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- The most northern body of land in the world,
Greenland.
7/8 of its terrain lies under a blanket of solid ice.
Temperatures fall to 75 degrees below zero.
Six months of the year, the sun shines continuously.
But during the winter, the pure white snow
is shrouded in darkness.
- It is imperative that we push
the outpost line of defense
of the free world far to the north,
in the very shadow of the Pole itself,
the mysteries of the Arctic wastes.
Until recent times, the northern part of Greenland
was a total unexplored wilderness.
You may well wonder what Americans are doing
in this polar wilderness of ice and snow.
A glance at the globe of the world, however,
will readily show that the shortest air route
from the Americas to Eurasia is over the North Pole.
Seismic studies revealed that the center of the ice cap
is almost 10 times as deep as
the Empire State Building is high.
Never before had heavy vehicles ascended the caps or attempted
to travel over its rugged surface.
- Fuel caches had been stored
along the trail the previous
year, and air drops, showered supplies from the sky.
Crevasses, many of them camouflaged
by a deceptive bridge of snow, were an ever present danger.
They varied in size from shallow cracks in the ice to massive ice
caverns as large as a cathedral.
Now, over a half century later,
other Americans await the signal to start.
Expedition 7 was a project that
Greg and I started talking about in 2011.
And the intention was
to take the same vehicle to all seven continents,
which is something that had never been accomplished before.
It wound up taking two and a half years.
I was in the field 218 days.
It was a journey of 56,000 miles and we had about 53 people
play a role in the expedition.
It was one of the coolest things I've ever done.
In the wake of, E7, um,
I guess the natural question was, what next?
So I got a call from Greg.
He said, hey, come down to Salt Lake.
I'd like to talk about a little project that I have in mind.
I wanted something else that was challenging,
something that had never been done before, something
that was, let's say, unprecedented.
Greenland brought together all of the pieces that
make it the most extreme.
Even when you compare driving across Antarctica,
going to the South Pole and doing, a landmass, crossing
Greenland was far more difficult and for a lot of reasons.
In Antarctica, there's already existing infrastructure.
People have already done it before many times.
And with Greenland, that had never been done before.
Those glaciers had not been climbed by a vehicle before
and we were in literally uncharted territory.
There has been one notable expedition that crossed
Greenland from the west coast to the east coast.
That was done by Arctic trucks in the late 90s,
but no one had even considered trying to do it from
south to north because the distances were an order of
magnitude more, and the difficulties
were an order of magnitude more,
including fuel drops and other
logistics that would be impossible to consider
really beforehand for us to attempt it,
for us to leave from the south and start heading north.
It had never been done before.
My roles in the beginning were basically planning the vehicles,
uh, the route, logistics around, fuel.
For me, the goal is simple and that is to reach Wulff Land.
If we can do that,
the trip will be a success.
The route up north was unknown,
so we're going into a quite
of uh, unhospitaled area which cannot sustain any life.
So the route across Greenland starts
in Isortoq at the reindeer farm.
And then we need to get up onto the glacier,
and then onto the ice sheet, and then from there we need
to get to all of our fuel drops along the eastern coastline.
And then from there we're up into Wulff Land in the north
and we're going to actually touch ground
before turning around and heading back
to those fuel stops and then to the summit station
and ultimately exiting the glacier at Kangerlussuaq
and getting to our shipping container.
And we've got to do all of this in three weeks.
Having the right team
supporting this project was absolutely critical.
Dr. Jon Solberg was our medical doctor.
Kurt Williams, head of refueling and, camp logistics.
Torfi Johannsson was lead mechanic.
Clay was a driver and the film maker for the expedition.
We had this amazing team of people that had finally come
together and we were moving towards the reindeer farm.
And I remember reflecting on that.
It was just really this sense of family,
this sense of familiarity that I think is the best way
to start a trip like this.
There wasn't any anxiety around the people that
I was traveling with now.
There was certainly anxiety about the unknowns to come,
but it wasn't about the people that I was there with.
There are few, adventures in one's
lifetime that he must not say no to.
He must go to no matter what.
And this place of Greenland,
this great unknown, it was that for me I had to go.
I had to make sure that I was there to experience this.
Doing an expedition in Greenland is, like this,
Greenland is very, what was the word?
Ambitious.
How do you feel, Greg?
Well, at the moment I have a small bit of encouragement
that we're actually in contact with the, barge that
transported our trucks up.
But for the last couple hours, I've been really nervous.
I think it was interesting to see
how the group was just coming together
and gelling as a team,
and we kind of kept adding one or two more elements,
and everybody wondered, you know, are we going
to click and are we going to get
along and are the trucks going to be ready?
There was a lot of anxiety even before we got on the ice sheet.
Oh, baby, there's the trucks.
When I first saw the trucks on the flow ice in Isortoq,
it was a wave of emotion.
The team was together for the first time.
Clay!
What's up guys?
How you doing, buddy?
You made it?
Yeah, I did.
Pretty monumental.
We had been waiting for quite some time, and, we weren't sure,
you know, if people even could get there
because of the ice conditions.
Everything must have been very difficult.
So seeing the guys ride,
and that was the first time I met Clay.
- Hi - Emil.
- Hi, Emil. - Clay.
- Hi, Clay. - Nice to meet you.
Nice to meet you.
- How you doing? - Hi, nice to see you.
Yeah, seeing the guys with was really nice.
This is like another planet.
Uh. Getting all the gear loaded up right now.
Pulling everything off the barge.
The-- The trucks are a lot bigger than I anticipated.
They're huge and awesome.
The confidence that I have has just.
For some reason, just seeing the trucks has
skyrocketed my confidence.
So we had three vehicles
built on a Toyota Hilux.
The name of the trucks was, Emma,
the truck I was driving.
We had E7, which was Greg on the older generation.
And then we had Dreki.
Gentlemen, welcome to Isortoq.
All right, let's get set up
to go get Emil's truck.
We are here in the workshop, Stefan's workshop,
fixing this tire.
We had a little, ice incident the other day as we were
faring gear from the barge over to the station here.
Emil's truck went into the lake, cracked through the ice, and it
dented a wheel pretty bad.
We lost two tires.
We were all set when the other guys came.
Other than fixing my truck, which had fallen into a,
into a river through broken ice.
It was not, that was not, good news for us
because I knew we just had one spare tire of this type.
And, if you had to use that, we had no spare tire
for the whole expedition.
And that was, in my mind, not doable.
You don't want to head into any adventure
with a vehicle that's, you know, got something wrong with it.
We knew that truck, the AT44, we call that one, Emma,
the one that went through the ice,
we knew it had sustained damage.
It had a bent wheel, which means it took a really hard hit.
I knew something had broken or really bended.
So, my first thinking is, the expedition over.
How will we do it with two cars?
We can't carry what we need.
I think Emil carried a lot more of that stress than I did,
because that was the truck he was going to be driving.
But also he knew the implications
of what would happen if we'd be completely inoperable
and what that would mean for later on in the trip.
And I don't know that everyone even knew this,
but he called and placed an order in Iceland,
had them get a spare part, which is kind of proprietary
to that Arctic truck, and had that shipped,
hopefully in a box that we would see later on with one of
the fuel deliveries.
Again!
We drove across that on the way in, and going back,
it broke through.
So, it's not good.
Already on a pretty tortured front end.
It just always happens at the worst time,
we're just trying to leave, but stuff keeps happening.
So we have the tools #* in this one.
So our loose arrangement is tools, recovery, spares
on this side, food, and then your personal bins.
Just put wherever you need them,
because you're gonna probably run those down,
have them inside the house to be able to
start moving into your boxes.
Okay. Let's take one of these cardboard boxes.
Every single piece of equipment is crucial.
It's as close as I think I'll ever get to a--
a NASA mission or something.
Even in Antarctica,
there is some infrastructure that's designed to allow, uh,
either scientific expeditions or just adventurers
to travel across the ice sheet.
In Greenland, i'm told there's one Twin Otter that services
the entire island,
and there's a lot of demand on that.
So if we get in trouble in Greenland,
we could be in for a long wait.
Everybody's super excited and stoked.
I haven't seen anybody take a drink of water yet today either.
So at some point, maybe just grab
a candy bar and drink something, you know.
I don't think anybody will ever be able to fully
comprehend how much I worried about everybody's safety.
I mean, every single person on the expedition was 100% integral
to the success, and you just had to trust every single person.
So, I mean, nobody ever inspected my med kit
or asked for my credentials.
I think everybody just trusted that
I had had the right training
and would be able to lend assistance
in the event of an emergency.
Just like I trusted that,
um, the trucks would operate and there
would be enough fuel at the next stop, and there was enough food.
It was just.
It was collaborative survival for the entire expedition.
When we first left the reindeer farm,
the one thing that was top of mind for me is,
"don't fall through the ice.
Don't fall through the ice."
And I don't tend to feel that level of anxiety.
But it was this immediacy of,
we need to get through these freshwater lakes.
We need to get across the ice before it melts.
It was getting warmer.
The snow was melting at the reindeer farm.
We were in danger of being able
to not even make it to the glacier.
And there was no backup plan.
I remember the reindeer farmer and his son
getting out with these giant poles and testing the ice.
And then it would break through the ice and we'd have
to find a new way around.
I already knew this would be a big challenge.
I did a lot of research on the glacier, and I got help from a,
specialist glacier, team to analyze, satellite imagery,
but you still never know.
It's always this big unknown with the glacier that
is moving constantly.
One of the things that I have learned, about challenges
in expeditions and even in life, I suppose,
is that there's no point in speculating
about how bad it could be.
I was really nervous going towards that glacier
once it came into the windshield.
It was as daunting and as scary as I had imagined it.
GREG#*: But we had these two guys,
Stephan and his son, at the reindeer farm.
They had gone out, found this spot.
It just went up beautifully.
You could tell there was crevasse lines in there,
but it was all filled in.
Okay, I'm gonna take mine down to three
and see if that helps.
- GREG - It'll help later on, but right now,
we need to get you.
You can get to my right Emil
or the left.
Whatever's easier.
Either way, that's good.
Once we stepped on it, the truck started to cross it.
We weren't falling in.
Pretty soon we were past,
you know, steepest topography, terrain,
and the confidence was like,
hey, we're on top of this thing.
I had to pinch myself because the first, you know,
the last three weeks I've been afraid of this,
and it turned out to be nothing.
This is day one, and we've moved, like, this far
on the map, out of this far.
- GREG - I think it would be probably a good time
to stop driving for the day.
Let's take advantage of the remaining light,
make camp for the first time,
try to get some heat generated inside the tents while some are
Doing that, others can be refueling
and hopefully we can have a successful first night without,
trying to fumble through the dark
and, get some rest, be ready to hit
it early in the morning.
Yeah then we gotta tie it here.
I remember the first time we were behind schedule,
was the first day.
We were either gonna have to get a lot better at,
performing each one of the functions and condense the time
it took to pitch and break camp,
or we weren't gonna have time to set up camp at all.
So from the time we parked the trucks, set up camp,
made a meal, did any repairs we needed on the vehicle,
and got a full night's sleep was about a 24 hour period.
So we wound up pitching camp, I think seven times in the 20
days that we were on the ice.
Another challenge that we faced was how, to transport the fuel.
The fuel delivered by helicopter and air came
in a traditional 55 gallon drum.
Well, we would pump the fuel
either into the bladder or right into the trucks.
Part of our permission and
the permit to do this trip was that
we would leave nothing behind.
And that included those fuel drums.
So every time we emptied a drum
that we weren't going to be reusing,
we would have to make several cuts.
We'd cut the top off of it, the bottom off of it,
and one slice down the middle of it
and we could roll that up just tight enough to
fit it into another drum
and we could get five or six drums into each one.
It's noon and we still haven't left camp.
Grinding the barrels has become a big chore.
We had to get the generators out.
The generators hadn't been fueled.
They're brand new out of the box.
It's 12:39.
And we just left our first camp.
So obviously we're a little late getting started, which
is discouraging, especially since I'd like to try
to cover 150 miles today.
All right, so team Dreky back here has discussed it.
We're totally on board with a little marathon.
It is, we're looking at 497km to the DYE 2 station
on our current pace.
So anywhere, our speed's changing,
so we're anywhere between 15 and 20 hours
to get there at this pace.
So we'd love to set that as a goal.
And we fall a little short.
That's all right, but let's just motor towards that.
To me it was really simple.
We just had to cover 150 miles a day.
And if we could do 150 miles a day for 20 days, we would
cover all the ground we needed.
Sounds easy enough.
But I learned in the first couple of days
that trying to stick to that schedule was really difficult.
So Emil and I were out in the lead,
and we're trying to work through
these really difficult conditions and that
we just really can't see.
And all of a sudden, it felt like
we were in really deep snow, like the vehicle was fighting.
And I said, "I think it's something with his steering."
And he says, like, he says, "I don't know if it's
the snow or the steering."
And then Greg cracked through the radio, and he says,
the radio, and he says, "I think there's something wrong
with your steering."
And, we hopped out, and the front tires were like that.
It's really hard to see.
#*: Yeah. - Nothing to see.
Torfi hops out all spirits and said, oh, well,
we'll get this fixed, you know, and crawls under there,
gets a board out, gets his yellow jumpsuit on and, you know
waves his little mechanic hands, and all of a sudden,
that thing's driving straight, and we're up and running again.
Yeah, when I was a kid,
I-- I was very curious how things work on many things
I took apart, and sometimes I was able to put them back
together and, even modified a little bit.
But, yeah, sometimes it just went into the trash.
So, yeah, that's kind of how it started.
And it's just ongoing.
It's still there.
For the first three or four days.
I remember just living with a
constant sense of frustration that no matter how hard we tried
to overcome the challenges, uh,
early on, they were mostly mechanical challenges
we couldn't get caught up.
- GREG - Yeah, we're feeling good about, doing
some marathons, I think, you know,
probably two or three marathons
during the duration of the drive.
This-- this expedition has us covering
about 3,000 miles.
As I said in the driver's meeting,
all of a sudden, I felt the truck
starting to slow down.
Like, there was some drag on the truck.
And I looked in the mirrors, and I could see that the.
The trailer was listing like this.
Hey, guys, we got a problem.
We just lost a wheel.
Um--
We're stuck.
It rolled about 100 yards ahead of the truck and literally
came to a rest between the two tracks.
As if to say, this trip will be one
challenge after another,
One obstacle in the road after another.
Copy that.
We're coming your direction.
We're going to make this the time to eat
since we're down,
and get, some water going while that's getting fixed.
It's all part of the adventure.
You See, a lot of mechanics,
they kind of repair by rote.
So they just.
They go that this is the way that it's always done.
This is the problem.
This is how I fix it.
Whereas Torfi, he looks at it more like a
scientist and dissects the issue, and he very quickly
determines the best way to fix it.
So some of the things that we think
maybe would take an hour to repair,
he'll have fixed in 20 minutes.
It's super cold.
We're all tired.
We're making our miles and kind of just chugging along.
And someone pops on the radio,
the bladder just fell off of one of the sleds.
Um, okay.
It's always something.
Towing a bag of fuel behind a big old Arctic truck
contained in a blubbery bladder
is just seemingly impossible.
And it nearly was.
It was just so much work because it just.
It doesn't want to stay anywhere where you put it.
Those sleds should be burned, and then their ashes
should be burned again.
Man, we keep making it like
20km at a time before another problem hits.
That actually took us longer to fix than a,
tire falling off the trailer.
One of the most unusual things that
I have ever experienced in all
of my Travels was the DYE 2 station.
This is part of the DEW Line that was used to
early detect Russian bombers
coming over to the United States to drop nuclear bombs.
So this was a very significant piece of military history.
And we were driving right towards it.
As we got closer and closer,
we actually started to get a sense of
just how massive this building was.
It's quite special for Arctic Trucks having
been the only cars being here before.
- That's right. - 19 years ago.
That's right.
Now it's the only cars again.
Yeha.
Nearly two decades later.
Yes.
I guess it's coming like,
running at the space station or something,
the way the snow is all drifted up
on the west side of that thing.
Yeah, let's get wind from that side a lot from the other side.
I think DYE 2 does the best job of explaining how inhospitable
the ice sheet is.
One day it was an operating radar station,
and a few days later, everyone was gone.
- GREG - Will do guys as we approach
the facility to the right.
So the DYE 2 station, they were monitoring it
in the 50s, 60s, 70s.
This was an early attack warning system.
They were keeping an eye on the air movement
and air traffic in that area.
So.
So it was a strategic position to have it located there.
And I cannot think of a more
inhospitable place to be stationed.
- Hidden behind these icy ramparts
lies one of the great military secrets of our time.
December 1950, when communist aggression was in full flood.
President Truman had proclaimed a national emergency.
Built with the permission of the Danish government,
the base would push our defense line 2000 miles to the north.
Industry developed new designs that would stand up
to the severe strain imposed by the Arctic winter.
Your corps of, army engineers.
CLAY#*: Okay, camera.
All right, coming in.
I think the biggest thing is making sure
you don't get lost in the place.
The old light fixtures and,
I mean imagine the amount of time you would have taken
to assemble this thing and the amount of expense
and effort to fly in,
what looks like to be a five story building in the middle of
the Greenland ice sheet.
And then imagine being that new recruit that lands
in an airplane and they get off
and the plane takes away and this is what they're left with.
Pretty remote.
Even wood trimmings
on some of the walls.
They tried to make it like home best they could.
- Oh, wow! - Dude!
- I know. - There's a pool table.
Oh, wow.
There were lots of things in DYE 2
that were exciting.
I was especially interested in looking around the infirmary.
There were still some medical supplies there.
Step into my office,
get tetanus.
There was a prescription for methylcarbamol,
which is a muscle relaxer that the physician had
written for somebody who works there who must have been having
some back pain or something.
And I don't know if their back is still hurting or not.
They never did get their prescription.
So the building was built so that it had stilts on all
the col- the corners, like columns, quite a few of them.
And they could raise and lower the building.
So you see here instructions on how to level the building.
Raise the building, raise all the jack support.
So using these, these are all the different columns around
the corners of the building.
They could level this place out.
And this may even tell this is like ground pressure
on each of the columns.
So it tells you how much force they're exerting.
I imagine as this thing was used in different times of the year
and heat, the building would sink into the ice and,
and move around.
So they had to constantly adjust it to keep it level.
And I don't know, there's beds in this room.
So it may have been happening enough that they were
worried about, having guys on call to move the building
in the middle of the night.
- USSR - That's right.
This thing has--
It's been frozen in time.
People walked out without
straightening up their desk or they just,
they literally stood up,
walked out to their airplane
and got on it and no one ever came back.
See if you can push it.
It's like a picture in time that you can walk around in
and you can tangibly touch the items of October 1988,
in the last moment of DYE 2's life
before the life that was in it left.
And it makes an impression on you
to see something like that.
Probably by the fourth or fifth day,
it did start to get a little monotonous.
And I remember feeling like we were a,
a bowling ball on this huge white trampoline.
These white sides that just went up to the horizon.
And no matter how far we drove, we couldn't get to a point
where we could see over it.
I don't even know how many audio books we made it
all the way through because you would press start on
them and you wouldn't like, stop for two, three days
till you're done with a book.
But it did, it was tiring.
And you wanted to get out and just stretch your legs.
You wanted to get out and just, you know, hey,
wouldn't it be so nice to lay down and sleep flat tonight?
But there just wasn't the time.
So we just kind of endure and keep moving forward.
Everybody had a lack of sleep, you know, basically from day one
throughout the expedition.
I remember I had been asleep.
I'd been taking a nap in the passenger seat and Emil was
driving and I, I kind of woke up and I look over and Emil was
completely crashed out too.
The radio was going and he was sitting.
He was sitting in the seat, like, with his hands like this
and the wheels going back and forth in the rut.
We were both completely out
and I'm like, I'm not gonna wake him up.
He had his foot-- he had his foot steady on the throttle
and nothing bad was happening.
So I just kind of like side seat drove for a while
while he was sleeping.
He finally kind of woke up and he looked over at me
and I got this big grin onto my face
and he's like, you know.
Very soon he was asleep again and, I guess I was too.
We were just.
We just kept heading and we continued.
We decided that it technically wasn't
falling asleep at the wheel unless your eyes were closed
for more than 60 seconds.
Um, we made, we made a rule that was
a real rule that if you were going to stop that you had to
get on the radio and audibly announce your intent to stop
because there was a good chance
the truck in second position or third position, uh,
the driver may have been taking a short nap and
might run into you.
All right guys, coming to a full stop.
Full stop.
Hey guys, we lost the trailer.
Come on back.
Uh, neville.
Scott.
We just happen to have a spare pintle hitch
just laying around in the back of a truck.
Actually Greg shipped that from home.
Good job Greg.
I'm pretty sure that came from Salt lake.
At 1:45 in the morning.
We're halfway on our push between our last camp
at the next fuel depot.
So we're just running all night.
It's too cold to set up camp anyway.
It's like minus 22 so it's not even comfortable to start
trying to get tents up.
So we're just going to kind of take some little naps
in the car.
Recycled drivers.
But we have to refuel because it's a long push, about 720km.
So we're draining off the bladders here,
filling up Greg's truck.
We'll drain off this front bladder draining the rest
and get onto the checkpoint where
we're meeting position one where the fuel is being flown in.
There's already 10 barrels there and 11 more showing up tomorrow.
So we'll be able to refill all these bladders
once we get there.
One of the most difficult considerations for this
expedition was planning fuel.
Not only how much fuel do we need but where do we drop it,
how much should we drop and then what do we do
if we have too much or too little and there's something as
simple as we're doing better on
fuel economy or the conditions is approved.
Let's increase the tire pressure in the tires.
It's easy to just forget that
and continue to operate at a lower pressure
which increases resistance
and then increases fuel consumption.
So it's really finding that perfect balance.
And that comes from a combination of
very in depth calculations and a lot of experience.
And then that is all filtered through what's happening
right now on the ground.
If you're wrong, we basically run out of fuel
and it's probably gonna cost five hundred thousand dollars
to get you off
and you're not gonna finish the expidition.
When we got to the first waypoint for the fuel drop
on the east coast and we're getting closer and closer
and we're expecting to begin to see
the influence of man on the horizon.
Like some barrels and drums or shapes that are not natural
in the environment and they didn't show up.
We got right to the waypoint and there was nothing there.
We are parked dead on the location,
based on Torfi's GPS and my gps,
but there's nothing here.
My guess is they flew over this and said it's too rough
for them to land, so they found something nearby.
So this was kind of a big, issue.
It triggered a calculated panic.
They even launched the drone
to go and look for the fuel
Uh, disturbance that I could see.
It does not look like sastrugi,
but I don't see any barrels by it.
I mean, we shut right down.
We stopped.
It was like satellite phone with the pilots.
We're sending messages via the inreach satellite system.
Everybody had a question mark.
Hello, Paul.
Hi, Paul.
Emil here again.
We provided the waypoint of our location.
We had them confirm the waypoint that they were
going to drop the fuel.
And then that's when we realized that the location
that they dropped it was different from where we were at.
They had a wrong location and they delivered it, uh,
to a location that was in the first original plan.
That was a trust plan made quite early.
Well, we got the info on where the fuel's at, and the bad news
is it's not here where it was supposed to be, which is our,
scheduled rendezvous point.
It's 50 miles north of here.
Okay, that means going into a crevasse area
which we have no satellite imagery for.
We have no research for.
What is the best route to take.
How do we approach this?
What's the most likely safe route?
If we have another mistake like this,
it's going to be a disaster.
So will you please call him back and say, you know,
we'll call you in two hours, three hours when we get there.
But just to confirm that we've got it.
In the meantime, please keep your
phone on your, in your palm.
Decided to go back onto our route,
which we had already planned.
And we choose kind, of a almost 90 degree on our old route
and go there in after the fuel.
I think it was about 30, 40 kilometers to go in,
in an unknown territory.
And we could see the crevices, on both sides.
Big, big relief to find those fuel drums
and know they're there.
There's one point where we're like, is this kind
of another wild goose chase?
But, we're here.
It's frigid out here.
Probably one of the coldest camps of my life,
if not the coldest camp of my life.
Making some repairs this morning.
One of the, hitch extensions cracked.
It's a lot of work pulling those sleds,
fatiguing it all through the day.
Torfi's getting all geared up to lay some weld down on it.
We're gonna add some reinforcing
bracing to it so that it doesn't do it again, hopefully.
Fingers crossed.
Let me see if you try and cross your fingers, Kurt.
They're too frozen, actually.
It's actually very important in every expedition,
successful expedition,
that, you can have the team spirit all the time.
You know, you have all the members with you.
You know, they're all working together, you know,
backing each other, up exactly like it was in this expedition.
It was amazing.
Another day in the ER.
Always problems.
Mostly the plumbing.
We basically negotiated them to come back to the location
where we were,
Take the rest of this fuel because we already knew
we didn't need all this fuel.
We could use part of this fuel
to bring part of what we had there further up west,
more on the top of the glacier.
This would save us time on the way back.
This meant we could turn, a bad thing into a good thing.
It's all working out.
We got three drums that we're putting on that we're leaving
out to fuel the airplane so it has enough fuel to go and do the
mission that we've asked it to do now.
And then we're reloading it looks like
four or five more drums that'll be sent out further
to the west so that, we don't have to come this far,
towards the coast on our return trip.
It puts our fuel in line with the straight line south.
Pilots have agreed to take at least nine and as many as 12
of these empty drums out of here.
So not only do we not have to spend hours cutting them up,
we don't have to haul them with us, all the way back and forth.
So this is a big win for the team.
We're calling this the last flying fuel drop.
Dro-- The airplane dropped these five drums off yesterday,
Drove through the night to get here now.
Now we're gonna drop off a couple more drums,
and this is our cache for the way home.
And it is wicked out right now.
Whooh.
You think you're gonna roll up at the gas station
and fill up
but when you're talking about moving drums by hand
and pumping them and pumps working in
sub zero temperatures, it just nothing is easy.
And then I got this one mustache hair that's frozen down,
and every time I smile the wrong way,
it pulls right on the one that hurts the most.
So I'm looking forward to getting
in the trucks and getting thawed out a little bit.
We started on a cadence of drive
for two or three Days camp once.
Drive for two or three days, camp once.
After a week of that, everybody,
you could see it was taking its toll on everybody.
We were getting tired and really, it almost felt zombieish
during the day.
I mean it was really difficult to sleep even when--
even when you were the guy who was getting a break.
The trucks would bounce and it was so bouncy that,
that it was difficult to sleep
even when it was your time to sleep.
Figured out we had been driving for 75 hours,
constant driving.
Except for one stop for about two or three
for about two or three hours to sleep in the cars.
Other than that, we were njust driving and changing seats,
just keeping on, keep on driving.
You okay, Dr. Jon?
When you read any story about Arctic survival and the--
the amount of abuse that the human body can be subjected to
before it finally breaks down and dies is incredible.
You know, we all discussed it as a team.
Yeah, let's keep doing this.
Let's take a two and three hour nap and call it.
And we're going to get back up in the morning and
go another 700 miles.
There's a few things that are of consideration
with remoteness,
and we're always thinking about are we closer to these
points of inaccessibility or poor accessibility.
The first thing that you lose is access by helicopter.
But once you get outside of the helicopter range,
then you have to have an aircraft land
and that requires specific conditions on the ground.
And then you can actually get far enough away
where it's going to require an aircraft to bring in fuel,
an aircraft to land and refuel to get to you
than to get you off of the ice sheet.
And the further north that you get in Greenland,
the more likely that is to occur.
You're deeper into the expedition.
People are more fatigued.
Decision making has suffered.
The human body starts to break down because of those
extremely long driving periods.
We were still heading north
and we were running into this storm.
According to a path visibility,
we are quite close to maybe about
2- 300 kilometers from Wulff Land.
We get quite strong winds.
We were navigating only
using gps, which is a dangerous
thing to do when you're approaching crevasse area.
There was what they call white darkness.
It's white, you look out the window and you see white,
but the visibility is a matter of feet.
It was bad enough that I told the guys on the radio,
if you get out of the truck for any reason,
make sure that you maintain contact with the truck.
Because if you get disoriented and take two steps in the wrong
direction, it could be fatal.
There's no bearings whatsoever what's going on around you.
You will be lost like that.
If you take a single step in any direction,
it's a straight up guess.
As we made our final push north to Wulff Land,
we were really chasing the clock.
We-- At any point, we're gonna have to make our
decision to turn back.
The weather wasn't cooperating.
The time was slipping away.
We were at the point where we didn't know if we were actually
gonna make any of our goals because progress
had slowed down so much.
And I remember the radio cracking to life
and Torfi saying, there's an animal on the right.
And we had trouble seeing it.
And we kind of pulled up next to it.
And as we get closer and start to brush the snow off,
we realize that it was a musk ox calf that had been separated
from its mother, likely in a storm just like that,
or maybe even earlier in that storm.
And it was frozen solid from the cold.
And I remember all of us being very aware of the fact
that we were quite fragile.
We had people on the team,
we could tell in their voice that they were starting to get
concerned and worried.
And at that point, we have a spring break, on the 6x6.
I was riding with Greg at the time,
and Torfi hopped on the radio and said,
hold on, something's wrong.
Dreky's got a broken coil spring.
And I think all of us immediately,
like, our hearts sank.
It's a broken spring.
For me, at least, what I've learned is to always,
you know, no matter how bad the situation is, you just, you
you know, you love the circumstances.
You know, this is fantastic.
You know, it's so great
to be here with you guys, you know,
in this fantastic place.
Just look at this nature, you know,
always trying to, you know, see some positive things,
you know, positive sides.
You've got a spring break!
You know, being negative and,
that doesn't get you anywhere, you know, have to be positive,
you know, and enjoying what you're doing.
And in every person, actually, you know, if you have the time
and space to do that, you know, to bring, you know, the best
out of every person in the team.
Fantastic.
It's cold, it's windy.
We're having fun.
Made the decision that we can fix it right there
on the spot.
We've got the spare part to do it,
but the weather's getting worse and worse.
In fact, it was the worst weather
we'd seen on the entire trip.
I remember Jon Solberg holding
the wood barriers and trying to-
to block the wind with his own body to give these guys a chance
at getting that repaired.
And they did it in less time than it would take a mechanic
in a warm garage in Salt Lake City to do the same thing.
I mean, that's when you see,
that's when you see exceptional people do exceptional things.
GREG#*: These are incredible men.
And there is clearly no way this expedition would have,
would have succeeded without them
and several others like them.
It was sometime in this window of
what to me felt like a barrage of adversity,
uh, compounded by the fact that,
that I was feeling sick and
I was-- I was not able to make the level of contribution
I would have liked physically.
And that compounded my frustration as well,
that I decided, that it would be a good time to try
to connect with my wife, Heidi.
We're 135 kilometers from the northern edge of the glacier,
and we're,
we're having a lot of trouble.
We've had an unbelievable
number of setbacks,
and these guys just keep going.
It's 8 degrees below zero, and the wind is blowing so hard,
I can barely see the truck that's 10ft in front of me.
And these guys are out, fixing the axle
to support my expedition.
Is everybody mentally okay?
Everybody wanted to quit?
No. That's the thing that's so amazing.
That's why I'm so emotional.
It's because there's no sign of quitting.
I told you a couple times before I left that this would be
the biggest adventure I ever did.
And I underestimated it.
Just hearing her voice
brought me a lot of comfort.
I will say that we have today looks to be
our best weather condition.
Torfi can provide some additional clarification,
but it looks like the wind actually
doubles in speed tomorrow.
The only thing we know at this point is it's worse
than it was an hour ago,
which was worse than it was an hour before.
It doesn't seem to be letting up at all.
And we're making the decision to push north.
And it was really important for Greg.
We were all getting a greater sense of that,
how important it was for him to reach Wulff Land
and call the mission successful.
- SCOTT - We do know that this next weather window,
the wind kicks up and it is scheduled out for several days.
So even moving a couple days may not be enough.
Yeah, I agree.
Greg hit me up right immediately,
"what do you want to, what do you think we should do?
You know, I'm asking everybody, do you feel comfortable moving
forward in this weather?
Knowing what we know now about the weather
and the time we have, how do you feel about it?".
We decided that we would drive until 6:00am and reassess.
Uh, even though the repair was complete on Dreky,
once we started moving, Dreky didn't move.
And so I got on the radio and said, Dreky, are you with us?
And I could tell from the delay
in the response and the tone of the response that
we didn't have complete alignment
from the folks in Dreky.
I remember it took a couple minutes and Greg was,
I don't think frustrated, but like seemingly anxious like,
"what's taking them so long?
I want to know the answer."
You know, "Are they comfortable moving forward?"
In our vehicle we were having a real hard time coming
to a consensus, and nobody wanted to disappoint Greg,
but we had had some serious
concerns about our safety.
If any of you guys have any
concerns about this along the way, I'd like to hear them.
You all, your voice is welcome.
At that moment, I was definitely thinking we are probably pushing
beyond our capabilities here.
In my mind, we were not able to
drive off the glacier if we didn't have a visibility.
It was just no way situation.
Any desire that I had to get there and, you know,
take a picture at the farthest northern piece of dirt
on the planet or do something that nobody else had
ever done before was severely shadowed
by my promise to my profession,
which is to not ever put anybody in jeopardy.
I guess I was just shell shocked by everything at this point.
What was a risk?
I mean, we'd done so many things.
At this point, I was comfortable pushing into the storm.
One of the things that can happen on a trip like this,
when you pull together so many competent individuals,
they have a lot of tolerance for variability,
they have a lot of tolerance for leadership.
And they allow for people with experience and with the right
mindset to make decisions throughout an expedition.
But what can happen is
once the options start to come off the table,
once you really only have one path left,
then people will start to actively question and they have
every right to.
That's one of the things that make a great team,
is for people having the ability to speak up
and the mindset and the desire to speak up when things
start to get dangerous.
I actually got out of the truck and went back and,
Scott is the one that I probably know best of all.
Jon, he looked at me and he shared this story
about what happens right up to the point
that an airplane runs into the side of a mountain.
And he wasn't telling me the story because he wanted to say
I don't want to go or I don't feel comfortable going.
He wanted to make sure that Emil and I were reminded of the fact
that those cascade of events, we can be so focused on something
that we want to achieve in our life that we can start to forget
about all of the risks that come along the way.
We get those blinders on,
and we get so focused on that goal
that we run right into the side of the mountain.
I am the expedition leader.
The safety of, every one of these team members
is my responsibility,
and I must get every one of them
back home to their families safely.
I knew that he was deliberating
between giving up on something that he had tried so hard
to achieve and had given so much towards us and
everyone else to try to get to this goal.
I knew that he was potentially faced with that reality that
we weren't gonna make it.
We weren't even gonna make it to the end of the ice sheet.
And I have such respect for him in that moment, because what he
did was he kind of gave that up.
He kind of said, "it's okay if we don't make it to our goal as
long as we all make it home."
And that says a lot about a leader right there.
I felt like my concerns were heard, and we decided
as a group to push on.
That is a good old North Dakota blizzard right there,
I'll tell you that much.
My inclination is that we,
we take it one objective at a time.
Let's get to the edge of the ice sheet and then reassess,
and then, we can decide if we want to getto, the tou--
the terra firma.
I think that's probably the best thing to do
at this point in time, because I think everybody's going to be
excited about trying to get to the edge of the ice sheet.
- GREG - Scott, I couldn't agree with you more.
Thank you.
You four guys are just awesome.
Thank you.
60 minutes later,
sunshine,
the bluest skies we'd seen in days.
And the more time passes, the more I can hear angels singing
in that moment in my memory.
We were the first boots on the ground into this region.
Now, there's certainly been
people on the north of Greenland,
but there had never been anybody that we were aware of
that had traveled to this particular glacier.
If you'd asked me on the first day or two
if I thought we were going to get all the way to the north tip
I said there's no way, I mean, like,
we're going to be lucky to bail,
take a left to go to Kangerlussuaq, you know.
- GREG - Yeah, I think we're all pretty honored
to be here.
I had a pretty good idea
of what Wulff Land would be like.
But to be standing there looking at it and to see the magnitude
of it and the grandeur and the remoteness,
the stillness was overwhelming to me.
It was beyond anything that I'd imagined.
We got to the top of this extremely
steep slope and Emil said,
Greg, you must go down first to make sure we can get back up.
We weren't going to commit all three vehicles
to the bottom of this thing
if we couldn't climb back up again.
Greg got down to the bottom and he just started
cruising back up and he didn't even spin a tire.
It was at,
at that moment that I knew we were gonna meet our objective.
There you go, guys.
Tires have now touched Wulff Land.
We are on Wulff Land.
Seeing those brown rocks, those
brown mountains, 50, 80, 100 miles out into the distance
was so rewarding for me.
So that's one of the most remote places I've ever been.
It was very special - to get to Wulff Land. - That was a great moment.
It's hard to describe by, you know,
you-- you-- you, uh, you looked at the map so many times
and it's just a location on a map and all of a sudden
you're standing there and,
it's out of this world kind of.
Welcome to Wulff Land!
It looks like the moon with a glacier on it.
When we came down to Wulff Land,
we were kind of surprised
because there was almost no snow at all.
Just--
So our plans to drive further north, they just,
they were gone.
It was not possible to drive any further.
After evaluating this and thinking about the ice melt
and what was time and the risk and everything,
like that, we decided to just to take a long, good rest
and then turn around.
I regret not being able to keep driving north.
I would have loved to have gotten all the way to the,
to the Arctic Ocean and found,
a place to break through the ice and actually get the tires wet.
I think we all just tried to drink it in and absorb as much
as we could of that moment before we had to turn around
and start making our way south.
I mean, this expedition inspired adventurers
from around the globe
to push beyond the notions of what is possible.
Expedition 7 Greenland Crossing team members.
Craig Miller-Expedition Leader, USA.
Scott Brady, USA.
Clay Croft, USA.
Emil Grimson, Iceland.
Torfi Johannsson, Iceland.
Dr. Jon Solberg, USA.
Kurt Williams, USA.
- GREG - Well, probably just as hard for you guys
to pull out of this place as it is for me.
After what we went through to get here, I just don't want
to leave such a special place.
Especially after having seen so little of it.
But we all need to get back home
to our families and all of our other real world commitments.
So make sure to capture one last image of that before we
turn and burn and encounter all
that great white hostility on the way back to a hot shower.
Yeah, I'm ready for a shower and a shave.
Yeah, me too.
Me too.
But that was worth, that was worth every kilometer
to get to that place, very beautiful.
Mh-hm.
There's always something hard about leaving a place you love.
Seeing it in your rear view mirror.
Especially knowing if you'll never come back.
People oftentimes don't consider
with expeditions or danger surrounding expeditions is
it's just like scaling a mountain.
You don't need to just get to the top and succeed.
You need to get back down safely to base camp
and back to your families.
Wulff Land back,
it had a few challenges.
We had a broken CV joint on my truck.
Clay broke it.
We all knew Clay broke it.
Clay finally accepted that he broke it.
The lunettes of both sleds had to be completely reworked
and re welded.
We broke the hitch on the trailer.
We broke the hitch on one of the sleds as well,
the vehicle side.
I was in the army for seven years.
I never saw a cast iron pintle hitch wear through anything
and be stretched into an oval.
It's cracking.
Cut it, put it your log like in between
The runners on the sleds,
they were starting to break off.
And of course the straps and all these things on the,
on the sleds to keep the bladders in place.
Then we had a leaf spring on the trailer broke.
This one's, I don't see how you're
gonna fix this.
The water maker stopped running so I had to take it in the car
inside and warm it up.
A minor issue with a fuel pump.
We are troubleshooting low fuel.
This thing's got enough. Doesn't seem to be pumping.
Pump?
Yeah, yeah, please.
Go ahead and turn that pump on, Greg.
Got a lot better now.
KURT#*: Yeah.
So yeah, I guess we did have a lot of problems.
We had a mini parade
of terribles as we were southbound.
We were on our way back from Wulff Land
and all of a sudden this display came across the sky like
nothing I had ever seen in my life.
I had certainly seen sundogs before
and I'd seen rainbows before and I'd seen
concentric sun rings before.
But I had never seen all of them together in one scene.
I was completely awestruck by what I saw,
and it was so significant in its scale,
I could not capture it with the camera.
Well, we're down to the final
160km, 150km, something like that.
And, we're in the process of offloading all of the fuel from
the bladders into the trucks.
Anything that's left, we can put in a couple drums,
but we want the sleds to be able to go away.
Torfi right now is installing spikes into the 6x6
to get ready for that slick ice.
And this could be pretty adventurous as we get up,
up into here. Yeah.
But it's kind of a win because it's the last time, allegedly,
that the fuel pumps are going to get out.
It's been a big job of ours over the last few weeks pumping fuel.
One of the most difficult things for us to do
as the lead vehicle was to get a route through
the glacier into Kangerlussuaq.
It was the most challenging route finding
that I had ever done.
Part of this section was incredibly dangerous.
This is the most harsh,
the most, most harsh condition for a vehicle
I have ever been in, period.
Even walking around here when I step through the top soil,
top snow,
I hit ice under it and it's super slick.
I've never seen anything like this before.
I'm pretty nervous, to tell you the truth.
We were seven smelly guys
that were 10 kilometers away from a hot shower and pizza.
All we needed to do was get off the ice.
Five years from now, you won't look back to the night
we just drove right off the glacier in the Kangerlussuaq
and it was no problem, it was easy.
You'll remember the time you had to work for it,
maybe all night, maybe tomorrow.
Not a lot of work.
Just takes time and patience.
Yeah, time and patience. Yeah.
I kind of didn't know what to expect.
I had, had all these impressions
of me about crevasses and giant crevasse fields
and thinking, I'm gonna see them,
you're gonna see these giant deep wedges into the ground.
And we really didn't see any of those.
And it wasn't because they weren't there,
as we later found out.
It was just because they were snow blown and covered over.
It was getting dark.
I was in second position.
Scott and Emil were in the first truck,
and we were making our way through the crevasse field
we knew was there.
I saw my trailer just kind of list to the left side
Hey guys, we got a problem.
And in my mind that crevasse was just going to open up
and swallow the whole truck and trailer into it.
Instinctively just gave a little gas,
it broke the outer bead and the tire got kind
of mangled up under the wheel.
We're not getting anywhere near that.
And in the process is that popped down and Greg's truck
lurched a little bit.
It peeled the tire off the bead.
So now we gotta put a tire back on the bead.
This looks alright.
We've also found that the truck frame has a crack in it.
Yes, sir.
Kind of in a pinch.
All right.
Stop, stop, stop.
I went E7 forcing the crevice.
That's where everybody sees this is actual.
And that made the whole team quite careful.
You know, that-- that crevasse is like
two house stories tall.
It's gotta be 30 or 40ft deep and just a big V shape
all the way to the bottom of nothing but blue ice.
I've never seen anything like that before.
Clay and I were standing in the back with our crampons on
thinking oh my gosh, if somebody goes in we're really gonna have
to figure out how to get them out.
Oh, it's right there. It's running this way.
- It's pretty narrow. - I'm standing on it.
It's not big enough to swallow a truck.
That was pretty scary.
Greg is literally standing on the crevasse right now.
It was incredible to watch these guys
sitting on top of a crevasse,
repairing the vehicle.
Scott and Emil have gone on to
explore some more routes.
It was our role, me and Scott to try to find the route.
It was not an optimal situation
because we did not have a second car to tie us,
to tie it to.
So if we would go down into a crevasse we would have no one to
to hold us back from falling, free falling in.
So we had to be very careful.
Scott and Emil, do you copy?
Yeah, go ahead.
Listen, I'm just watching Jon in front of Torfi here,
he's 20ft in front of the truck and found multiple crevasses.
I'm thinking that what we should do is abort
and let's just reassess the whole thing in the morning.
We could pitch camp.
Jon just about fell into a crevasse right there.
That was the dumbest thing I've ever done.
I mean that we didn't have any business being out there.
I mean I think it was pretty obvious that
at that pace we were not ever going to get
where we needed to go.
We decided to stop and get some rest.
That was a good.
We needed that.
We were all exhausted for sure.
This is our world.
It's-- it's kind of a big problem right now.
It's proving to be very difficult to navigate.
Huge chunks of the glaciers are turning into clear water pools
and it's resulting in these high points and low points,
and there's crevasses everywhere in between.
There was no room for error.
Can you believe this?
I remember the moment that Emil said,
"Those are tracks."
The first indication of a route
that we had found since we started
trying to get off the glacier.
So if we found ski tracks, there was a good chance
we could find one of the easier routes
off of the glacier.
It didn't mean that it was easy for the vehicles.
It was very challenging.
But at least we had a general direction to go.
It was, a small miracle that we saw those tracks.
But it changed everything.
Oh, come on back guys.
We got another one here.
Careful, Kurt.
Maybe-- maybe we can put a little tension on the edge.#*
- SCOTT - There is, it's a very narrow ice shelf.
It looks like you could drive on it, but it's too narrow.
And then it, it cascades down into
like a slot like you find in Moab.
Nice.
Yeah.
Back's already on the slope, so you're down.
Good work man, crazy.
I am standing on dirt.
Check it out.
How cool is that?
We just met our guide that's going to help us
do what's called the Arctic Circle Trail to get into, uh,
our final landing spot.
Our guide said, welcome to western Greenland.
We've been all over.
We've been on southern and northern,
pretty much on the eastern
and now definitely on the western.
That'll be a tough one to beat.
- GREG - Yea, I just wanted you to be aware
that we are effectively there
so that you can let the guys know.
We made it.
Team feels like a million bucks.
You can just see everybody like this huge sense of relief
and joy and kind of like this calm amongst the whole group.
It was-- it was It feels so good to be like on a road
and within a few hours of
just some basic creature comforts.
Like an indoor toilet.
Yeah. Like an indoor toilet would be really key right now.
Okay. Not to freak you guys out or anything,
but those crevasses on the left,
I have no idea how many of those we drove over today,
but I think they could swallow trucks whole.
It's quite exciting and it's,
uh, you forget all your tiredness and you're just kinda,
"Yeah."
What we've recognized from this project, Expedition 7
in it's entirety, is that vehicle based
expedition travel is a meaningful way
to explore the world, and it provides an accessibility
that some people may never have.
I think the biggest thing that I learned
from my Greenland experience
was the importance of surrounding yourself
with great people.
All of us were together for 21 days,
and five of us were together for almost a month.
And in all of that time,
in all of those intense circumstances,
there was never a single crossword spoken.
That just doesn't happen.
That is evidence of the quality of individuals that were on this
trip and the respect they had
for one another and their commitment to the greater goal.
And if you have those kind of resources at your disposal,
you can accomplish just about anything you set your mind to.
If I learned anything,
it was to be more like those guys,
because every one of them had attributes
that I can only aspire to be.
I mean, it only speaks to the people that were there.
Those six guys I spent time with,
I have amazing respect for all of them.
What I learned on this expedition,
it's just no matter how big the challenge is,
it's just a question of,
the right preparation and the right team.
And wondering what's over the next hill or the desire
to learn something new.
Sometimes comes a point in people's life where
it just feels like they've lost the lust for life
or the desire to explore.
And I think people start aging much more quickly when
they reach that point.
The lessons, the relationships, the memories, um,
none of those things materialize unless you get out
and have an experience.
You will have many people coming back from an expedition,
like they say, "never again".
But you will have them in a few months later, they say,
"when can I go again?".
It-- we want to check the box.
We want to achieve the goal.
We want to make it across the ice sheet.
All of us do in some version in our life.
But if we don't, at the end of it,
have a team of people or a family member
or a loved one that we get to experience that with,
then what's the point?
It may not make a lot of sense to you or to someone else,
but if you're passionate about it, you got to go do it.
You just got to.
Because don't ask yourself what the world needs.
Ask yourself what makes you come alive?
Because what the world needs is people who have come alive.
And I would encourage anyone
to take that on and see how that will change your life,
because it certainly has changed mine.
All right, that's a wrap.
Good job, Kurt.
You're the man.
It's that they see that we're just, there not--
We're done, Greg. Thanks.
Yeah.
Scotty, you're good.
Yeah, it's great.
Good job, Scott.
♪ Need the hug?
No.
Awesome, Jon. Thank you.
Yep. Thank you, guys.
Torfi, you're done.
All right.
Thanks, Emil.
Okay.
On to the next one.