Living true to its motto, “Fighting spirit through sports and adventure”, 11 members of the Indian Navy undertook a grueling month long ski expedition into the Greenland Ice Cap in the Arctic region in July this year. A grueling task, the 600-kilometre journey was arduous and consisted of nerve-wracking moments for the team.
According to Commander Satyabrata Dam, team leader, “In this one-month, we didn’t see a single animal or a human face apart from the team members and even though the average intake of the members was around 4000 K Cal each day, each member lost weight ranging from four-12 Kg. Another interesting feature was that there was no sunset in the Arctic Circle.”
The team first went to the Vatnajokull Glacier, the third largest glacier in the world in Iceland and climbed Hvannadalshnukur (7100 ft), the highest peak in Iceland, through extreme bad weather conditions and zero visibility. The team also scaled an unnamed virgin peak at 11,000 ft approximately in the Mt Forrel region and named it the ‘Indian Peak’.
Encountering temperatures ranging from minus 10 to minus 35 degree Celsius and Hurricane blizzards averaging 50kmph, the team had its own nervous moments. “One of the team members fell into a deep crevice with his sledge. He was just in front of me so I saw him, otherwise we wouldn’t have known about the incident. I thought either he is dead or is badly injured. But luck would have it that his sledge got struck in between and he fell on top of it. So he was saved. It took three hours to rescue him and due to this, some of the members froze due to non-movement of the body. After taking him out, I had to go down the crevice to get his sled,” says Commander Dam, who at 41 years was the oldest member of the team while the youngest member was Sonam Tamchos, 20, from Ladakh.According to Commmander Dam, “The chores of cooking and eating were most tedious, since blocks of ice had to be cut and melted for every need. It took hours to cut the ice and then melt over small fuel burners. The team had only one proper meal a day at night, and what we missed the most was the home-made pickles.”
A deep dug pit into ice would be the make shift kitchen with ice block walls cordoning off to keep the howling winds at bay. The team had only one proper meal a day at night. The day began with a meager meal of cereals in the morning, with a cup of coco and then during the skiing through the day, they would stop after every 1 hr or 1.30 hrs for 10 – 15 min active rest, when they would munch chocolates, cheese, biscuits, dry fish, meat, etc along with sips of water. This rest period could not exceed since once the body stopped skiing, it rapidly cooled down and one can freeze instantly. At the end of the day, when they put up the tents for night, they would have soup and a freeze dried food, like pasta, rice, etc.
Now just stop thinking about how they addressed the nature’s call!The Team
a) Satyabrata Dam Cdr (Leader)
(b) KS Balaji Lt Cdr (Dy Leader)
(c) GP Pande Lt Cdr
(d) Ajay Sharma Surg Lt
(e) Avinash Khajuria Lt
(f) Raj Kumar MCERA I
(g) Rakesh Kumar POMA
(h) Vikas Kumar POMA
(j) Manoj Vats Sea I PT-III
(k) Sonam Tamchos MA I
(l) B Singh Sea I PT II
