text: A couple of hundred yards of this sort of manhauling, and your sled will never be the same again. Passes like this are why I prefer my much cheaper but slightly heavier fiberglass sled to Ogita's $5,000 carbon Acapulka model. So much less painful to ruin and replace.
  On the west end, near Flagler Fiord, Sverdrup Pass raises a second obstacle: steep ramps of bare ice where a summer river has frozen. They're fairly easy to negotiate if you've thought to bring crampons and a long rope to haul the sled up after you, but these two items are not common on manhauling expeditions -- you don't need them on sea ice. Eventually, however, Ogita managed. When I joined an Inuit sovereignty patrol through Sverdrup Pass once, we were even able to horse the snowmobiles up, though it took hours and involved ropes, several men and and a couple of hours of chiseling the ramp with an ice tool to a slightly gentler grade.
  The trick of traveling in very cold weather (I'm talking -40 or -50, not -20) is perpetual motion. You stay warm thanks to exercise metabolism. No bulky clothes, or even specialty items, required. Just the usual layers: polypro, fleece, shell. At those temperatures, there is no such thing as a lunch stop.
  No matter how cold it is, of course, you have to pause intermittently, to eat, drink and pee. While manhauling, I do this every hour and a half or two hours. The key is speed: You have to finish these chores and get going again before the exercise heat shuts down and your body cools. It's not necessary to put on a heavy parka if you're fast enough. I've found that seven minutes is the longest break you can take before you pay a price. Longer than that, and you may have to add a layer, then remove it 15 minutes later: very inefficient. Your fingers also go numb, and hurt like hell when feeling returns. Ice climbers call this the screaming barfies; a doctor I traveled with called it reactive hyperemia and suggested that lactic acid builds up during the numb phase. The pain is the lactic acid being reabsorbed. You don't have to have this experience too many times to want to avoid it. After a too-long break, it takes 20 minutes to feel okay again.
  It's possible to do everything in a few minutes, though you may still be chewing your snack, or holding a half-eaten sandwich in your hand and grabbing a bite in mid-stride for the next few minutes. Towards the end of the day, I sometimes sit down on the sled or kneel down in the snow briefly just to stretch the lower back. But always, I have the seven-minute rule in my head and keep all stops within that time limit. In slightly milder temperatures, such discipline is not necessary but it's a habit now, and on day ski tours here in the Rockies, partners tease me about my restlessness at break time.
  ExplorersWeb reports that Yasu Ogita of Japan plans to manhaul from Grise Fiord on Ellesmere Island to Siorapaluk, the northernmost village in Greenland. The article states that the route is 1000km. I've done the entire way except the crossing to Greenland, so I can say it's closer to 800km. Still, a good length.
  I checked the current state of the sea ice in that area using NASA's Worldview satellite imagery, above. The 50km gap between Canada and Greenland is typically the northern terminus of the North Water polynya. Historically, it almost always freezes over, often around the Bache Peninsula, as it has this year. When Frederick Cook and his two Inuit companions walked back to Greenland after their winter on Devon Island in 1909, he claims to have crossed around Bache. Other explorers had it easier: In 1914, Donald MacMillan dogsledded across from Pim Island in just a few hours. And in the early 1970s, some crazy Minnesota snowmobilers went to Greenland from Cape Dunsterville, a section that is so unstable even in good years, it makes my skin crawl to think of the risks they took.