned. The kitchens at Gargia made up all the dinners for the week
and put them into sealed bags, so our chicken dinner with pasta and
sauce was a matter of boiling up a couple of bags of pre-cooked
chicken breasts, a bag of sauce and cooking up spaghetti. After
dinner, we had a briefing, with a recap of the day done and an
outline of the next day, including a request for teams to do the dogs
and the cooking. My team must have got the porridge recipe right, as
we got to do it the next day as well. Some evenings, we were awake
enough for general chat, or to ask Per Thore more about life in these
lands.
