A slight wind peeled back the thin veneer of soft snow that has been bogging us down revealing the patterns of the hard snow beneath. I was once again reminded of how much the surface here can look like wood grain... or the bottom of the ocean (you can pick which you prefer).

At our first break, we were both pleasantly surprised at how much easier it was to pull the sleds - not a lot but enough for us to actually have a short conversation on snow and the process of deconstructive metamorphosis.

Unfortunately, things progressively devolved from there. We came to a huge lead easily 400 meters wide that was open in the middle so we followed the southern 'shore' west skiing on the 'safe thin ice near the side. After about 20 minutes we found a place to cross but we ended up stuck in a mess of heaving, cracked and rubbled ice. I don't know if it was the full moon or winds but everything seemed to be breaking up underneath us today.

Several times we raced across ice that was actively pressuring, the chug and whine sounds of ice on ice everywhere as we watch mammoth size chunks of ice grind against one another.

After lunch we were stuck in the middle of open water, big pressure ridges and rubbled ice so we took the rubbled route which took roughly an hour to get both our sleds through a 100 meter section. Whatever reference we ever used to define 'epic' has now changed to today's brutal.

We finally made it to a small cracked pan then connected a corner of another then another then a thin ice lead, some pressure, big drifts and... A big open pan! I couldn't believe my eyes.

'From worst to first,' I told Ryan.

The other big surprise was that we crossed Yasu, the Japanese skier's tracks. What are the odds? We could see where he was struggling to get up a few drifts. It appears he had been dealing with the same slow snow. The ice must have turned because our bearing and his were substantially different and the intersection of our two experiences only lasted a second.

Distance traveled: 7.27 nm

Image: Ryan gaining some extra 'west' by skirting a big lead - we would later have to go way east to get out of crazy ice.