To stave off a breaching 3,000-pound walrus from the cockpit of a small sea kayak, Erik Boomer recommends using the paddle.

“Sort of like a Heisman stiff-arm, hit him in the face and try to feed him the paddle,” he said. “Then start paddling.”

The first 600 miles of the Ellesmere Island expedition had not been so sporting — lots of marching along on skis with skins, towing the boats.

“Kind of a goofy sea kayak trip, because we haven’t been sea kayaking yet,” Jon Turk said via satellite phone 38 days into the journey. He added, “At every moment, we expect the possibility that we’re going to run into big trouble.”

Opposite Greenland along the ice-choked Nares Strait, Ellesmere (population 146) is the northernmost isle of the Canadian Arctic Archipelago and the most mountainous island in the Arctic Circle. “It’s stacked with fatty mountains,” Boomer said. Ellesmere, the world’s 10th largest island, is also something of a jewel of Arctic exploration, its rugged and icebound 1,500-mile perimeter rarely traveled before.

Unlikely partners, Boomer, a 26-year-old photographer and rising figure in whitewater kayaking, and Turk, 65, an author, scientist and veteran of far-flung adventures, were attempting to complete what is believed to be the first circumnavigation of the island.

They hardly knew each other before setting out on their clockwise circumnavigation attempt. Starting May 7 from Grise Fiord (population 141), on the south coast, they found the first section involved trudging for 10 hours daily over snow and ice on what remained of their skis, towing their 200-plus-pound kayaks, making and breaking camp, all under the midnight sun. Introduced by a mutual friend, who withdrew from the trip after he was injured in a 94-foot waterfall plunge six weeks before, Turk and Boomer also spent a lot of time talking and laughing.

“Something we laughed about and, then again, something we bonded on was that we’re both pretty rare characters to commit to doing something like this with a complete stranger,” Boomer said. “When terrible things would happen, we would find ourselves with nothing left to do but just kind of laugh.”

On Aug. 19, they paddled back into Grise Fiord, Ellesmere’s first circumnavigation complete in 104 days. Boomer said they learned other lessons: When a friendly Arctic wolf traipses into camp and wants to hang out, let him sleep where he pleases. When a polar bear pokes his nose into the tent, scream to chase him out. When visiting a place where the sun never sets, carry more sunscreen. And when your traveling partner goes into kidney failure, call for a medevac.

Will Steger, an accomplished polar adventurer and conservationist, calls Ellesmere one of his favorite places.

“It’s like the ice age, before the advent of humans,” he said.

Steger added: “I’d say 99 percent of the population doesn’t know where Ellesmere is, let alone comprehend what it represents. What makes a great trip? I’d say going around Ellesmere would be one of the greatest.”

Boomer’s failing ski gave out around Mile 750 as they encountered the worst of the rough ice, which forms as currents, winds and tides compress sea ice against shores and glaciers stratified with multiyear ice. Last summer, the ice on Ellesmere’s north coast began unlocking in mid-July.

“The ice is different every year,” Turk said. “And there’s no way to do research on it because the roughness depends on the winds and the tides in that five- or six-hour period in October when it freezes up.”

Turk and Boomer’s progress slowed from 15 miles a day to a crawl. All progress halted for 17 days at Cape Union, a 15-mile escarpment of sheer cliffs on the northeast coast that works like a geologic icebreaker. They could not portage around the cliffs.

“You’re seeing ice collide into other chunks of ice,” Turk said, “or collide into the rock and tilt and smear and just get shoved up into the air — 10, 20, 30 feet into the air. That’s why we were scared. If you’re caught in the middle of that in a 13-foot kayak, there’s nothing you can do to not be dead.”

Since he first visited Ellesmere on an expedition in 1988, Turk said, the place has haunted him.

“I got into following these ancient migrations,” he said. “I fell in love with the place. It’s just such a wild, wild, wild place, and I thought it’d be cool to go around it. I realized how difficult it was, how complex it was, and I said it can’t be done in a single season. It’s too uncertain.”

He added: “Then 25 years passed. I’m in my mid-60s. I said, I got to do this. I got to give this thing a go. It’s kind of my last chance.”

A grandfather of six, Turk has lived, climbed, paddled and skied throughout the West, but he made a career writing college-level science textbooks (25) and adventure narratives (three). He graduated from the University of Colorado with a Ph.D. in organic chemistry in 1971.

“I stuffed the diploma in the glove box of a 1964 Ford Fairlane and went up north and started paddling,” Turk said.

He lived in the Arctic, the Northwest Territories, the bush of Alaska and the Oregon coast and spent five or six years as a ski bum in Telluride, Colo. Since 1984, Turk has lived in the southern Bitterroot Mountains of Montana. For the skiing, he winters in Fernie, British Columbia.

“The guy’s had more unexpected bivouacs than anyone I’ve ever talked to,” Boomer said. “And I’m a little bit jealous of that.”

Raised in American Falls, Idaho, Boomer maintains no permanent address; a 1994 Honda Accord station wagon with more than 270,000 miles suffices. Nicknamed Honey Badger by paddling friends, Boomer has logged six descents of the Grand Canyon of the Stikine, a multiday excursion in northern British Columbia regarded as the most treacherous run in North American expedition kayaking. (Once, he paddled it in a day.)

Boomer has dropped 90-foot waterfalls, and completed at least 40 first descents. But he had not been on an expedition longer than 12 or 13 days. And only once had he been in a less maneuverable and buoyant sea kayak, paddling 90 miles of big whitewater on Idaho’s Salmon River in one day.

Turk and Boomer started with 25 days’ worth of food. Each kayak weighed 220 pounds. The first mandatory stop was Eureka, a manned weather station on the west coast and site of the first of their three arranged food caches. After another cache at the Ward Hunt Ice Shelf, the kayaks weighed more than 300 pounds, with 60 days of food. The two ate a lot of beans and other calorie-laden items that required little stove fuel. All gear had to serve multiple purposes, so one pair of boots did the duty of three.

Turk and Boomer, whose trip was financed by grants from Eddie Bauer/First Ascent and Polartec, have since been nominated as adventurers of the year by National Geographic. On the island, the weather they experienced approximated that of winter in the Rockies: midday temperatures into the mid-50s, down to single digits when the sun dipped behind the mountains. At its worst, the wind chill was minus-35.

While waiting 17 days for the ocean to calm at Cape Union at the mouth of the Robeson Channel, they once paddled offshore and climbed atop an ice floe the size of two baseball infields that looked to them like a promising raft.

“Whoopee ding, we’re going south; we’re on top of the world,” Turk said. “Then the ebb tide came and we went north, the wrong way, at twice the speed we were going south.”

When the ice floe began disintegrating in collisions with other ice pans, Turk said, “we got terrified and made a break and got back to land.”

On July 21, “we paddled out at 11 in the morning, got scared and came back,” Turk said.

“We went out at 4 in the afternoon, got scared and came back,” he said. “And then we went out at 9 and looked at each other. ‘O.K., we’re going for it.’ By 3 in the morning, we got clear around Cape Union.”

He added: “We each had a gut feeling that that was the right time. But is a gut feeling just a fancy name for blind luck? Or did we really know something? I don’t know. We made it.”

That was the first open-water paddling of the trip, and a segue to the paddling leg, which amounted to some 650 miles of 1,500 total. Winding among ice floes and occasionally climbing up and over them, they kept Ellesmere’s east coast on their right and encountered curious specimens of walrus and polar bear along the way.

Paddling back into Grise Fiord, where they had started, was anticlimactic for Boomer.

“We had so many intense times that tried us to our last thread,” he said. “But the last two days was just nice, easy paddling. It was an interesting feeling to nonchalantly paddle in.”

It was different for Turk, whose hands, wrists, elbows and feet had swelled considerably.

“I was so deeply tired that there wasn’t much space for emotion,” he said. “But I was very much aware that this was the last time in my life that I would push myself to this degree, and be in this mental state of pushing as hard as you can. So when I got to the end, part of me was like, I’m never going to be here again. There was this joy of finishing, but there was also this sense that I was leaving that part of me behind forever.”

They finished about 9 a.m. Aug. 19. Some 42 hours later, during his second night of sleep in a bed, Turk knocked on Boomer’s room door. He was in a lot of pain and could not urinate.

“His muscles were twitching,” Boomer said.

Tests by a local nurse indicated Turk’s kidneys were not working. Three days later, after low clouds finally cleared, a medevac plane whisked him off the island. Turk spent six days in a hospital. Recently, he rated his recovery at 95 percent and improving.

He and Boomer are in regular contact. They may go skiing this winter.

“I’d be a liar if I said we never had any conflicts out there,” Turk said. “But I think the enduring thing — 104 days, no books, no iPhones, no iPods, no music, no radios, just the two of us — was that we really enjoyed each other’s company.”

On the subject of how much they might see each other in the future, Turk laughed and said: “That’s an interesting question. I’m older than his father. I’m a geezer and he’s a young man. Is he going to want to ski with me? I mean, I don’t want to brag, but I can ski.”

Source – NY Times