Ron and I (John Harrington) hiked down to Crozier's Landing this morning. We thought we might meet Cameron and Louie, but it seems they were coming back to visit us so we missed them. We wanted to do 129 pencil rubbings of the plaque (in memory of each of the crew members) down there for my logbooks. We managed to get that done. Ron went out on the ice and took some nice photos from out there. When we were done, the other two were heading back and we did meet up with them.

POLAR BEAR TRACK

They have a bit of a problem; one of their snowmobiles broke down last night. They were out looking for polar bears and blew a piston so they're in trouble - not big trouble, they just have to get back to Gjoa Haven. They have a sled with them and they have the snowmobile up on the sled to take it back. Just out of interest, they were up at Cape Felix, which is about fifteen miles north of here, and they were following the trail of two polar bears. We don't want to alarm anyone, we feel we're pretty safe here.

We had lunch with them, and I did a couple of sketches for them in some books that they had brought. Then they were kind enough, with the remaining snowmobile, to drive Ron and me back to the camp here. Louie Kamookak is a grandson of Patty Gibson, who was a Hudson's Bay trader here in the '30s, at the Hudson's Bay Company in Gjoa Haven. By the time we got back here, John and Derek and Doug had built one igloo and were building a second one. The second igloo is Derek's "smoking room". It's connected by a tunnel to the main igloo, where the five of us are going to sleep tonight.

The weather has been amazing. I'm here without gloves on right now talking to you and it's probably only 5 or 10 below. There's a gorgeous sunset taking place right over our outhouse. We're in very good shape.

Tomorrow is the 25th, so we're going to hike down and join forces with the other group and have some sort of commemorative ceremony at noon. Franklin's ghosts will no doubt haunt the region...

We might get flown out tomorrow afternoon. Adlair wants us to phone at 3:00 pm our time to check on weather conditions. If they're projecting bad weather the next day they want to come and pick us up right away. We'd prefer that they delay it another day, until the 26th since we're having so much fun. It's like an adventure for boy scouts...all the things that boy scouts would ever want to do! We'll try to get some interior shots of all of us inside the igloo tonight. Ron has some digital pictures which he will send to you as soon as we get back, so you'll get those right away. (Webmaster's postscript note: This did not happen, as the extreme weather on the final days of the trip adversely affected the disc.)

I guess that's all we have to report on today - talk to you tomorrow night.

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